VMS glyphs may not be phonetics.

[DonaldFisk]

The problems I have with a Chinese origin are that the zodiac in the VMS is the standard European (originally Babylonian) one, the nymphs don't look even remotely Chinese, and the swallowtail merlons in one of the illustrations are an Italian architectural feature.   However, if you still want to proceed on the assumption it's encoded Chinese, be aware of the difference between traditional and simplified characters.  The simplified characters used today, adopted only after the 1949 revolution, didn't exist when the VMS was created, and still haven't been adopted in Taiwan or Hong Kong.  Also, the modern written language (which is based on Mandarin) is only 100 years old, adopted after the 1911 revolution.   Prior to its adoption, Classical Chinese was written and this was very different from modern standard Chinese.