Intercultural encounters between China and German-speaking countries are vivid and this exchange continues to increase in intensity. While the phenomenon of language in interaction is very important for the examination of cultures and intercultural communication, it has never, until now, been a topic of research in any monograph in the field of cultural exchange between China and German-speaking countries. German words of Chinese origin are words borrowed from the Chinese language that entered German in whole or in part, and have the characteristics of German words. This paper deals with the process of the borrowing of Chinese words in German as an intercultural exchange process and analyzes those words in the modern German language using the methods of quantitative linguistics. Words of Chinese origin are understood as words which either originated directly or indirectly from Chinese as native language or have migrated to the Chinese language from a different language. The investigation shows that more than 160 words of Chinese origin are currently in active use in the modern German language. A lot of Chinese loan words were probably brought by the migrants from China to the West. Many of the first words borrowed from Chinese have migrated from Cantonese dialect via English to German and other European languages. The process of the borrowing of Chinese words should therefore not only be understood as the result of interaction between languages, but also as a process of intercultural and intersocial communication that was strongly associated with the history of overseas Chinese. We cannot yet determine whether the reception process of German words of Chinese origin abides by the Piotrowski law of quantitative linguistics. But there are still some interesting facts to be mentioned: the number of words of Chinese origin in German has increased constantly since the end of the 19th Century. Furthermore the spelling of words is increasingly influenced by the pinyinsystem which was developed in the 1950s in Mainland China. It should be emphasized that interlinguistic and intercultural connections and influences between China and German-speaking countries will certainly continue. We can expect that this tendency will lead to more Chinese borrowings in German in the foreseeable future and therefore will result in a better reception of the Chinese culture in German-speaking countries, as it has already happened in English-speaking countries.