Exploring the reasons for internal climate variability at the multidecadal (50-70 years) scale is one of the fundamental issues in climate research (Chang et al., 2014;Jüling et al., 2020). It is very important for both understanding the 20th-century climate change and narrowing the uncertainty of future climate projections (Johnson et al., 2020;Kushnir et al., 2019). Many studies have investigated the multidecadal variability in Northern Hemisphere temperature during the instrumental period (e.g., Delworth & Mann, 2000;Steinman et al., 2015). From a regional perspective, researchers have mainly focused on the sea surface temperature (SST) multidecadal variability over the Atlantic and Pacific due to both the availability of long-length SST data and the importance of SST variability in climate variations almost globally (Deser et al., 2010;Newman et al., 2016;Zhang et al., 2019). However, multidecadal climate variability over land regions is still poorly understood due to the shortage of reliable data back to the 19th century.East Asia, containing approximately one-fifth of the world's population, is very sensitive and susceptible to climate change (Ding et al., 2015). Though the greenhouse gas concentrations are increasing, the East Asian winter temperature has shown a cooling trend since 2000 (Miao & Wang, 2020;Wang & Chen, 2014a). The internal climate variability at the decadal-multidecadal scales could play a vital role in this trend and has received much attention. Until now, the East Asian winter climate variability at the decadal (∼10 years) or interdecadal (15-35 years) scale has been explored mainly based on post-1950s datasets (e.g., Ding et al., 2014;Miao et al., 2018). However, the characteristics and mechanisms of East Asian winter climate variability for longer timescales are still poorly understood. Although the surface air temperature (SAT) series for China reaching back to the 19th century were constructed using instrumental observations and proxy records, differences