The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) addresses an increasing need within the research community for a publicly available balanced corpus of Mandarin Chinese. LCMC has been constructed as part of a research project undertaken by the Linguistics Department, Lancaster University. The corpus is designed as a Chinese match of the Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English (FLOB), and, as such, will provide a valuable resource for contrastive studies between English and Chinese as well as a sound basis for monolingual investigations of Chinese.