Two Chinese pure alexic patients are reported. C.Y.T. had a circumscribed lesion in the left occipital lobe, the same location as the classic cases of pure alexia in other languages. Y.Y.X. was diagnosed with Balint's syndrome characterized by bilateral damage in the parietal and occipital lobes. The Chinese script is logographic and non-alphabetic. Nevertheless, the neuroanatomy of early processing in reading Chinese appears to be the same for readers of alphabetical and non-alphabetical scripts. Both patients displayed a ‘radical-by-radical’ reading strategy which is analogous (and possibly functionally equivalent) to ‘letter-by-letter’ reading in alphabetic patients. There was an association between constructional apraxia and a deficit in processing the visual form of Chinese characters for Y.Y.X. However, C.Y.T. had intact visuospatial function and displayed no impairment to the processing of character form. The implications of the data from pure alexic patients to our understanding of oral reading in Chinese are discussed.