Secret Society of Handsome Chinese Cryptographers

Certain days of the year are celebrated or remembered for their political and historical significance. There's Merdeka Day, USA or Indonesian Independence Day, Bastille Day, attack on Pearl Habour, and D-Day, etc.

But one doesn't refer to these historical moments by their dates respectively as 8/31, 7/4 & 8/17, 7/14, 12/7, and 6/6. They are mentioned by the significance of their events, for example, Bastille Day as in the storming of the Bastille, or the invasion of Europe against the Nazi occupiers designated by military planners as D-Day.

Why then do we now have 9/11 and 7/7 for the terrorist attacks on respectively New York's World Trade Centre's Twin Towers and London's Tube Stations? Why not refer to them as 'Attack on Twin Towers' (or WTC) or 'London Tube Bombings'? Why the use of numerals to indicate the dates of occurrence?

Well, we can explain the designation of one of the answers, namely 7/7 for the London Tube Bombings. Whoever started it followed the American example, either because it seemed logical at that time to 'standardise' reference to such terrorist attacks by their dates of occurrence, or to deliberately associate it with a horrendous image as that evoked by the Twin Tower collapsing and disintegrating.

Wikipedia has this to say about 9/11:

"The attacks are often referred to simply as September 11 or 9/11. The latter is from the U.S. style for writing short dates, and is pronounced 'nine-eleven.' Within the United States, the typographic styling of the 9/11 designation alludes to 9-1-1 (also written 911, pronounced 'nine-one-one' in either case), the emergency telephone number used by the U.S. and Canada."

"Furthermore, the two 'ones' in 9/11 are seen by some as being representative of the two towers of the World Trade Centers. For these symbolic reasons and for convenience, 9/11 has become a common domestic term for the attacks."

"There was some initial speculation that the correspondence between 911 and the date 9/11 as mentioned above was intentional, to communicate something along the lines 'Starting now, life in America is about emergencies rather than ease.'"

But all the above don't explain, for example, why the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbour on the morning of 7th December 1941, considered by Americans as their most traumatic experience, until 9/11, has never been referred to as 12/7 (twelve-seven).

Personally I suspect that the origin in the use of numerals (of dates) to refer to momentous occasions, whether joyous or tragic, can be traced to Chinese traditional practice.

Chinese are very fond of referring to significant occasions, each by a numerical code that represents, respectively, the month and the day the event occurred - just the way the Americans have followed in referring to 9/11.

For example, Taiwanese Chinese would refer to the celebration of the First Republic of China as 10-10 or 'Double Ten'. Sun Yat Sun declared 10 October as China's National Day to commemorate the start of the Wuchang Uprising on 10 October 1911, which led to the collapse of the Manchu Qing Dynasty and the establishment of a republican China on January 1, 1912

'Double Ten' of course also represents a Chinese symbol that signifies 'ong', a Chinese (Hokkien) word meaning fantastic luck or very good fortune. We may therefore safely assume that, while the official reason given was about the Wuchang Uprising, the starting point of the Chinese republic, the Chinese would also have considered the auspicious feng shui element for Dr Sun to nominate that fateful day as the Republic's National Day - mind you, 'twas certainly not good feng shui for Chinese royalty!

Communist China or the People's Republic of China was only born on 01 October 1949, 38 years later.

One day I was with a group of Penang friends discussing a particular event, which we naturally referred to by the traditional numerical coding. My good mate Maniam was puzzled by the numbers and asked me what the hell we were referring to.

I explained the Chinese practice of employing such numerical coding for important events, purely for ease of reference. His eyes lit up as if he had just been inducted into the Secret Society of Handsome Chinese Cryptographers - Maniam spoke such beautiful Hokkien that he has always been considered by our group as a Chinese Penangite.

Soon there was no stopping him as he referred to virtually all events using the numerical codings. I had to explain to him his birthday or mine, or for that matter, the first time he lost his ... er ... virginity, didn't count as momentous occasions for society in general, perhaps, unless he was, say, the King. Therefore those events shouldn't/couldn't be referred to by the codings because no one would have any clue on what he was talking about.

His face felled at the unnecessary constraint. After glaring at me to see whether I was pulling his leg or being overly and unduly cautious, he grudingly accepted that our personal birthdays weren't of historical significance in Malaysian or Penang society but he was still adamant that the day he sacrificed his virginity definitely was. Ah, well ...

And what was that event that got him interested in Chinese numerical coding of events in the first place?

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