“…Sporadic precipitation proxies from several different natural archives in local sites and several short‐term time‐slices also showed inconsistent patterns (Shao et al , ; Chu et al , ). Simulation results from the ECHAM4 ‐ HOPE‐G (ECHO‐G) coupled ocean–atmosphere model indicated that more precipitation occurred in the warm periods and less precipitation in the cold periods; the phases (cold spells and warm peaks) of the variations in precipitation lagged behind those of temperature (Wang et al , ). However, there are still large uncertainties in the main spatial patterns of precipitation associated with decadal–centennial cold/warm periods over China and there is inconsistent knowledge of large‐scale dry and wet spatial patterns for the typical warm and cold periods.…”