This paper focuses on the annotation of Chinese noun phrases as part of a broader endeavor to develop a parsed corpus with both syntactic and semantic information for Chinese characters. For this purpose, the following two notable issues are considered: 1) clarifying the internal structure of noun phrases with a formal analysis; and 2) distinguishing the syntactic roles played by noun phrases. As a frequently used phrase type supporting various modifiers, it is not easy to conduct a consistent analysis on noun phrases. Under a detailed but practical classification of noun phrase modifiers, a comprehensive observation of noun phrase structures with a full range of modifiers is undertaken following a scheme adapted from the Annotation manual for the Penn Historical Corpora and the PCEEC (Santorini 2010). As an isolating language, Chinese lacks formal clues that can explicitly indicate the syntactic roles played by noun phrases. The distinction between topic and subject has been considered as an open issue. Following our aim of developing a parsed corpus, a precise definition of topic and subject will be provided. Based on these definitions, we clarify the criteria for determining the topic and subject by considering various examples. This lays an important foundation for further studies into the grammatical structure of Chinese sentences by establishing a solid foundation for exploring further construction types of Chinese within a framework that is instantiated by an actively queried parsed corpus.