<p>Some puzzle hint methods that I know:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Indicating the domain of the answer, traditional puzzles always use this.</p>
<p>粽子头，梅花脚，屁股挂把弯镰刀，黑白灰黄花皮袄，坐着反比站着高。(打一动物)</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>note &quot;打&quot; in 灯谜.</p>
<ol start="2">
<li><p>Giving the radical components.</p>
<p>屋子方方，有门没窗，屋外热烘，屋里冰霜。(两点水, 竹字头)</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>And for more common hints, the number of characters or the pronunciation  may be given.</p>
<pre><code>五个兄弟，住在一起，名字不同，高矮不齐。(2个字)
圆筒白浆糊，早晚挤一股，兄弟三十二，都说有好处。(ya gao)
</code></pre>
<ol start="3">
<li>笔画数</li>
</ol>
<p>This just came up in my mind, sometimes the total number of strokes of every character in the answer is given to the readers, so readers can verify their answers.</p>
<pre><code>驼背公公，力大无穷;爱驮什么车水马龙(10画)。
</code></pre>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-25T23:32:06.153Z
Relevant to question description, but not relevant to question subject regarding "rot13".
王博龙
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T14:38:15.707Z
2023-07-19T14:49:13.887Z
2023-07-19T14:49:13.887Z
sfy
<p>Answer is <strong>NO</strong>.</p>
<p>If you mean directly applying such things to Chinese characters. There is no such thing as of now. It is called rot13 because it is a rotation based method, shifting 13 characters from the original (e.g., a -&gt; n). This needs a certain order to present, where in Chinese characters, the characters themselves and their parts do not have such orders <strong>as a convention</strong>.</p>
<p>I know some people first write Chinese in Pinyin (without tones), and then apply English encryption methods. Even like this, I have not seen anyone who actually applies rot13 on it.</p>
<hr />
<h3>Update 2023-07-26</h3>
<p>I made minor changes to the above paragraphs to clarify the scope of the answer.
The answer is still a firm <strong>NO</strong> to the OP's question: Is there a Chinese equivalent of rot13? -- There is no such thing at this moment.</p>
<p>Such a thing does not exist today, and I can say with high confidence that it won't exist in the future either -- Unless someone intentionally works something out to prove this is doable. Even if this is the case, I doubt how many people would actually use it.</p>
<p>For the &quot;doable&quot; discuss, i.e., whether such thing could exist.</p>
<h4>Plan A: Computer + arbitrary ordinals</h4>
<p>There are only limited number of Chinese characters at any given moment. Therefore, we can order them in any particular order and assign each character an ordinal. Then we can map each character to a different one by manipulating their ordinals.</p>
<p>The total number of Chinese characters is at the order of thousands: approximately 3,000 to 5,000 currently used characters; or 97,058 total define in CJKV of Unicode 15.0 (not all of them are in modern written Chinese).</p>
<p>Therefore, such algorithm is not practically usable by humans without using a computer.</p>
<p>Potential problems of this plan:</p>
<ol>
<li>Characters can be invented. Chinese language and other languages that use these characters do not forbid invention of new characters, or revival of previously uncommon characters. This can cause compatibility issues for such algorithms over longer period of time.</li>
<li>Such algorithm is not useful. It is not fun, because it likely converts some simple characters into some never-seen complex ones, which is not as fun as converting &quot;dog&quot; into &quot;qbt&quot;. Neither is it useful as encryption, because it is too easy to crack by brute force, and there are many, many, many modern encryption algorithms, where you can use complex keys, and those algorithms' security only depends on the key under current physics context.</li>
</ol>
<h4>Plan B: Components</h4>
<p>Instead of assigning ordinals to every character, we can assign ordinals to components, and map characters by mapping its components.</p>
<p>It can be more doable for humans but it is still more difficult than English. I do not even know how many common components there are, letting aside uncommon ones.</p>
<p>There is also an obvious drawback of this method: It cannot guarantee that the result of such mapping of a character is still a valid character in Chinese or even CJKV.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T12:30:06.720Z
You mean there is no ordering whatsoever for Chinese characters? No standardised "alphabet" of any kind?
Davor
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T12:53:10.233Z
@Davor there are things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_General_Standard_Chinese_Characters - but the sheer number is so big that memorizing the ordering like we do for the latin alphabet is impractical, so it's not a concept that comes natural to Chinese speakers. Additionally, these lists are never really exhaustive since there is a ridiculous amount of exotic, rarely used characters.
Michael Borgwardt
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T15:38:17.037Z
I don’t see a reason why you shouldn’t be able to implement an rot13-like equivalent to Chinese (or any other script), using Unicode code points as the lookup table instead of a simple 1–26 list of English letters. It would be a lot of work to separate out all specifically Chinese Unicode blocks, and with all the Unicode lookups it would also be a lot more processor-intensive, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be _doable_.
Janus Bahs Jacquet
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-24T04:30:25.557Z
Of course, the language only contains limited number of characters so you can always range them in some order. However, unlike English alphabet, such order is unnecessary and a native user like me never depends on such thing. Therefore, the OP's question "is there a Chinese equivalent of rot13" is still a no. @MichaelBorgwardt
王博龙
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-24T04:32:01.070Z
@JanusBahsJacquet By such definition, cracking any known encryption algorithm (say, RSA) is also "doable" (in finite time) by this definition, it just "takes too much time" :-)
王博龙
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-24T08:21:35.903Z
Yes, cracking encryption algorithms _is_ doable, but takes too much time, even when done by supercomputers. That’s not really comparable to this, though. Creating an ROT cipher by using Unicode blocks could be done in perhaps half an hour by a competent coder, and the hard work would all be an up-front one-off. Once you’ve done that and actually generated the code for ROT, it will work just as well as the English version.
Janus Bahs Jacquet
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-25T23:30:51.587Z
@JanusBahsJacquet I think the English version is meant to be executed by human, not by computer.
王博龙
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-26T03:11:19.493Z
It was _invented_ long before the advent of computers (variations of it were in use thousands of years ago), but nowadays, I would be willing to bet that at least 99.99% of ROT13 usage is on computers, on the Internet. The question doesn’t mention ‘manual’ use, so I think it’s fair to assume that computers would be involved, especially for Chinese.
