Abstract When I studied the history of Chinese literature, I was always puzzled by the following questions. 1. Why was it that Chinese poetry developed its compositional style from shi 詩 to ci 詞 and to qu 曲, and not the other way around? 2. What was the reason that writers of the ci poetry occasionally changed the compositional pattern by adding or omitting a few characters? 3. What was the function of the chenzi (襯字), or added characters, in the qu (曲) compositions of the Yuan dynasty? The answers to these questions pointed to one single reason, namely, to change the rhythm in verse writing. In modern times, the rhythmic pattern of the new style poetry (新詩) has gradually coalesced with that of prose writing. And, in some cases, it is even difficult to find the differences between a poem and an essay. Then what is the rhythm of Chinese essays? This paper aims to examine cases in other genres such as tongue twisters (繞口令), easy pronounced phrases (順口溜), common sayings (諺語), and children songs (童謠), and then the genre of literary essays. Based on my findings, I would argue that prose writing derives its rhythmic effects from: 1. arrangement of characters with different tones to create variations in rhythm, i.e. pingsheng (平聲) characters representing the level tone and the rusheng (入 聲) the short and abrupt tone; 2. alternating number of characters to introduce rhythmic groupings of various lengths; 3. use of identical sentence patterns and words to highlight a rhythmic repetition; and 4. occasionally employing rhyme words to show emphasis. The major distinction between prose and poetry in Chinese is that the former never uses alliteration or regular rhyming.