This is an interdisciplinary project, based on a multifaceted approach to the historical development of Chinese in pro-modern China, with an emphasis on Late Medieval Chinese and the period of Early Mandarin. The project primarily focuses on qualitative and quantitative methodologies, including a Ghent-based database which has been constructed during a period of 10 years together with international collaborators, specializing on the digitizastion of early semi-colloquial manuscript and text materials which form the basis of linguistic analysis. As a specific feature of this project, textual materials and the (digital) corpora are contexualized in terms of genres and their backgrounds of production and editing processes, in addition to text-internal layers (e.g., various registers used in narrative and dialogues sections). The project is conducted in close collaboration with specialists in Historial Linguistics from the Department of Linguistics at Ghent University.