Janus Bahs Jacquet
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T05:30:29.697Z
2023-07-26T07:45:17.590Z
2023-07-26T07:45:17.590Z
王博龙
<p>我在杂志中看到最常用的方法是将答案倒过来,也就是旋转180度.
除此之外还有像这样的:<a href="https://i.sstatic.net/mZKnT.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/mZKnT.png" alt="enter image description here" /></a></p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-08-02T09:19:38.767Z
2023-08-02T09:19:38.767Z
socialcredit
<p>I remember when I first learnt Python making a programme to create Pig-Latin from any text.</p>
<p>You could try 藏头诗 for simple encoding. Just look it up in 百度</p>
<p>只是朱颜改，为我谢王戴。吻间仅一答，你若不信爱。意思是：只为吻你</p>
<p>愿托华池边，与你一文钱。白马顿红缨，头刺文案边。意思是：愿与白头</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T23:37:45.240Z
2023-07-19T23:37:45.240Z
Pedroski
<p>You can do something vaguely similar to rot-13 with Chinese characters if you first convert the characters to Chinese telegraph code. It's a code once used for sending Chinese over telegraphs.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Chinese telegraph code</a></p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-08-02T10:02:28.347Z
2023-08-02T10:02:28.347Z
fat penguin
<p>Chinese has much much more characters while written English only has 26. It's impossible to apply such an algorithm to an exhausted list of characters (if it ever exists!)</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T11:45:44.220Z
This is absolutely false. You can always apply a rot-n/2 algorithm to an ordered set provided there are an even number of elements (add a "blank" one if it's odd). So given an exhaustive and ordered list of chinese characters, just apply rot-25822 and that's it.
infinitezero
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T12:34:55.457Z
@infinitezero Your comment didn't invalidate my answer. As you mentioned, the rot-* algorithm assumes the existence of "given an exhaustive and ordered list of Chinese characters". But for arbitrary contents, it desn't!
WONderFUL
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T12:40:51.177Z
"It's impossible to apply such an algorithm to an exhausted list of characters (if it ever exists!)". @王博龙's answer explains why it is not possible. Your reasing is insufficient.
infinitezero
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T13:00:32.577Z
Your answer is clearly wrong. It is absolutely possible to apply such an algorithm if you have an ordered list of characters, and it is absolutely possible to produce such a list (just use their Unicode number, e.g.) Yes, you might then occasionally encounter rare hanzi missing from the list, and yes, people will not be familiar with the ordering. But neither of these prevent you from applying the algorithm in the vast majority of cases.
Michael Borgwardt
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T15:26:18.220Z
@MichaelBorgwardt If your list is Unicode code points and you encounter characters that are missing from the list, you wouldn’t be able to type those characters to begin with, so rot13’ing them becomes a moot point.
Janus Bahs Jacquet
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-20T08:13:15.640Z
@JanusBahsJacquet: Have you heard of things called "pens" and "paper"? A key point of rot13 is that it is in fact simple enough to do manually, in your head, using pen and paper. The amount of characters in the Chinese script and the lack of a familiar ordering makes this highly impractical, but not, strictly speaking, impossible. But then you can always still encounter characters that were not in whatever character list you're working with.
Michael Borgwardt
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-20T09:15:21.770Z
@MichaelBorgwardt I didn’t consider pen and paper because to me, rot13 is absolutely **not** simple to do in your head (I would at least need a lookup table), and the use case mentioned in the question (spoilers, as frequently seen in comments on [puzzling.se]) doesn’t generally apply to handwritten text. Obviously, if you’re restricting it to ways to obfuscate text by a rotational substitution cipher that you can do in your head, then there’s no way to do that in a system that has close to 100,000 distinct graphemes. Nobody would be able to keep that in their head.
Janus Bahs Jacquet
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-20T10:31:42.980Z
@MichaelBorgwardt If 'impossible' starts the argument here, maybe I should choose some other phrases like 'not practical'. ROT13 algorithm means you have some sort of look-up tables in hand. Yes, listing all the Unicode one after another may work, but looking up the Unicode table of ALL Chinese characters is not that pleasant compared to the 26 English letters, while everyone can remember 26 letters easily in their head. That's the point where I totally agreed with Janus Bahs Jacquet.
WONderFUL
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-20T10:37:02.890Z
@JanusBahsJacquet "I would at least need a lookup table" and "if you’re restricting it to ways to obfuscate text by a rotational substitution cipher that you can do in your head, then there’s no way to do that in a system that has close to 100,000 distinct graphemes". Totally agree and that's my point - sorry for not making it clearly at the first place.
WONderFUL
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T10:30:49.067Z
2023-07-19T10:30:49.067Z
WONderFUL
<p>For English, <a href="https://rot13.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">rot13</a> is a kind of easily decipherable substitution cipher.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz &lt;-&gt; nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It's often used for &quot;spoiler space&quot;, which as might be useful for giving the answer or hints to a puzzle.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>___ is man's best friend.  [answer (rot13): Qbt]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Of course, this doesn't work for Chinese characters.  So...</p>
<p><strong>Question</strong>: Is there a Chinese equivalent of rot13?</p>
<p>I want to use this for fill-in-the-blank 填空 sentences, in order to give the answer without outright saying what it is.  I'm thinking I could: (a) convert the Chinese to pinyin (without tones) and use rot13, or (b) convert Chinese characters to random characters with the same pronunciation.</p>
<p>I stumbled upon <a href="https://crypto.stackexchange.com/q/1784/48583">Encryption/ciphers/codes in Chinese</a> at crypto.SE, but some of these answers seem fairly complicated.</p>
<p>I wonder if there's a standard way of doing this.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T02:20:14.453Z
short answer is: **no**  the long answer is: well, what do you mean “encryption”?
水巷孑蠻
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T02:49:03.230Z
有些猜谜书会将答案印在其他页上。如果一定要印在同一页上，有些书会选择将文字上下颠倒。将书旋转180度之后可以看到正常的文字
tsh
<cipher>
Is there a Chinese equivalent of rot13?
# Is there a Chinese equivalent of rot13?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2023-07-19)

