Sedimentary records are potential to provide long-term evidence for better understanding the development mechanism of coastal hypoxia, shedding some light on the forecast, prediction and controlling-measure development to mitigate hypoxia. Therefore, recent research advances in the formation mechanism and evolution history of coastal hypoxia were briefly reviewed, specially with focus on sedimentary records and proxy methods. First, marine environments with hypoxia were classified into semi-enclosed marginal sea/gulf and open shelf sea based on the degree of bottom-water circulation and ventilation, and main characteristics for the hypoxic development were discussed respectively. Secondly, the methodology was reviewed in the efficiency by using different proxies to reconstruct hypoxia development history from sediment cores, including redox indicators of sedimentology, biology, mineralogy and geochemistry. Ultimately, recent research advance in hypoxic development mechanism and evolution history off the Changjiang Estuary were summarized. It is worth noting that long-term evolution history has been less studied from long cores. It is therefore suggested that a synthetic methodology involving multi-core comparison with different-proxy interpretation should be employed to study the development history of seasonal hypoxia off the Changjiang Estuary.