The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) is designed as a Chinese match for the FLOB and FROWN corpora for modern British and American English. The corpus is suitable for use in both monolingual research into modern Mandarin Chinese and cross-linguistic contrast of Chinese and British/American English. The corpus sampled 15 written text categories including news, literary texts, academic prose and official documents etc published in P. R. China in the earlier 1990s for a total of approximately 1 million words. The same sampling frame and period as FLOB/FROWN were used in LCMC. The corpus is marked up for text categories, sample file numbers, paragraphs, sentences and tokens. Linguistic annotations undertaken on the corpus include tokenization and part-of-speech tagging. The whole corpus is annotated at the word level and includes orthographic and morphological annotations. The tagging system used was produced by the Institute of Computing Science Chinese Lexical Analysis System (ICTCLAS), the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The corpus is encoded in Unicode (UTF-8) and marked up in XML. The corpus comes with a User Manual detailing corpus design specifications and part-of-speech tags. The XML structure of the corpus was validated using the parser built in Xaira. Part-of-speech tagging of all aspect markers was manually checked.

LCMC语料库是一个100万词次（按每1.6个汉字对应一个英文单词折算）的现代汉语书面语通用型平衡语料库。起先建立时，它是作为英国经社研究委员会资助项目Contrasting Tense and Aspect in English and Chinese的部分成果。肖忠华最初的设想是要将其建成同FLOB和FROWN对应的现代汉语语料库。筹建这样的一个语料库的另一个动因是：尽管已经有很多汉语语料库存在，但却没有一个完全免费对公众开放的平衡的汉语语料库