Abstract. Methane (CH4) has a 28-fold greater global warming potential than CO2 over one hundred years. Atmospheric CH4 concentration has tripled since 1750. Anthropogenic CH4 emissions from China has been growing rapidly in the past decades, and contributes more than 10 % of global anthropogenic CH4 emissions with large uncertainties in existing global inventories, generally limited to country-scale statistics. To date, a long-term CH4 emissions inventory including the major sources sectors and based on province-level emission factors is still lacking. In this study, we produced a detailed bottom-up inventory of anthropogenic CH4 emissions from the eight major source sectors in China for the period 1980–2010. In the past three decades, the total CH4 emissions increased from 22.2 [16.6–28.2] Tg CH4 yr−1 (mean [minimum-maximum of 95 % confidence interval]) to 45.0 [36.4–58.3] Tg CH4 yr−1, and most of this increase took place in the 2000s. This fast increase of the total CH4 emissions after 2000 is mainly driven by CH4 emissions from coal exploitation. The largest contribution to total CH4 emissions also shifted from rice cultivation in 1980 to coal exploitation in 2010. The total emissions inferred in this work compare well with the EPA inventory but appear to be 38 % lower than EDGAR4.2 inventory. The uncertainty of our inventory is investigated using emissions factors collected from published literatures. We also distributed province-scale emissions into 0.5º × 0.5º maps using social-economic activity data. This new inventory could help understanding CH4 budgets at regional scale and guiding CH4 mitigation policies in China.