The Thousand Character Classic is a Chinese text that contains 1000 characters, of which no character appears twice. This characteristic lent the work to an interesting off-label use: numeration
Because every character in the text is unique, you could use individual characters to compactly represent any number from 1-1000. So instead of writing 七百一十七(717), you could simply write 林 "forest" to represent the number seven hundred and seventeen. Volumes of the Qianlong Tripitaka 乾隆大藏經 were numbered in this fashion (using the first 724 characters!) , as well as examination cells, etc. Even until recently, Taiwanese conscripts' serial numbers started with one of the first four characters of the Thousand Character Classic.
Another related use was the lottery known as Puckapoo, which used the first 80 characters as entries for punters to place bets on. Sometimes the first 100 characters were used, but rather awkwardly characters 98-100 are 弔民伐罪 which could be interpreted as "the people are hanged for their crimes" (the actual meaning is 'the people are consoled; crimes are punished"), and various substitutions were made.
The system is not perfect. For example, some natural numbers are in the text, and awkwardly not in the corresponding positions. Eg: two is character number 415. A complete list is shown below:
One 壹 =123
Two 二=415
five 五=151
four 四=149
eight 八=499
nine 九=609
hundred 百=613
thousand 千=603
ten thousand 萬=143
To the author's knowledge, no such table corresponding each number of the 1000 character classic to natural numbers has been attempted. As such he places this table on his blog, for the convieneicence of the public. His base text has been the Wikisource text . Some of the characters have alternate forms, or have commonly established subsitutions (eg 元-玄); these are placed in square brackets. If there are any errors or omissions in the text below, please let him know of them, for which he will be most grateful.
Update 15 April 2024:Fixed bug where only the first 796 entries were displayed. Thanks, George Pollard!
UPDATE: 3 July 2024. I have finally have had the spare time to add the simplified characters. The simplified characters are placed in (round brackets) in the text. From a count of the characters, there are 364 of them that have an exclusively simplified form (I am not counting traditional variants like no. 394 真/眞 or 848 牀/床).
As my readers would know, In the process of simplification, what were previously separate characters in traditional were merged. This has happened for the following 7 characters in the Thousand Character Classic, (which have been marked with an asterisk in the main text)
i. 102發 and 148髮 ——>「发」
- 51巨 and 637鉅 ——>「巨」(although 钜 is also known as a simplified form of 637)
- 47崑 and 633昆——>「昆」
- 749 慼 and 818戚 ——>「戚」
- 33 雲and 623云——>「云」
- 616并 and 933並——>「并」
- 164絜 and 836潔——>「洁」
As such the text contains 993 different characters when it is printed in the simplified script. Of course, this gives a problem when the text is used to number things (so volume 发 may be either 102 or 348). This might be the case when (say) an old book is republished in Simplified chinese, but otherwise I do not think this would be an issue: if the editors were careful, they would've numbered the books as a primary reference.
Again, from a linguistic standpoint this merging has no effect. Firstly, the seven words above are already homophones in spoken mandarin. Secondly, by reading the thousand character classic as a whole the context would dispel every ambiguity. So character 102 means "prosper" (in the context of a person's name: Fa of Zhou, i.e. King Wu of Zhou) and character 148 means "hair".
弔民伐罪，周發殷湯｜吊民伐罪，周发殷汤。
Relieve the people, right the wrong; as did Fa of Zhou and Yin of Tang
蓋此身髮。四大五常。 ｜盖此身发。四大五常。
These bodies and this hair of ours; Four Great Things, Five Principles.
(translation based on the one by Nathan Sturman another copy of his translation)
