*
WANG Shaowu( 王绍武 ) and GONG Daoyi (
龚道溢 )
Department of Geophysics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Characteristics of temperature over China during the four special periods in the
Holocene are analyzed for the four periods; i.e. the Megathermal, the Medieval Warm Period, the
Little Ice Age and the Modern Warm Period. The Megathermal was found in between
8.5~3.0kaBP
， the maximum appeared about 5.5~6.0ka and 7.0kaBP, while temperatures were about 2
 C above the latest one hundred years’ average. During the Medieval Warm Period, from the late 9th century to the 13th century, temperatures were warmer over the eastern China. Some maximum temperatures were close to the mean of 1880s-1970s. However, the 12th century was cold. Over the west part of China, temperatures did not show the same features as that of the east, except for the moderate warm during the second half of 9th century. There are five cold spells in
China during the last millennium; in the early part of 12th, 14th and 15th century, the late of 15th century, the 17th and 19th century. Among these cold periods, the last three spells can be considered as the Little Ice Age of China, the minimum of temperature anomaly was below
–1.0

C and –0.5

C for the 10-years and 30~50-years mean respectively. The 20th century is the warmest one in the last 12 centuries, and was 0.5

C warmer than the 1200 years mean. During the last one hundred years, the warmest period appeared in 1920s-1940s, but the highest annual temperature occurred in 1998 in which the temperature anomaly was +1.38

C with respected to the 1961-1990 mean.
：
Holocene, China, Climatic change
Recently, a lot of attentions have been paid to the climatic changes in China. Large amounts of proxy evidence have been used in studying the climate of the four special periods, i.e. the
Megathermal, the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the Modern Warm Period, more
Received May 17, 1999; revised July , 1999
* Supported by “National Key Developing Programme for Basic Sciences: Research on the Formation Mechanism and Prediction Theory of Heavy Climatic Disasters in China ”, the first part of the “Research on the Formation
Mechanism and Prediction Theory of Heavy Climatic and Synoptic Disasters in China”, and supported by the
1

and more details have been unraveled. It is of great help to understand the climatic variation in
China during the Holocene.
The purpose of this study is to collect and analyze the proxy evidence for summarizing the characteristics of climate of China in the last 10ka.
The Megathermal are usually used to describe the warm periods of interglacial phase. It seems that this terminology may be more reasonable than the Hypsithermal and Climatic
Optimum ， for there may include some cool spells in the Magathermal [1] .
For the lack of documentary evidence in this period, only two archaeological evidence were shown to support the warm climate in the early times in the pioneer work of “Preliminary study on the climatic change in China during the last five thousand years” by Professor Zhu Kezhen(1973)
[2] . Since then, amounts of archaeological evidence have been found, for example, fossils of many tropical animals such as elephants and rhinoceros have been found over the middle and low valley of Yellow River [3,4] . It is clear that there have been a warmer period during the Holocene. Shi et al. indicated that the Magathermal covers the period 8.5~3.0kaBP in China [5,6] .
However, there are some problems with the archaeological evidence. First, the dating was not accurate enough. Second, although there were fossils of tropical animals in the northern China, it’s difficult to induce the temperature directly. Third, the fossils cannot help for building a continuous time series. Then, the best proxy for the climate of Holocene may be the pollen. The numbers of published papers about the pollen analysis have been more than 200 even eight year ago. Shi et al. have carefully discussed the climate of China in Holocene mainly according to the pollen data [5,6] , and finished the map of vegetation distribution in the Magathermal (7.2~6.0KaBP) using the pollen data from more than 70 datasets. The difference between the maps in the Magathermal and in modern times is checked, then the difference in temperature is estimated. Zhang et al. also calculated the seasonal and annual temperature of the middle Holocene using pollen data of 49 sites [7] .
To get better representative, here we chose ten pollen time series for the ten climatological
National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant No.49635190).
2