For English, [rot13](https://rot13.com/) is a kind of easily decipherable substitution cipher.

> abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz <-> nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm

It's often used for "spoiler space", which as might be useful for giving the answer or hints to a puzzle.

> \_\_\_ is man's best friend. [answer (rot13): Qbt]

Of course, this doesn't work for Chinese characters. So...

**Question**: Is there a Chinese equivalent of rot13?

I want to use this for fill-in-the-blank 填空 sentences, in order to give the answer without outright saying what it is. I'm thinking I could: (a) convert the Chinese to pinyin (without tones) and use rot13, or (b) convert Chinese characters to random characters with the same pronunciation.

I stumbled upon [Encryption/ciphers/codes in Chinese](https://crypto.stackexchange.com/q/1784/48583) at crypto.SE, but some of these answers seem fairly complicated.

I wonder if there's a standard way of doing this.

**Tags:** cipher
> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: short answer is: **no**  the long answer is: well, what do you mean “encryption”?  
> **username_2**: 有些猜谜书会将答案印在其他页上。如果一定要印在同一页上，有些书会选择将文字上下颠倒。将书旋转180度之后可以看到正常的文字  

---

## 6 answers

### Answer by username_3 on 2023-07-19. Score: 2

Some puzzle hint methods that I know:

Indicating the domain of the answer, traditional puzzles always use this.
粽子头，梅花脚，屁股挂把弯镰刀，黑白灰黄花皮袄，坐着反比站着高。(打一动物)


note "打" in 灯谜.

