Chongzhen revived the Ming Dynasty

All the shortcomings of carrier pigeons were pointed out by the ministers.

But after the problem is raised, it is still necessary to use——

Because in this era, there is no faster way of communication.

And as far as Zhu Youjian knew, military pigeons were still used by the military in later generations.

During World War II, the Eighth Route Army even set up a special pigeon-killing sniper team to target Japanese carrier pigeons.

Therefore, after this Wuying Palace meeting, Zhu Youjian specially convened a meeting of relevant personnel to resolve various communication issues.

The communication issue was discussed with great fanfare in the court, and the protagonist was the little pigeon.

This matter sounds a bit funny, but the ministers of the Ministry of War did not think it was unimportant.

For the Privy Council that was about to be established, whether carrier pigeons were practical and whether they could deliver official documents was a major issue concerning the Privy Council's power.

If messages delivered by carrier pigeons were not considered official documents, then orders from the Privy Council could only be delivered by other means.

Considering the territory of the Ming Dynasty and the speed of the times, it would take one or two months to deliver news thousands of miles away, no matter how fast the ship or horse was. If a reply was needed from the front line, it would take several months to go back and forth.

But it was different when carrier pigeons could deliver official documents. With the speed of carrier pigeons, it only took three or four days to fly three thousand miles.

Moreover, it is a straight distance in the air, unlike horses on the ground which have to take a detour due to road restrictions.

The Privy Council's orders could be quickly transmitted to various places and replies would be received.

In this way, the Privy Council would not know everything that was happening on the front line, but it would not be completely in the dark as it was before.

This is of vital importance to the Privy Council, which has the power to mobilize troops.

Therefore, before this meeting, the officials of the Ministry of War made a lot of preparations. Min Mengde, the Left Vice Minister of the Ministry of War, said:

"When I was in my hometown, I heard that Zhang Wanzhong, the son of Zhang Yandeng, the governor of Zhejiang, liked to raise pigeons."

"He also wrote a book called 'Pigeon Classics', which explains the essentials of pigeon breeding."

"I think we can call this man to Beijing to raise special military pigeons."

Zhu Youjian had an impression of Zhang Yandeng, who was one of the few governors-general who did not rely on the eunuch party and was retained by him.

And just last month, Zhang Yandeng reported that there was a group of pirates in Dachen Mountain and that troops were being sent to suppress them. He also proposed a strict ban on the sea to reduce the number of pirates.

Zhu Youjian certainly did not listen to his suggestion of banning the sea, but instead ordered Zheng Zhilong and others to join the suppression. He also ordered Zhang Yandeng to help the navy build a customs in Ningbo and strengthen the coastal customs ban.

The name of the customs was to shut up these officials who banned maritime operations. Zhu Youjian ordered all officials who advocated the ban to strictly enforce the maritime ban outside the customs.

Upon hearing that the man's son was good at raising pigeons, Zhu Youjian nodded in approval and ordered the man to come to Beijing to raise military pigeons.

Han Rizhun, who had just taken office as the Left Vice Minister of the Ministry of Personnel and was from Boluo, Guangdong, said:

"In my hometown, there are many pigeon-releasing meetings."

"The best ones can be selected to breed homing pigeons for the imperial court."

Zhu Youjian nodded in approval and gave the order:

“Since there are competitions among the people, they should be regulated.”

"Order to establish a pigeon association modeled after the martial arts association."

“The Pigeon Association is responsible for organizing short-distance, medium-distance, long-distance and ultra-long-distance pigeon races.”

"The winner of the national competition will be granted the status of a public official!"

This reward may not sound like much, as Gongshi is just a civilian title and does not have any rank or salary.

But now it is becoming more and more important because the emperor has granted the public officials the power to elect and be elected in the parliament in the free trade zone.

This means that people with the status of a public official may become members of parliament in the future.

For pigeon breeders, this is already a high enough reward.

