One of the most challenging topics is the recognition of Chinese handwriting, especially offline recognition. In this paper, an offline recognition system based on multifeature and multilevel classification is presented for handwritten Chinese characters. Ten classes of multifeatures, such as peripheral shape features, stroke density features, and stroke direction features, are used in this system. The multilevel classification scheme consists of a group classifier and a five-level character classifier, where two new technologies, overlap clustering and Gaussian distribution selector, are developed. Experiments have been conducted to recognize 5,401 daily-used Chinese characters. The recognition rate is about 90 percent for a unique candidate, and 98 percent for multichoice with 10 candidates. © 1998 IEEE.