Paleotempestology is an emerging field of science that, mainly through the use of geological and documentary proxy techniques, studies past tropical cyclone activity beyond the period of instrumental observations, typically spanning the last several centuries to five millennia. In the past more than 10 years, significant progresses have been achieved in research scope, theory and methods. Paleotempestology has become an important component of Quaternary Palaeoclimatology. The proxies for paleotempestology studies include historical documentary records, typical storm-generated sedimentary structures, marine fossil assemblages, isotopic geochemical composition. Single proxy technique for storm-genesis interpretation has some limitation. A promising research direction in paleotempestology involves the development of new proxies and multi-proxy techniques in detecting the geophysical and ecological impacts of past typhoons. Instead of highlighting typhoon landfall frequency, in future, we should take advantage of recent advances in storm surge theoretic studies, integrating storm surge modeling with proxy studies to help validate the intensity estimates. Meanwhile, enhancing global correlation studies of tropical cyclones activity is another promising field to improve our understanding the linkage between tropical cyclones activity and global climate change, providing evidence for constructing typhoon activity scenarios under global warming.