Abstract: The concept of Chinese layered corpus for Chinese speech synthesis has been brought forward in this paper. Through the analyzing and tailoring of the layered corpus, some important conclusions are obtained:(1)The pitch, duration and energy of corpus are layered. (2) The naturalness of this layered corpus can compare with the large corpus for concatenative speech synthesis. (3) The achievement of the expressive intonations for concatenative speech synthesis may be based on the layered corpus. (4) The use of resources of layered corpus is much less than the large corpus.