In Western history, there are many prominent historical figures who used code/cipher. But in China, Korea, or Japan, use of code/cipher was not common before the modern era. So an episode from the Tang period as an introduction for a narrative of Korean patriot codes in the Japanese colonial period on a Korean website I cited recently caught my attention. As expected, it is more like a riddle than code/cipher.
The episode is recorded in Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms (三國遺事) (Wikipedia):
又古記云。總章元年戊辰〈若總章戊辰則李勣之事而下文蘇定方誤矣。若定方則年號當龍朔二年壬戌來圍平壤之時也〉國人之所請唐兵屯于平壤郊而通書曰。急輸軍資。王會群臣問曰。入於敵國至唐兵屯所。其勢危矣。所請王師糧匱而不輪其料。亦不宜也。如何。庾信奏曰。臣等能輸其軍資。請大王無慮。於是庾信仁問等率數萬人入句麗境。輸料二萬斛乃還。王大喜。又欲興師會唐兵。庾信先遣然起兵川等一人問其會期。唐帥蘇定方紙畫鸞犢二物迴之。國人未解其意。使問於元曉法師。解之曰。速還其兵。謂畫犢畫鸞二切也。於是庾信迴軍。欲渡浿江。今日後渡者斬之。軍士爭先半渡。句麗兵來掠。殺其未渡者。翌日信返追句麗兵。捕殺數萬級。(text from Database of East Asian World History Research Center (東アジア世界史研究センター))
Korea was divided into three major kingdoms: Goguryeo (高句麗), Paekche (百済), and Silla (新羅) for several centuries. Silla, allied with Tang (China), conquered Paeckche in 660 and then Goguryeo in 668. Kim Yu-sin (金庾信) (Wikipedia) was a leading figure in the unification of the Korean Peninsula under Silla.
In 668, when a Tang army under General Su Dingfang (蘇定方) (Wikipedia) (so goes the record, but either the year or the name of the general must be wrong because Su died in 667) was camped near Pyongyang, capital of Goguryeo deep behind the border, Silla was to join the Tang army. General Kim Yu-sin sent forward a small detachment to ask for a schedule. General Su Dingfang replied by drawing a young phoenix (鸞) and a calf (犢). When Kim's staff was puzzled by this mysterious letter from the ally, an eminent scholar-monk Wonhyo (元曉) (Wikipedia) figured out that the riddle can be solved by fanqie (反切), a technique whereby the pronuciation of a character is indicated by the initial consonant of a first character and the ending of a second character.
With this technique, the drawing of a calf (畫犢) (hwa-dok) reads hok, and the drawing of a young pohenix (hwa-ran) (畫鸞) reads hwan. That is, the two drawings refer to hok-hwan, which is somehow understood to be sok-hwan (速還), meaning "Retrun quickly". (I relied on the Hangul rendering of the characters in the transliterations here. Maybe we need to check the old pronunciation of these characters.)
This saved General Kim Yu-sin's army from annihilation.
Similar stories, if not fanqie, may abound in the world. In the Warring States Period in Japan, when warlord Oda Nobunaga was attacking the Asakura clan in 1570, his back was threatened by the Azai clan, supposed to be an ally. Nobunaga is said to have been warned of the imminent danger by his sister Oichi, wedded to Azai Nagamasa. She sent a pack of beans with both ends tied, which revealed the pincer movement by his enemies. While one might deplore such crucial information not being conveyed in a more straightforward message, this episode is considered apocryphal (Wikipedia).
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