“In the 1980s, the cost of sending a telegram was almost the same as a pound of pork,” recalls Wang Xiuhua, a retired telegraph operator from Taizhou, a city 270 kilometers southeast of Hangzhou. “Only people with real emergencies would choose it.”
Messages like: “Father is ill, come back immediately,” or “Arrive on the 8th, pick me up at the station.”
Back then, every character had to be encoded by hand. Each Chinese character was represented by a string of four numbers, drawn from a thick manual known as the Standard Telegraph Code Book. Wang spent three months memorizing the codes for 2,000 to 3,000 of the most commonly used words. Once mastered, she could type 80 characters a minute.
“I still remember — 1562 means gong (work), and 0086 means ren (person),” she explains. “Together, they mean ‘working people.’ That’s us.” Her eyes lit up, the numbers still at her fingertips after all these years.
In her prime, Wang would send hundreds of telegrams a day, “from the moment I picked up my pen at work until the end of the day.”
That process continued for decades, until just months before the Hangzhou station shut. After its last telegraph machine broke down, staff began typing messages on a computer: a temporary fix to meet rising demand. They were then printed, stamped, and sealed for express delivery.