After all, given their status, it was already a great achievement to be able to obtain the status of a public official. Moreover, if they wanted to donate, they would need to actually pay one thousand taels of silver!
It can be said that Zhu Youjian spent nothing, but just used the nominal title of a public official to mobilize the pigeon-raising power among the people.

In the future, there will even be people who specialize in breeding racing pigeons in order to seek the title of duke.

Because pigeon breeding has a long history and deep accumulation among the people, Zhu Youjian was not worried about the breed of homing pigeons. The speed of homing pigeons at that time was no less than that of later generations. However, in terms of training, they were not professional enough.

So he ordered competitions of different levels to select pigeons with different adaptability.

Pigeons, which have fast flying speed and strong explosive power, can be used for medium and short-range communications.

Pigeons, which have great flying endurance and strong self-reliant abilities, can be used for long- and ultra-long-distance communications.

At the same time, he ordered the gathering of some falconers to train these pigeons to resist eagles and reduce the losses caused by hunting by birds of prey.

Liu Qiao, the Minister of the Imperial Guards, also proposed a suggestion, which is to completely ban pigeon hunting.

In particular, it is forbidden for children to shoot pigeons with slingshots when they have nothing to do. Those who catch homing pigeons will be punished with labor correction at the least and imprisonment at the worst, so as to avoid affecting the transmission of information due to their behavior.

This order might cause controversy among the people, but after thinking about it, Zhu Youjian felt that the criticism would not be great.

Because pigeons are not the main food, and there are meat pigeons specifically for eating. Those who want to eat pigeons, let them buy them.

So he agreed to the proposal, and ordered the parents to be punished on the grounds that the children did not have full capacity for behavior.

I think after being taught a lesson, parents will strictly forbid naughty children from catching pigeons.

Chen Qiyu, the Minister of the Imperial Household, even proposed to put pigeon breeding on a par with horse breeding, and also proposed to build pigeon nests in places such as post stations for roosting pigeons.

Through these measures, the flights of homing pigeons within the Ming Dynasty were guaranteed to a certain extent.

However, there is still a risk of leaks when transmitting confidential information, especially when passing over Jianlu.

So at this time, another group of people were needed to do their work. Zhu Youjian looked at Zheng Shiyi, the commander of the Jinyiwei, and asked:
"I established the Confidentiality Department in the North Office last year, which is responsible for secret communications and secret codes and secret phrases."

"What results can be used in pigeon messaging? Zheng Qing, tell us in detail."

Zheng Shiyi had already prepared, and replied:

"According to your majesty's instructions, all secret information is classified into three levels: top secret, confidential, and secret."

"The top secret messages must be delivered by at least three groups of carrier pigeons."

"This is how the news of Southwest Qijie was transmitted, and now it has been confirmed."

This is one of the most boastful achievements of the Jinyiwei. Zheng Shiyi mentioned it and then said cautiously:

"After the pinyin and standard character table were determined, we already had a clue about the password."

"But your Majesty has ordered the use of the four-corner number method to create a numerical code for each character, which I am afraid will be difficult to achieve."

The four-corner number search method was used by Zhu Youjian when he looked up dictionaries in later generations. After recalling it, he asked Zhang Ruitu, Meng Shaoyu and others to formulate a search method when they were formulating a general standard word table for printing.

The purpose is naturally to facilitate the checking of characters and to promote movable type printing in the future.

Later, he saw that when using the four-corner number method to check characters, each character had a corresponding number, so he ordered the Jinyiwei Secret Affairs Department to develop a set of digital codes based on the four-corner number method.

The status of this set of digital codes is equivalent to the Chinese telegraph code in later generations. However, Zhu Youjian had never memorized the Chinese telegraph code, nor did he think it was necessary to memorize it, so he asked the Jinyiwei to develop their own set of digital codes based on the four-corner numbers.

With the digital code, the message can be transmitted entirely in numbers. The enemy does not know the Chinese characters corresponding to the digital code and cannot decipher it. It can even encrypt the message by adding or subtracting numbers.