regions over China [8] . Then the area weighted time series are obtained. For the low resolution in time scale, only four samples are used in every one thousand years, i.e., in the order of 10.0, 9.75,
9.50, 9.25kaBP,… etc., so there are 40 time points from 10 to 0.25kaBP in total, the anomaly of modern time is 0. Some important common practices should be noticed, (a) the pollen series have already filtered out the high frequency components, and then can correspond to the multi-year averaging of the temperature. (b) The referenced period was different from author to another, here we try to reduce all the anomalies but to the last one hundred years. (c) The converting functions were different from author to another too, but no changes are made in this paper. The original data of ten regions are shown in the table 1. The original converted temperature data was obtained for the Region 1, 2, 3, 4 and 7. The temperature series for the other five regions are calculated using the original pollen data. However, as demonstrated in the fig.1, the time series constructed by five original temperature data regions are not different much to that by all ten regions. Then it maybe conclude that the time series shown in the fig. 1 depict the most important temperature features of China during the last 10k years. Figure 1 indicates that the Magathermal in China covers 8.5~3.0kaBP by using the criteria of warm-than-now, and in the maximum (5.5~6.0 and
7.0KaBP) the annual mean temperature over whole China is +2.0C above now.
Table 1. The Magathermal in China
Regions Sites Latitude
/

N
1 East. North Gushantun
2 North East. Hebei
3 East
4 South
Jianhu Lake
42
40
34
Pear Riv. Delta 23
5 Taiwan
6 Central
7 Sou. East
Riyuetan Lake
Dongting Lake
Guizhou
24
29
28
8 Nor. West Qinghai Lake
9 Xinjiang Aibi Lake
10 Tibet Bangong Lake
37
45
34
Longitude
/

E
Time
/kaBP
126 8.3~4.0
118 8.0~4.0
120 8.5~3.7
114 9.0~3.0
121 8.5~3.0
113 7.5~4.0
109 7.8~2.7
100 8.0~3.5
83 8.5~4.0
80 8.3~4.0
Warmer than now
/

C
1.7~2.6
3.0~4.0
1.7
1.0
2.0~3.0
3.0~3.5
1.6~3.0
3.0
1.0~3.0
3.0~4.0
References
[5],33~39p
[5],1~18p
[5],80~93p
[5],121p
[5],91p
[5],120p
[5],123p
[5],48~65p
[5],168~174p
[5],197~205p
Fig. 1. Temperature of China in Holocene for (a) ten regions mean and (b) five regions mean.
It has been suggested that the Medieval Warm Period encompass the AD 900 to A.D.1300.
3

Zhu(1973) [2] indicated that the Sui and Tang Dynasty (AD 589~A.D.907) experienced a climate of warmth. But the temperature decreased during the 11th century, and had a climate of coldness in the 12th century. Around the 13th century the temperature increased a little but then turned to drop in 14th century. Then there maybe no warm climate during the 10th to 13th century, i.e., there is no Medieval Warm Period in China. However, Man [9] has shown a lot of proofs supporting that there indeed existed warmer climate during the 10th to the 13th century over China. During this period, the northern boundary for planting some crops, such as wheat, rice, sugarcane, tea tree, citrus, ramie, was 1

north to today's. According to Gong et al.
[3] , the annual temperature difference between latitudes is ~0.5

C per one degree of latitude in the eastern China. Man [9] indicated that the season was 3~4 days early than that of present in Hangzhou, it was nearly equal to the 1

