Review paper for the ESO Minor Bodies in the Outer Solar System Workshop held in Garching, Germany in November 1998 The study of the Kuiper Belt has emerged as one of the leading subjects in planetary science. The Kuiper Belt offers many intriguing clues to the nature of the early solar system, and may also reveal key information about the processes behind the formation and growth of planets in the accretion disk of the sun. Kuiper Belt science has already been reviewed in detail several times elsewhere in the astronomical literature. In this short overview paper, I separate those aspects of the Kuiper Belt which are known with considerable confidence from other aspects that are less well known. In this way, I hope to provide a context for the other papers presented at the ESO Minor Bodies Workshop. To save space, and in the interests of keeping a tight focus on the subject at hand, I omit source references from this overview. The reader is directed to two full length reviews for complete references to the research literature (Jewitt, Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 1999; Jewitt and Luu, Protostars and Planets IV, 1999). Both are available at http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/faculty/jewitt/papers/.