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A sequence of hot briquetting and carbonization (HBC) is a promising technology for the production of coke with a high mechanical strength from lignite, but factors affecting the coke strength have not yet been fully understood. The HBC cokes prepared from 12 lignites in this study showed diverse tensile strength (e.g., from 0.2 to 31.2 MPa in the preparation at 200 °C and 112 MPa for hot briquetting and 1000 °C for carbonization), and the coke strengths could not be explained by differences in commonly used structural properties of the parent lignites, such as elemental composition and contents of volatile matter/fixed carbon and ash. In this study, two methods were proposed for correlating the coke strength with the lignite properties, which employed the chemical structure analyzed by solid-state 13C nuclear magnetic resonance or the volumetric shrinkage during carbonization. A stronger coke was obtained from lignite that contained more aliphatic carbons (less aromatic carbons) or shrank more considerably. These characteristics contributed to intensified compaction of lignite in the briquetting and suppression of the formation of large pores, which are a cause of coke fracture. Two empirical equations, predicting the coke strength from the parameters of lignite properties, were established to be criteria for selection of lignite as HBC coke feedstock, although further investigation with more experimental data would be necessary for the validation.