TLS explores the conceptual schemes of pre-Buddhist Chinese on the basis of over 8500 A4 pages of text with interlinear translations. TLS is a sustained effort in philological and philosophical fieldwork, designed throughout to make the classical Chinese evidence strictly comparable to that of other cultures, and to make possible meaningful analytic primary-evidence-based disagreement among non-sinologists on classical Chinese concepts and words. TLS is compiled in the hope that careful philosophical reflection on Chinese texts might serve to broaden the empirical basis for philosophical theories and generalisations on conceptual schemes. TLS is based on the conviction that we should improve the clarity and bite of declarations of difference between conceptual schemes by enlarging the basis of literally translated and analysed texts from widely (though never radically) different intellectual cultures. The necessary charitable assumption that if we want to understand others we must count them right in most matters will not prevent TLS from looking for and exploring deep conceptual contrasts to the full. TLS seeks to make precise criteria of translation for classical Chinese, mainly through a detailed description in English of systematic recurrent semantic relations between Chinese words, especially distinctive semantic features. TLS is the first synonym dictionary of classical Chinese in any Western language. TLS focusses on distinctive semantic nuances. TLS is the first interactive dictionary of Chinese. TLS is the first dictionary which systematically organises the Chinese vocabulary in taxonomic and mereonomic hierarchies thus showing up whole conceptual schemes or cognitive systems. These are taken to circumscribe the changing topology of Chinese mental space. TLS is the first dictionary that systematically registers a range of lexical relations like antonym, converse, epithet etc. TLS thus aims to define conceptual space as a relational space. TLS is the first dictionary of Chinese which incorporates detailed syntactic analysis of (over 600 distinct kinds of) syntactic usage. TLS thus enables us to make a systematic study of such basic phenomena as the natural history of abstract nouns in China. TLS is the first corpus-based dictionary which will record the history of rhetorical devices in texts and will thus enable us to study such intellectually crucial things as the natural history of irony in China. All analytic categories and procedures of analysis in TLS are flexible in the sense that they are continuously being revised and improved in the light of new observation and analysis