It has been 100 years since the study of plant geography began in China, and the discipline is now thriving. Particularly as the sequencing and bioinformatics techniques developed in the last three decades, great achievements have been obtained with the interdisciplinary integration of taxonomy, evolution and ecology. These advances can be concluded into three aspects. (1) Plant taxa and flora, on the whole, show regular patterns along latitude, longitude, and altitude in China; the hotspots of species richness, phylogenetic diversity, and endemism are recognized mainly in mountainous areas in southern China, and some in mountainous or arid areas in northern China. (2) As for the large scale pattern and underlying mechanism of plant diversity, the species richness patterns of most tropical families are predicted by winter coldness, while those of the majority of temperate families are predicted by Quaternary climate change; mountain plants and communities are of significant vertical zonality and spatial heterogeneity, and the maximum temperature of the warmest month is the most important climatic factor that affects geographical deviation of alpine flora composition in China. (3) The majority of extant Chinese angiosperm genera (c. 66%) were diverged during or after the Miocene; the 500 mm isoline of annual precipitation in China is the most important boundary line for floral age and vegetation regionalization; the origin and diversification of flora and characteristic or key taxa in China are closely related with the uplift of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) and the intensification of Asian monsoons. In the future, integration of space and time is still a hot topic of plant geographic studies, and more attention will be focused on the estimates of divergence time of taxa, communities, and flora and the resolution of distribution data. The rapid growth and improvement of botanical data can provide powerful support for research on plant geography in the future.