Giving the radical components.
屋子方方，有门没窗，屋外热烘，屋里冰霜。(两点水, 竹字头)


And for more common hints, the number of characters or the pronunciation  may be given.
五个兄弟，住在一起，名字不同，高矮不齐。(2个字)
圆筒白浆糊，早晚挤一股，兄弟三十二，都说有好处。(ya gao)


笔画数

This just came up in my mind, sometimes the total number of strokes of every character in the answer is given to the readers, so readers can verify their answers.
驼背公公，力大无穷;爱驮什么车水马龙(10画)。

> **Comments:**
> **username_4**: Relevant to question description, but not relevant to question subject regarding "rot13".  

---

### Answer by username_4 on 2023-07-19. Score: 2

Answer is **NO**.

If you mean directly applying such things to Chinese characters. There is no such thing as of now. It is called rot13 because it is a rotation based method, shifting 13 characters from the original (e.g., a -> n). This needs a certain order to present, where in Chinese characters, the characters themselves and their parts do not have such orders **as a convention**.

I know some people first write Chinese in Pinyin (without tones), and then apply English encryption methods. Even like this, I have not seen anyone who actually applies rot13 on it.

---

### Update 2023-07-26

I made minor changes to the above paragraphs to clarify the scope of the answer.
The answer is still a firm **NO** to the OP's question: Is there a Chinese equivalent of rot13? -- There is no such thing at this moment.

Such a thing does not exist today, and I can say with high confidence that it won't exist in the future either -- Unless someone intentionally works something out to prove this is doable. Even if this is the case, I doubt how many people would actually use it.

For the "doable" discuss, i.e., whether such thing could exist.

#### Plan A: Computer + arbitrary ordinals

There are only limited number of Chinese characters at any given moment. Therefore, we can order them in any particular order and assign each character an ordinal. Then we can map each character to a different one by manipulating their ordinals.

The total number of Chinese characters is at the order of thousands: approximately 3,000 to 5,000 currently used characters; or 97,058 total define in CJKV of Unicode 15.0 (not all of them are in modern written Chinese).

Therefore, such algorithm is not practically usable by humans without using a computer.

Potential problems of this plan:

1. Characters can be invented. Chinese language and other languages that use these characters do not forbid invention of new characters, or revival of previously uncommon characters. This can cause compatibility issues for such algorithms over longer period of time.
2. Such algorithm is not useful. It is not fun, because it likely converts some simple characters into some never-seen complex ones, which is not as fun as converting "dog" into "qbt". Neither is it useful as encryption, because it is too easy to crack by brute force, and there are many, many, many modern encryption algorithms, where you can use complex keys, and those algorithms' security only depends on the key under current physics context.

#### Plan B: Components

Instead of assigning ordinals to every character, we can assign ordinals to components, and map characters by mapping its components.

It can be more doable for humans but it is still more difficult than English. I do not even know how many common components there are, letting aside uncommon ones.

There is also an obvious drawback of this method: It cannot guarantee that the result of such mapping of a character is still a valid character in Chinese or even CJKV.

> **Comments:**
> **username_5**: You mean there is no ordering whatsoever for Chinese characters? No standardised "alphabet" of any kind?  
> **username_6**: @Davor there are things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_General_Standard_Chinese_Characters - but the sheer number is so big that memorizing the ordering like we do for the latin alphabet is impractical, so it's not a concept that comes natural to Chinese speakers. Additionally, these lists are never really exhaustive since there is a ridiculous amount of exotic, rarely used characters.  
> **username_7**: I don’t see a reason why you shouldn’t be able to implement an rot13-like equivalent to Chinese (or any other script), using Unicode code points as the lookup table instead of a simple 1–26 list of English letters. It would be a lot of work to separate out all specifically Chinese Unicode blocks, and with all the Unicode lookups it would also be a lot more processor-intensive, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be _doable_.  
> **username_4**: Of course, the language only contains limited number of characters so you can always range them in some order. However, unlike English alphabet, such order is unnecessary and a native user like me never depends on such thing. Therefore, the OP's question "is there a Chinese equivalent of rot13" is still a no. @MichaelBorgwardt  
> **username_4**: @JanusBahsJacquet By such definition, cracking any known encryption algorithm (say, RSA) is also "doable" (in finite time) by this definition, it just "takes too much time" :-)  
> **username_7**: Yes, cracking encryption algorithms _is_ doable, but takes too much time, even when done by supercomputers. That’s not really comparable to this, though. Creating an ROT cipher by using Unicode blocks could be done in perhaps half an hour by a competent coder, and the hard work would all be an up-front one-off. Once you’ve done that and actually generated the code for ROT, it will work just as well as the English version.  
> **username_4**: @JanusBahsJacquet I think the English version is meant to be executed by human, not by computer.  
> **username_7**: It was _invented_ long before the advent of computers (variations of it were in use thousands of years ago), but nowadays, I would be willing to bet that at least 99.99% of ROT13 usage is on computers, on the Internet. The question doesn’t mention ‘manual’ use, so I think it’s fair to assume that computers would be involved, especially for Chinese.  

