Food frequency questionnaire is an important assessment tool for public health nutrition research. We describe the development history and conducted the validity and reproducibility studies for a meal-based Chinese food frequency questionnaire (Chinese FFQ) by five meal sequences. A total of 51 subjects were recruited to collect dietary information twice (6 months apart) with one 24-hr recall, 7-day food records and the Chinese FFQ. Combining data from both time sets, Chinese FFQ showed strong correlations of macro and micronutrients with 7-day records (n = 60, r = 0.29-0.50, p < 0.05), but not with 24-hr recalls (n = 60, r = 0.01-0.23, p > 0.05). The reproducibility of this Chinese FFQ (n = 22) was consistently high for most nutrients, with Spearman correction coefficients between 0.42 for vitamin A to 0.79 for vitamin B12. From a larger sample of 231 subjects who completed the Chinese FFQ and one 24-hr recall, we found the energy distributions of breakfast, lunch, dinner, afternoon and evening snacks combined from Chinese FFQ were 20%, 37%, 37% and 6%, and from 24-hour recalls were 19%, 36%, 44% and 1%, respectively. These results showed acceptable reproducibility and relative validity of this meal-based Chinese FFQ.