This paper focuses on the relationship between Joyce and the Chinese elements of his works. How and to what extent did James Joyce know East Asia? When he wrote a list of forty languages used for Finnegans Wake, Chinese is listed 6th from the top, Japanese 7th (1938: JJA 63:343). Chinese and Japanese languages are doubtlessly among the minor language groups for him. Alphabetical characters represent phonemes while Chinese characters can be considered as thought-pictures describing concepts. Learning Chinese and Japanese elements would have given Joyce some opportunities to reevaluate various kinds of scripts, which encouraged him to infuse some visual effects as thought-images into Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s interest in East Asia initially arose from the Jesuit missionary activities that he learned at Jesuit schools. He read “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” serialized in The Little Review between September and December, 1919. It was written by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound. His “Orientalism” was gradually developed with his daughter Lucia who had been interested in Chinese and Japanese art since the mid-1920s. As The James Joyce Archive and other manuscripts reveal, many words and phrases related to China were inserted into Ulysses after The Little Review serialization. Joyce made similar late insertions in Finnegans Wake. Joyce also wrote a memo under the subject heading “Chinese” while finalizing Finnegans Wake in 1938 (JJA 40:152-53; VI.B.46-47-48). Inserting Chinese elements at the  finishing  stage,   Joyce  successfully  made  his  alphabetic  texts  more revolutionary.