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:
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 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!