latitude changing to the north too. Zhang [11] also found that the northern boundary for planting citrus and ramie was more north to today’s during the 13th century. Wang(1990) [12] has constructed the temperature time series of winter and summer of the eastern China back to the
A.D.800, however, because of the lack of data in the early time, time resolution of the series was only in 100 years.
Table 2. Sources of the documentary evidence (A.D.800~A.D.1399)
5
6
3
2
4
No. Year
1 A.D.800~1399
Dynasty
Tang~Ming
A.D.800~941
A.D.960~1100
A.D.1288~1340
A.D.962~1228
A.D.962~1127
A.D.1018~1371
A.D.821~1399
A.D.627~904
A.D.814~947
A.D.821~903
A.D.962~1237
A.D.988~1113
A.D.1197~1232
A.D.1284~1368
Mid.Tang~Wudai
Beisong
Yuan
Song
Beisong
Song~Ming
Tang~Ming
Tang
Nantang, Beiqi
Tang
Song
Liao
Jin
Yuan
Proofs
Cold winter
Warm winter
Cold summer
Warm summer
Cold events
Temp.anomalies
Heavy snow
12
15
13
Cold & warm events 67
Cold events
Serevere cold events
Cold winter
Freeze
Freeze, hot summer
Sea ice
Freeze
Freeze
Freeze
Freeze
19
7
36
33
5
2
36
7
10
30
Numbers References
42 [12],17~18p
40 [12],17~18p
34
36
[12],18~19p
[12],18~19p
[6],292p
[6],297p
[6],299p
[6],439p
[13],146p
[13],120p
[13],156~157p
[14],73~74p
[14],78p
[14],92p
[14],172~173p
[14],175~176
[14],177p
[14],182~183p
A.D.628~902
A.D.647~904
A.D.821~903
Tang
Tang
Tang
A.D.928~1113 Liao
Frost,snow 10
Serevere cold events 17
Sea ice 3
Freeze
[15],26p
[15],26p
[15],26p
[16],48~49p
Here we collect more historical documentary evidence, as shown in table 2. The time
4

resolution was in 50 years. The 10-year-mean annual temperature series beginning from A.D.1400 are used to construct the converting function between the 50-year-mean coldness index and the temperature anomalies 1) . Then using this function, the temperature over the eastern China for
A.D.800~849, A.D.850~899, A.D.900~949, … , are computed (See fig.2a). Recently, Wang et al.
[17] have reconstructed the temperature over the western China for the last millennium. Figure 2b shows the 50-year-mean temperature anomalies (with respected to 1880-1970) of the three western regions’ average. The three regions are the northern West, Xingjiang and Tibet. In the northern West and Xinjiang, the δ 18 O data are used [18][19] , in the Tibet the tree ring data are used [20] . Figure 2c is the mean of the western and eastern China. Some features are evident as fig.2 demonstrated: (a) The climate of China in the Medieval Warm Period was as warm as in the 20th century, but there were significant difference between the western and the eastern China. (b) In the eastern China, there were two warm spells appearing in the late 9th to the late 11th century, and
13th century.(c) There was no warm climate over the west of China during the 10th to 13th century. (d) The coldness occurring in 12th century was more significant in the western China than in the east.
Fig. 2. Temperature of China since A.D.800. (a) The eastern China, (b) the western China, (c) whole China. The means of the whole series are shown as the dotted lines.
The period of A.D.1550~1850 are widely known as the Little Ice Age (Lamb,1972) [21] .
Zhu(1973) indicated that there were three cold episodes for the Little Ice Age in China, appeared in A.D.1470
～ 1520(50years), A.D.1620
～ 1720(100 years) and A.D.1840
～ 1890(50 years). The results have supported by some other evidence. Zhu also guessed the degree of the coldness according to the phynology records. Major evidence are extracted from the Diary of Yuan Xiaoxiu
(A.D. 1608~1617) and the Travel to the North (A.D. 1653~1655). The blooming dates of peach, apricot, clove and some other vegetation showed that the seasons might be one-two weeks later than the present. The thawing out data of the canal in Beijing was twelve later than today. So, Zhu
1) Wang Shaowu, Gong Daoyi and Zhu Jinhong, The Climate of Medieval Warm Period in China, 1999
5

concluded that the winter temperature during the middle 17th century was 2

C lower than today.
Gong et al.
[10] indicated that the season would be four days later comparing to that of the place in one degree south, and the annual mean temperature and winter temperature would be 0.5

C and
0.9

C lower respectively. Therefore, the deduction of Zhu(1973) is creditable, and an aftermath can be drew that the annual temperature during the Little Ice Age was 1

