The paper reports the results of a naturalistic enquiry into written request strategies in emails sent by Chinese learners of English to their teachers. A corpus of 600 emails was collected in the course of an academic year. CCARP (Cross-Cultural Speech-Act Realisation Project) segmentation and coding was used to analyse the requests contained in the messages. Results confirm some findings of research on request strategies in the Chinese language. First, the learners used direct requests when communicating with their teachers. Second, they used linguistic politeness devices that conform to the traditional teacher–student hierarchical relationship in Chinese culture. However, they tended to use requestive hints frequently. The implications of the findings for research on cross-cultural written communication are discussed.