Objective To translate the Essen Climate Evaluation Schema (EssenCES) into Chinese and test its reliability and validity. Methods Based on the Brislin translation model, the original English version EssenCES was translated, back-translated, culturally adapted, and pretested to form the Chinese version of the EssenCES, then it was used to investigate 606 nurses and 368 patients in psychiatric wards to test its reliability and validity. Results The Chinese version of the EssenCES consisted of three dimensions (therapeutic hold, experienced safety, and patients cohesion) and 15 items. Its scale-level content validity index was 0.976,and its item-level content validity index ranged from 0.900 to 1.000. For psychiatric nurses and patients, its respective Cronbach′s α coefficient was 0.848 and 0.816, its test-retest reliability was 0.893 and 0.878, and its split-half reliability coefficient was 0.815 and 0.779. Exploratory factor analysis extracted three common factors, explaining cumulative variances of 64.408% for nurses and 61.131% for patients. Exploratory graph analysis detected three dimensions with a frequency of 0.998 for nurses and 0.994 for patients, and item-dimension reliability frequencies ranged from 0.970 to 1.000 for nurses and 0.920 to 1.000 for patients. Confirmatory factor analysis showed the following fit indices for nurses and patients respectively:χ2/df=2.697 and 2.280, RMSEA=0.058 and 0.062, GFI=0.903 and 0.888, NFI=0.902 and 0.883, CFI=0.936 and 0.930, TLI=0.922 and 0.916, IFI=0.936 and 0.931. Conclusion The Chinese version of the EssenCES has good reliability and validity,it serves as a reliable tool for assessing the psychiatric ward atmosphere, thus it provides references for improving the psychiatric ward atmosphere in China accordingly.