This textbook for beginning students contains 35 lessons of increasing difficulty designed to introduce students to the basic patterns of Classical Chinese and to provide practice in reading a variety of texts. The lessons are structured to encourage students to do more work with dictionaries and other references as they progress through the book.

The Introduction provides an overview of the grammar of Literary Chinese. Part I presents eight lessons on sentence structure, parts of speech, verbs, and negatives. Part II consists of sixteen intermediate-level lessons, and Part III offers five advanced-level selections. Part IV has six lessons based on Tang and Song dynasty prose and poetry.