Although China has one of the most ancient lexicographical traditions, we know much about the etymology of the more recent (1) Chinese words. My goal in undertaking this study was therefore to establish the entity and characteristic of lexical events (2) between 1840 and 1898, and show that Modern Chinese lexicon is not simple the fruit of the linguistic experiments that took place (3) in context of the literary movements of the early 20th century (4) but in fact developed thanks both to its traditional base and to the contribution of lexical inventions of the 19th century. With the starting assumption that languages react external stimuli, I (5) drew particular attention to the impact on Chinese lexicon of (6) those works written by Chinese either by foreigners or by Chinese (7) in contact with foreigners, either in China or abroad. The impact of western language on Chinese lexicon could only be direct, (8) and take place via the formation of semantic loans and loan-translations, since Chinese has great difficulty absorb (9) phonemic loans. The impact of Japanese was far greater. Because (10) different in structural terms, to some extent Japanese and Chinese share the same writing form.