C lower that today.
However, the relevant time series are necessary for understanding the climate of Little Ice
Age in details. Wang [22] has established the seasonal temperature series of Northern China since
A.D.1380 using the plenty historical documentary evidence. The temperature data usually obey the normal distribution, there are certain possibility for the certain anomalies, and the possibility can be measured by the standard deviation. For example, assuming the standard deviation of the temperature series is 1 ℃ (nearly close to the standard deviation of winter temperature in Beijing), so the possibility for the anomaly below -0.1

C is 15.9% ， possibility for below -2.0
℃ is 2.3%. If the climate become colder, the whole distribution will shift to the coldness. When the mean drop by 1.0

C, the possibility for the anomaly below -2.0

C is not 2.3% but increase to 15.9%.
Contrarily, the climatic change can be estimated by possibility of the cold events. This method is fruitful for reconstructing the climate of Little Ice Age as there are plentiful records of the cold events in the historical documents. Figure 3 shows ten-years-mean temperature series of Northern and Eastern China. According to these series, the three cold spells are recognized and shown as
I,II, and III in the table 3.
Table 3. Three cold spells in the Little Ice Age and the temperature anomalies (with respected to
1920s~1940s, in

C)
Time
Northern China
Eastern China
Whole China
I
1
I
2
II
Cold Spells
1
II
2
III
1
III
2
1450s
~
1470s
1490s
~
1510s
1560s
~
1600s
1620s
~
1690s
1790s
~
1810s
1830s
~
1890s
-0.29 -0.06 -0.47 -0.63 -0.45 -0.32
-0.31 -0.61 -0.47 -0.57 -0.41 -0.58
-0.47 -0.40 -0.30
Warm period
1920s
~
1940s
0.49
0.43
0.43
Figure 3 also gives the area weighted mean temperature since the 17th century [14] , however, because of the lack of data, the temperature of whole China during the spells of I
1
, I
2
, and II
1
3 are uncertain. The temperature anomalies of the whole China during the spells of II
2
, III
1
, and III
2
3 are listed in the last row of table 3. It can be briefly concluded that the temperature of Little Ice Age is
6

0.5

C lower than the last hundred years' mean..
Fig. 3. Temperatures in China since 1380s
(a) Northern China, (b) Eastern China, (c) Whole China
Returning to the fig. 2, it is clear that there are five cold periods in China during the last one thousand years, there occurred in the early 12th, 14th century, the late of 15th century, the 17th and 19th century. Among these cold periods, the last three periods can be considered as the three cold spells of the Little Ice Age.
Although the 20th century is just a short period in the Holocene, it's very helpful for understanding the modern climate and predicting the climate of future. Climate research relies greatly on the records from instruments at near surface weather stations, but, the modern large networks of weather observing stations are operated beginning just in 1951 in China. During the past decades some attempts have been made to estimate the annual mean temperature of China back to the late nineteenth century ( for example Zhang et al [23] ., Lin [24] , Wang [25] ). However, there are some causes maybe make temperature series inhomogeneous. Although several long-term stations, which located almost in the east China near the coast, were established during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there are large gaps in the observed temperature coverage. Especially, the data availability over the western continent of China is very poor.
Historical documentary data, together with other proxy data provide important supplement for increasing the coverage and extending back the data.
Wang et al.
[8] have established the annual mean temperature of the ten climatological regions of China for the period of 1880 to 1998. Data sources are listed in the table 4. There are five stations in each region (see reference [5] for details.). The regional series have been added to the average with consideration of the area weights. It's the first time to set up the series with consideration of the complete coverage of all ten regions and their area size.
The regional mean temperature is measured by the average of five stations during the past several decades, but in the late nineteenth century there is only one station's records are available
7

