Analysis and attempt to precisely translate the traditional Chinese administrative terms into Russian can be very interesting and fruitful for the understanding of the basic concepts of Chinese culture. Each title more or less explicitly encodes general ideas about the social functions of an institution or office and about the supposed ways to perform these functions. Of special interest are those cases when it is impossible to find a close Western functional analogue for the name and, therefore, it is impossible to simply replace the Chinese term with a Western one instead of translati ng it. In cases cases, each name just was the function. The name is an extremely concise symbolic, allegorical description of the ideal concepts about the tasks that the state sets for this institution or official, and, at the same time, of the ideal concepts about the methods by which these tasks will be implemented. Having understood the name, we get an idea of both the task and the method. Interesting examples of such names are the positions of the female staff of the institution that we traditionally call the imperial harem.