Methane is an important greenhouse gas, which accounts for about 20 % of the warming induced by long-lived greenhouse gases since 1750. Anthropogenic methane emissions from China may have been growing rapidly in the past decades because of increased coal mining and fast growing livestock. A good long-term methane emissions dataset is still lacking. Here, we produced a detailed bottom-up inventory of anthropogenic methane emissions from the eight major source sectors in China during 1980–2010.