for most regions. The change of station numbers maybe significantly change the variance of the regional temperature series. In most of the ten regions, the variance of single station data is roughly close to that of average regional data. However, the standard deviation of region 5 is 0.26, but that of Taibei (which locates in the north of Taiwan) is 0.39. For the region 4 and 8, the standard deviation ratio of regional data to the single center station data is 0.76 and 0.77 respectively (referenced to the period 1961-1990). We convert the temperature anomaly of single station to the average regional anomaly by multiplying the standard deviation ratio between them when there is only single station data available in the early time. Regard of the accordance of method, this multiplication is applied in all regions. Proxies also are converted to the temperature series with the same variance of observation temperature. The uncertainty could still exist in the series, however, this series maybe the one with the best coverage.
Fig. 4. Annual mean temperature anomalies of China. Reference period is 1961-1990.
Table 4. Original data sources.
Area name
1.North East
2.North
3.East
4.South
5.Taiwan
6.Mid.South
7.Southwest
8.Northwest
9.Xinjiang
10.Tibet
1880 To
1910
Ob
Ob
Ob
Ob
Ob,HD
HD
HD
Ic
Ic
Tr
Period
1911 To
1950
TMap
TMap
TMap
TMap
Ob
TMap
TMap
TMap
Ic
Ob,Tr
1951 To
1998
Ob
Ob
Ob
Ob
Ob
Ob
Ob
Ob
Ob
Ob
Ob-Observations, TMap-Temperature Category Maps,
Tr-Tree ring data, Ic-Ice core

18
O, HD-Historical
Document.
The temperature trends of the last century appraised by some previous works using less temperature data with incomplete coverage are much lower than the global mean (for example, the series by Wang (1990) [25] using four stations located in the eastern China just show a trend of
+0.09

C/100yr). But as shown in fig. 4, one of the most apparent features is the strong warming trend. The linear trend of the annual temperature of China with the complete coverage is
8

0.50

C/100yr. This remarkable warming trend is much higher than ever estimated before, and comparable to the global mean trend of 0.5 to 0.6

C per 100 years. Correlation of temperature between global mean and China is 0.60 for the last 119 years. This infers good parallelism of the warming in China with that on the globe.
It's of interest to notice that the 1998 ranks as the warmest year since 1880 in China.
Temperature anomaly in 1998 is +1.38

C (referenced to the 1961-1990 mean). The second warmest year occurred in 1946, temperature anomaly is +0.92, even considering the uncertainty of

0.16

C, the possible rang is 0.76~1.08

C, also lower than +1.38

C. It's manifest the annual temperature of 1998 set the highest record for the past century in China. The warming maybe related to the enhancement of the greenhouse effect..
Reconstructing the paleo-climate relies greatly on the proxy data. However, the proxy data contain a great deal of uncertainties which can be aroused from (a) the representativeness of sample sites, (b) the precision of dating, (c) the error in calibrating. This kind of uncertainty exist in all pollen, ice core δ 18 O, tree ring and historical documents data. Both new proxy data and advanced technology for calibrating will urge the work of paleo-climate reconstruction in China.
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China in the Megathermal, in: The Climate and Environment of China in the Megathermal (ed.
Shi, Y.F.), Beijing, Ocean Press, 1992,1-118.
2 Zhu, K.Z., Preliminary study on the climatic change in China during the last five thousand years,
Science in China , 1973,16(2):226-256
3 Hameed, S. and Gong, G.F., Temperature of China in historical periods, in: Climatic Change and
Its Effects (ed. Zhang, Y.), Beijing, Meteorological Press, 1993,57-69
4 Shi, Y.F. and Zhang, P.Y., Historical Climate Changes in China , Jinan, Shandong Science and
Technology Press, 1996,426
5 Shi, Y.F., The Climate and Environment of China in the Megathermal Beijing, Ocean Press,
1992,1-212.
6 Shi, Y.F. and Zhang, P.Y., Historical Climate Changes in China , Jinan, Shandong Science and
Technology Press, 1996,1-533
7 Zhang, Y. and Wang, W.C., Surface temperature fields over China during the middle Holocene, in: Climatic Change and Its Effects (ed. Zhang, Y.), Beijing, Meteorological Press,
1993,91-107
8 Wang, S.W., Ye, J.L., Gong, D.Y. et al., Reconstruction of the temperature series in China for the
9

