Development of the HKSCS

The Government Common Character Set

In 1995, to facilitate electronic communication among government departments, the Hong Kong Government developed a Chinese character set that contained locally specific characters required for use on computers by government departments. This character set was called the Government Common Character Set (GCCS) and supplemented the Big-5 character set. Initially, the GCCS was for internal use by the Government. Later, to facilitate the public to access electronic information published by the Government, the GCCS was placed in government web sites for the public to download.

The Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS)

Recognizing the need of the community to have a common set of locally specific Chinese characters, in 1998, the then Information Technology Services Department and the then Official Language Agency worked together to revise the GCCS with a view to extending it to the community. Locally specific Chinese characters were collected from various sectors of the community for inclusion in the GCCS.

In collaboration with the Chinese Language Interface Advisory Committee (CLIAC), the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region completed the revision of the GCCS in 1999, and renamed it as the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS). The first version of HKSCS was published in September 1999. The HKSCS-2001 was published in December 2001.

The HKSCS-2001 contains 116 more special Chinese characters as compared with the original HKSCS that was published in 1999. It also technically aligns with the ISO/IEC 10646-2:2001, which was published by the International Organization for Standardization in November 2001.

In May 2005, the Government published the HKSCS-2004. The HKSCS-2004 includes 123 more characters than the HKSCS-2001. The HKSCS-2004 technically aligns with the ISO/IEC 10646:2003 that was published in April 2004 and its amendments. The ISO/IEC 10646:2003 and its amendments include all the characters of the HKSCS-2004.

Statistics of the HKSCS-2004

The HKSCS-2004 contains 4,941 characters. Its details are as follows.

Symbols :
There are 441 symbol characters including Han character shapes, Hanyu Pinyin alphabets, international phonetic alphabets, Han radicals, symbols for drawing table, Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, etc.

Han characters :
There are 4,500 Han characters, 3,353 out of which can be found in major dictionaries (Kangxi Dictionary, Hanyu Dazidian, Hanyu Dacidian and Zhonghua Zihai).

The remaining 1,147 characters that cannot be found in major dictionaries are :

Cantonese dialect characters : 109 characters. Mainly provided by the Judiciary, the Hong Kong Police, the Department of Justice, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong. Some of them can be found in dictionaries of Cantonese dialect or academic articles.

Radicals and shapes : 30 characters

Scientific terms : 13 characters

Names of persons, companies and locations : 892 characters. They come from the databases of the Immigration Department, the Companies Registry, the Inland Revenue Department and the Lands Department. It has been confirmed that these characters are still being used in names of persons, companies and locations.

Others : 103 characters. (They can be found in commonly used Chinese font products in Hong Kong.)