Abstract: Comparing with other speech synthesis techniques, the synthesis-by-rule method has two distinguished features'it requires much less storage space for the phonetic library and offers greater flexibility in controlling acoustic and prosodic parameters. This paper introduces a Chinese speech synthesis-by-rule system developed by the first author during 1986 to 1990 at the University College London and improved by authors in 1992 at Academia Sinica, presents the principle and strategies of synthesizing Chinese speech by rule with special emphasis on prosody control, and reports the evaluation of the system.