To have a better understand of China’s historical land cover datasets and provide reference for future reconstruction study, 30 papers on reconstructions of China’s historical land cover change were summarized based on the source of data, the extraction and calibration of data, the time period, the time resolution, the spatial scale,the spatial resolution, and the reconstructed land cover types. All datasets of the studies included have clear spatial resolution and are able to serve global change study. The main conclusions are as follows: Historical documents are the main sources of historical land cover change reconstruction and the methods of data’s extraction and calibration are different according to their data sources; the longest time period of foreign resultsis from 10000BC to 2000AD, while most of the domestic datasets cover the past 300 years, the main time resolution is decades or centuries; there are three types of study areas, including the whole China, the Eastern China and one or several provinces or a region with complete geographic pattern; the existing studies still focus on historical cropland cover change. It is important to make full use of different data sources, to enhance the study in areas with no historical land cover change data approaching the international requirement, to improve the gridding method and to integrate the existing data.