Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate various issues related to Chinese language localisation in Evergreen, an open source integrated library system (ILS). Design/methodology/approach: A Simplified Chinese version of Evergreen was implemented and tested and various issues such as encoding, indexing, searching, and sorting specifically associated with Simplified Chinese language were investigated. Findings: The paper finds that Unicode eases a lot of ILS development problems. However, having another language version of an ILS does not simply require the translation from one language to another. Indexing, searching, sorting and other locale related issues should be tackled not only language by language, but locale by locale. Practical implications: Most of the issues that have arisen during this project will be found with other ILS-like systems. Originality/value: This paper provides insights into issues of, and various solutions to, indexing, searching, and sorting in the Chinese language in an ILS. These issues and the solutions may be applicable to other digital library systems such as institutional repositories.