last one hundred years, Quarterly Journal of Applied Meteorology, 1998,9(4):392-401
9 Shi, Y.F. and Zhang, P.Y., Historical Climate Changes in China , Jinan, Shandong Science and
Technology Press, 1996,293-298
10 Gong, G.F. and Jian, W.M., The Geographical distribution of the vegetation phenology in China,
Acta Geographic Sinica , 1983,38(1):33-40
11 Zhang, D.,. Evidence for the existence of the Medieval Warm Period in China, Climatic
Change , 1994,26(2~3):287~297.
12 Wang, S.W., Winter and summer temperature of China in the last one thousand years,
Meteorological Monthly , 1990,16(6):15-21.
13 Wen, F.R. and Wen, R.S., Historical climate change for the winter half year in China , Beijing,
Science Press, 1996, 1-167.
14 Gao,X.W., History of the natural Disasters in China , Beijing, Seismic Press, 1997,1-525.
15 Man, Z.M., Climate in Tang Dynasty of China: discussion for its evidence, Quaternary
Sciences ,1998,1:20-30.
16 Deng, H., Reconstruction of climatic series of the northern Yanshan Mountains region in Liao
Dynasty, Quaternary Sciences ,1998,1:46-53.
17 Wang, S.W., Ye, J.L., Gong, D.Y., Climate in China during the Little Ice Age, Quaternary
Sciences , 1998, 1: 54-64.
18 Yao, T.D. and Xie, Z.C., Records of the Little Ice Age in the Dunde ice core data, Science in
China(B) , 1990,11,1197-1201.
19 Yao,T. D., Yang, Z.H., Huang, C.L. et al., Preliminary research on the climatic and environmental changes by using the 2Ka Guliya ice core data, Chinese Science Bulletin, 1996,
41(12): 1103-1106.
20 Kang, X.C., Graumlich, L. J. and Sheppard, P., Climatic change in Dulan of Qinghai Province since A.D. 1835: tree ring data evidence, Quaternary Sciences ,1997,1:70-75.
21 Lamb, H. H.,. Climatic History and the Future, vol 2: Climate: Present, Past and Future,
London, Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1972, 835.
22 Wang, S.W., Reconstruction of the temperature series of Northern China back to A.D. 1380,
Science in China(B) , 1990,5,553-560
23 Zhang, X.G., Zhao, Z. and Xu, R.Y., Tree rings of Qinian Mountain and the climatic change in
China, in: Proceedings of the workshop on the climatic changes in China , Beijing, Science
Press, 1978,26-35.
24 Lin, X.C., Yu,. S.Q. and Tang, G.L., Temperature series of China in the last one hundred years,
Atmospheric Sciences, 1995,19(5):525-534.
25 Wang, S. W., Variations of temperature in China for the 100 year period in comparison with global temperatures, Meteorological Monthly ,1990,16(2):11-15.
10

0
-1
-2
2
1
0
-1
2
1
-2
(a)
(b)
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 KaBP
Fig. 1. Temperature of China in Holocene for (a) ten regions mean and (b) five regions mean.
0.2
0.0
(a)
-0.2
-0.4
-0.6
0.2
0.0
-0.2
-0.4
-0.6
(b)
(c)
800 900 1000 1100 1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 2000
0.2
0.0
-0.2
-0.4
-0.6
Fig. 2. Temperature of China since A.D.800. (a) The eastern China, (b) the western China, (c) whole China. The means of the whole series are shown as the dotted lines.
11

0.5
0.0
-0.5
0.5
0.0
-0.5
0.5
0.0
-0.5
(a)
(b)
(c)
1400 1450 1500 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000
Fig. 3. Temperatures in China since 1380s
(a) Northern China, (b) Eastern China, (c) Whole China
1.0
0.5
0.0
-0.5
-1.0
1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980
Fig. 4. Annual mean temperature anomalies of China. Reference period is 1961-1990.
2000
12