For example, 8073 corresponds to the word "gong", and 0242 needs to be added when setting the decryption, so it becomes 8315, which corresponds to the word "qian".

In this way, even if the enemy knows the Chinese characters corresponding to the digital code, they can be encrypted so that they cannot decipher it.

Unless the enemy can obtain the code book and know how to decrypt it.

This was a simple encryption method that Zhu Youjian knew about, and he had asked the Imperial Guard to study it a long time ago. However, the Imperial Guard now told him that it might be difficult to implement.

This made him very angry, and he asked where the difficulty was. With so many ministers in the court, he didn't believe it couldn't be solved.

Zheng Shiyi said tremblingly:
"There are too many duplicate characters in the four-digit code created using the Four Corners Number Search Method."

"Even if it's added to five digits, there are still a lot of duplicate codes."

"For example, 8073 not only corresponds to the character 'gong', but also to the characters 'shi', 'qiu', and 'yang'."

"And because the structure of the lower right end is the same, even if the supplementary code is added to become 80732, it still corresponds to these words."

"Whether it is a four-digit code or a five-digit code, there are too many duplicate characters, which makes it easy to make mistakes when transmitting messages."

After listening to Zheng Shiyi's statement, most of the ministers were confused.

It was Zhang Ruitu and Zheng Shiyi, who formulated the four-corner number search method in accordance with the emperor's instructions, who understood a little bit.

After consulting the emperor, the two men and Zheng Shiyi explained to the ministers what the four-corner number search method was, the correspondence between numbers and words, and how to convey messages.

They also gave an example, such as 2355100077223630, which is confusing to people who don't understand. But after decoding, it means "I will be back in January" -

Every four digits represent a Chinese character, 2355 corresponds to "I", 1000 corresponds to "one", 7722 corresponds to "month", and 3630 corresponds to "back".

When the ministers saw this method of using numbers to convey messages, they felt it was extremely amazing and were deeply impressed by the emperor who came up with this idea.

If this encryption method can be realized, the possibility of leakage when delivering messages using carrier pigeons can be said to be infinitely reduced.

Even more messages were delivered by carrier pigeons, as the numbers could be written very small and tied to the legs of carrier pigeons for easy delivery.

The only drawback is that the messages transmitted in this way are not intuitive and require specialized intelligence personnel to be responsible for encryption and decryption.

But it is a good idea anyway. It can encrypt and transmit confidential information.

So they worked together to solve the problems encountered by this encryption method.

The most difficult part was the duplicate codes, so someone suggested that we change the correspondence method between Chinese characters and numbers. But for a while, no one could come up with a better correspondence method than the four-corner code.

Someone suggested using the radical method to match characters, and suggested that 0001 correspond to "一", 0002 correspond to "丁", 0003 correspond to "七"... and arrange the characters one by one according to the radicals and strokes.

This method is similar to the Chinese telegraph code of later generations. This correspondence method, originally developed by the French, has been used by later generations.

But in the Ming Dynasty, it was undoubtedly opposed by many people. Especially with the four-corner number search method, everyone felt that this unreasonable code was too difficult to remember.

Do we have to ask every intelligence agent to memorize the numerical codes corresponding to thousands of words?

They all thought it would be better to modify the four-corner numbers and arrange the characters with repeated codes separately so that the intelligence agents only need to memorize the repeated codes.

Zhu Youjian also agreed with this. His idea was to use a system to train intelligence officers and proofreaders. In the future, after intelligence officers retire, they can easily become proofreaders. When there is a shortage of intelligence officers, they can also be selected from the proofreaders.

Therefore, the opinion after the communication is to optimize the four-corner number search method to minimize the occurrence of duplicate codes in standard characters.

If it is unavoidable, use the four-digit numbers without corresponding characters around them to correspond to those duplicate codes.

For characters that are not standard characters, no four-digit numbers are set to correspond to them.

