Abstract: An hourly precipitation database has been developed by collecting and assembling various historical data from national meteorological stations in China. Quality assessment indicates that the vast majority of stations have a data availability rate of 90% or higher, while stations in China's eastern coastal areas and Guizhou, Hunan and other provinces have a low rate of data. The rate of data correctness at all stations is generally high; those with correctness rate lower than 98% accounts for 0.7%, and those with correctness rate of 99% to 98% accounts for 1.8%. The remaining 97.5% of the stations have correctness rate higher than 99%. Comparing the daily precipitations calculated from hourly values and that manually measured, there are 92.1% of stations with difference less than 1 mm, 16.37% of stations with the difference of 0.5 – 5mm, and only 0.9% of stations with the difference greater than 5 mm.