Abstract: For its special geographical location and environment, the arid area of northwest China is one of the regions that most dendroclimatic studies are conducted and a lot of the tree ring related researches are published in this area. Tree growth in this area is sensitive to climate change and there are many old living trees and archaeological wood were preserved, which can provide the reliable proxy data for studying past climate and environment variation. In this paper, we discussed the spatial distribution of these dendroclimatic studies and the progress of building long tree ring chronologies and the characteristic of the tree ring recorded temperature and moisture variability in the northwest China based on the published dendroclimatic studies in this area.Our results indicate that most of the dendroclimatic studies were conducted using tree ring-width data. Tree-ring records from the northeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and Tienshan Mountains in Xinjiang are moisture sensitive, while the tree ring chronologies from Altay Mountainsin,Xinjiang are temperature sensitive. There are some differences and similarities between the tree-ring records from the northeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and Xinjiang. The most obvious characteristic is that the patterns in tree-ring chronologies from the northeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau are very consistent.