12/12/2021

Sun Yat-sen's Coded Telegram (1916)

Sun Yat-sen's undecoded telegram (1916) is presented in "Unsolved Historical Ciphers". The basic principle is probably as follows: the Chinese characters in the plaintext are translated into four-digit codes according to a standard codebook; some manipulation may be applied to the figures (in some known examples, 111 was added); every pair of digits is converted to a consonant-vowel pair with a code condenser table; and the resulting sequence of figures are regrouped into ten-letter groups.
I presented two known code condensers at "Chinese Cryptography: 1871-1945". Although they belonged to Yamada Junzaburo, who supported Sun Yat-sen, I now found that an explanatory note, preserved in the Aichi University Archives, of encoding for correspondence between Yamada and Sun Yat-sen employed one of these (the one preserved in Guoshiguan).
When I applied it, the following character codes were revealed, but they do not decode well with the standard codebook.
2001 0174 5078 2348 7093 1963 4088 7850 5418 7709 5132 4463 ....
Subtraction of 111 yields:
1890 0063 4967 2237 6982 1852 3977 7739 5307 7598 5021 4352 ....
Again these result in a garble when decoded with the standard codebook.

Just in case, I tried the other of Yamada's known code condensers (the one preserved in the Michigan University).
Simple application leads to:
4037 3771 4692 8186 5095 6089 4494 9246 6780 1278....
Subtraction of 111 yields:
3926 3660 4581 8075 4984 5978 4383 9135 6669 1167....
Neither decodes to a meaningful plaintext.

I report these unsuccessful results as a starting point for further study.



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