In 1970, Billeter was appointed teaching assistant at the Ostasiatisches Seminar, at the University of Zurich (under Paul Kramers), where he worked until 1978. At the Faculty of Humanities, University of Geneva, he began giving courses on Chinese history in 1971 and set up a course in Chinese language in 1973. It would develop into a fully-fledged course in Chinese language and civilization, leading to a BA in Chinese studies in 1987, at which point Billeter was granted a professorship. After leaving academia in 1999, five years before the legal age of retirement, in order to dedicate himself to his work, Billeter took stock of his experience in "Mémoire sur les études chinoises à Genève et ailleurs "("A Report on Chinese studies, in Geneva and beyond"). A generous grant from the Taiwanese Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation had already enabled him to take a two-year sabbatical, from 1992 to 1994, and carry out his research on the "Zhuangzi". With very little leeway and tight financial conditions, Chinese studies in Geneva had to prioritize a solid and well-designed course in Mandarin. In order to meet this need, Billeter and his wife, who had then become his closest collaborator, devised their own method of teaching the Chinese language. Their method, effective and fine-tuned over two decades, resulted in a novel understanding of the “basic moves” of speech" in modern Chinese. Billeter plans to present this approach in a book together with an essay devoted to this “art of teaching”. Prizes and honors: in 1990, Stanislas Julien Prize from the French National Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres for "L'Art chinois de l'écriture "("The Chinese Art of Writing"); in 2013, Cultural Prize (Prix culturel) awarded by the Leenaards Foundation (Lausanne); in 2015, Prize of the City of Geneva. Aside from his PhD dissertation, the only book Jean François Billeter ever published during his teaching career was "The Chinese Art of Writing "(Skira, 1989), with illustrations both in black and white and colour. This book is a general presentation of Chinese calligraphy and deals with the distinctive features of the Chinese writing system, the technique of the brush, the switch from ordinary writing to true calligraphy. It examines what calligraphers from various periods have said about their practice, as well as the different functions calligraphy fulfilled throughout Chinese history.