For example, 8073 corresponds to the four characters "公、衾、食、饟". It can be stipulated that 8073 corresponds to the most commonly used character "公", and the characters "衾" and "食" are corresponded by the surrounding 8072 and 8075.

Because the character "饟" was not commonly used and could be replaced by the character "餉", it was kicked out of the standard characters by the officials. The original practice of formulating standard characters based on the Thirteen Classics was also changed.

Most of the rare characters with many strokes in the Thirteen Classics were kicked out and replaced by other characters when the standard character table was revised.

These non-standard characters were later assigned five-digit numbers in the dictionary that included all characters, according to the four-corner number indexing method. Except for those who specialize in studying characters, few people understand them.

Zhu Youjian agreed to this approach and continued to let Zhang Ruitu and Meng Shaoyu take the lead in renovating the four-corner number search method.

At the same time, he once again proposed that we must select common characters from the standard characters and try to use common characters to transmit intelligence. This way, it should be easier to train intelligence agents.

The current 7,000+ standard characters are still too much for intelligence officers to memorize, and the training cost is very high. If we can reduce it to mastering 2,000 to 3,000 commonly used characters, the requirements will be much lower.

Zhu Youjian asked that when sending messages in code, common characters should be used as much as possible.

He even proposed changing the radicals of some characters to reduce duplication of characters.

For example, when the character “食” is used as a radical, it is simplified to “饣”, and when the character “言” is used as a radical, it is simplified to “讠”.

Reduce the occurrence of duplicate codes by changing the font size.

This method reminded the ministers, and they proposed to use some simplified characters used in cursive script to change the shape of characters. For example, simplifying "長" to "長" can change the shape of characters such as "张" and "帐".

In short, the first edition of the general standard character table for printing developed by Zhang Ruitu and Meng Shaoyu faced the fate of being revised before it was officially promoted.

Many interested officials also volunteered to participate in the formulation of the second edition of the standardized character table.

Zhu Youjian agreed to their request and asked these people to formulate a Wubi character search method based on the Wubi input method.

Use four different letters, corresponding to Chinese characters one by one.

This was something he had proposed before, but it was not taken seriously.

Now that it is brought up again, all the ministers have discovered the advantages of Wubi:

There are very few duplicate codes, and all characters can be represented by four letters.

毕竟四位字母有26X26X26X26=456976种组合，远比四位数字的10X10X10X10=10000的组合范围大。

Mei Yingzuo compiled a collection of 33179 characters, which cannot be matched with four-digit numbers. However, Wubi can easily match them, and there are few duplicate codes.

The ministers who became interested began to formulate the Wubi character search method according to the Wubi input method rules proposed by the emperor. They disassembled each character, modified the character roots proposed by the emperor, or changed the characters that did not conform to the character roots.

It can be said that the second edition of the standardized character table has become more standardized and complete under the joint efforts of all officials. Therefore, it has been used for a long time and there will be almost no major changes in the future.

Even after entering the information age, there was no problem with inputting Chinese characters. Even Chinese typewriters appeared long before entering the information age.

This type of typewriter was originally invented by a military craftsman of the Embroidered Uniform Guard under the suggestion of Zhu Youjian, and was used to translate digital codes.

After entering the four-digit code, the corresponding text can be printed out.

In this way, after receiving the digital code, the intelligence officer can enter it into the typewriter and print out the corresponding message. There is no need to think hard about the Chinese characters corresponding to the digital code, and it also avoids possible translation errors due to memory errors.

It was just because this type of typewriter was initially very complex and very large that it did not become popular.

Later, after it was simplified and reduced in cost, it was gradually promoted and became a must-have for writers.

The same is true for the adding machine and the difference machine. Initially, under the suggestion of Zhu Youjian, the Jinyiwei organized military craftsmen to develop them in order to facilitate encryption and decryption.

Later, it was gradually used in other areas, driving the development of computing machines.

It can be said that the development of cryptography has brought about many new things.

Zhu Youjian also attached great importance to flag and lantern signals, which were thus realized. (End of this chapter)