---

### Answer by username_8 on 2023-08-02. Score: 1

我在杂志中看到最常用的方法是将答案倒过来,也就是旋转180度.
除此之外还有像这样的:[![enter image description here](https://i.sstatic.net/mZKnT.png)](https://i.sstatic.net/mZKnT.png)


---

### Answer by username_9 on 2023-07-19. Score: 0

I remember when I first learnt Python making a programme to create Pig-Latin from any text.

You could try 藏头诗 for simple encoding. Just look it up in 百度

只是朱颜改，为我谢王戴。吻间仅一答，你若不信爱。意思是：只为吻你

愿托华池边，与你一文钱。白马顿红缨，头刺文案边。意思是：愿与白头


---

### Answer by username_10 on 2023-08-02. Score: 0

You can do something vaguely similar to rot-13 with Chinese characters if you first convert the characters to Chinese telegraph code. It's a code once used for sending Chinese over telegraphs.

[Chinese telegraph code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code)


---

### Answer by username_11 on 2023-07-19. Score: 0

Chinese has much much more characters while written English only has 26. It's impossible to apply such an algorithm to an exhausted list of characters (if it ever exists!)

> **Comments:**
> **username_12**: This is absolutely false. You can always apply a rot-n/2 algorithm to an ordered set provided there are an even number of elements (add a "blank" one if it's odd). So given an exhaustive and ordered list of chinese characters, just apply rot-25822 and that's it.  
> **username_11**: @infinitezero Your comment didn't invalidate my answer. As you mentioned, the rot-* algorithm assumes the existence of "given an exhaustive and ordered list of Chinese characters". But for arbitrary contents, it desn't!  
> **username_12**: "It's impossible to apply such an algorithm to an exhausted list of characters (if it ever exists!)". @王博龙's answer explains why it is not possible. Your reasing is insufficient.  
> **username_6**: Your answer is clearly wrong. It is absolutely possible to apply such an algorithm if you have an ordered list of characters, and it is absolutely possible to produce such a list (just use their Unicode number, e.g.) Yes, you might then occasionally encounter rare hanzi missing from the list, and yes, people will not be familiar with the ordering. But neither of these prevent you from applying the algorithm in the vast majority of cases.  
> **username_7**: @MichaelBorgwardt If your list is Unicode code points and you encounter characters that are missing from the list, you wouldn’t be able to type those characters to begin with, so rot13’ing them becomes a moot point.  
> **username_6**: @JanusBahsJacquet: Have you heard of things called "pens" and "paper"? A key point of rot13 is that it is in fact simple enough to do manually, in your head, using pen and paper. The amount of characters in the Chinese script and the lack of a familiar ordering makes this highly impractical, but not, strictly speaking, impossible. But then you can always still encounter characters that were not in whatever character list you're working with.  
> **username_7**: @MichaelBorgwardt I didn’t consider pen and paper because to me, rot13 is absolutely **not** simple to do in your head (I would at least need a lookup table), and the use case mentioned in the question (spoilers, as frequently seen in comments on [puzzling.se]) doesn’t generally apply to handwritten text. Obviously, if you’re restricting it to ways to obfuscate text by a rotational substitution cipher that you can do in your head, then there’s no way to do that in a system that has close to 100,000 distinct graphemes. Nobody would be able to keep that in their head.  
> **username_11**: @MichaelBorgwardt If 'impossible' starts the argument here, maybe I should choose some other phrases like 'not practical'. ROT13 algorithm means you have some sort of look-up tables in hand. Yes, listing all the Unicode one after another may work, but looking up the Unicode table of ALL Chinese characters is not that pleasant compared to the 26 English letters, while everyone can remember 26 letters easily in their head. That's the point where I totally agreed with Janus Bahs Jacquet.  
> **username_11**: @JanusBahsJacquet "I would at least need a lookup table" and "if you’re restricting it to ways to obfuscate text by a rotational substitution cipher that you can do in your head, then there’s no way to do that in a system that has close to 100,000 distinct graphemes". Totally agree and that's my point - sorry for not making it clearly at the first place.  

---

