The present article presents an in-depth analysis of the head-final three-layered split CP realized by sentence-final particles (SFPs) in the SVO language Mandarin Chinese. These SFPs are shown to be fully-fledged functional heads with a complex feature make-up, on a par with C elements in e.g. Indo-European languages. Chinese SFPs select and project, as evidenced by the strict hierarchy for co- occurring SFPs in the split CP. This structure must be merged as such and cannot be derived by postulating movement from a head-initial CP. It straightforwardly invalidates empirically superficial statements that attempt to turn Chinese SFPs into a grammatical quantite negligeable in order to uphold problematic word order generalizations such as the Final-over-Final Constraint.