In Chapter 12, we engage in the study of the unit of speech act by contrastively examining the ways in which historical letters are conventionally closed in three different linguacultures: Chinese, German and British English. The ‘cross-cultural’ aspect of pragmatics does not only involve the study of language use in geographically different cultures – we may as well go back in history and compare language use in various historical periods within a particular linguaculture. Furthermore, we may also combine research on spatially distant linguacultures with that of diachronically distant ones. In this chapter we do exactly this, by conducting a contrastive analysis of typologically ‘closer’ and typologically more ‘distant’ linguacultures. By focusing on historical data, we highlight the overlap between cross-cultural pragmatics and the field of historical pragmatics. The chapter shows how our speech act coding scheme outlined in Chapter 8 can be put into use in data analysis.