This paper investigates the so-called V de O clefts in Chinese, a specific type of “clefts” where the de particle appears between the verb and the object, and proposes a cartographic approach to their syntactic and semantic properties. While some common generalizations about this pattern are shown to hold upon closer examination (i.e., exhaustive focus, obligatory past reading, ban on TMA markers), some do not (i.e., strict adjacency effect, term focus restriction). Two key projections are argued to exist in the relevant functional hierarchy, each linked to one crucial element in the pattern: (i) a FocP selected by the copula shi; (ii) an Asp*P headed by the verbal particle de. The former explains the focus effects with syntactic encoding and the latter accounts for the temporal/aspectual peculiarities with the marking of perfective aspect (related predictions about predicate restrictions are also presented). The derivation of V de O clefts involves overt focus movement of an extended “eventive” projection, which minimally contains an Asp*P. This movement is triggered by a focus feature either on the whole constituent (VP/S+VP) or on a smaller constituent within it (verb/object/subject/adjunct), the latter case demonstrating a pied-piping movement.