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Fire provides an important indicator of paleoclimatic change. However, little information relating to late Cenozoic fire history has been gathered in mid-latitude Asia (including Inner Asia and East Asia), a key region for understanding the development of the arid-monsoon climate system as well as the driving forces behind it. Here we first report the records of microcharcoal concentrations (MC) covering the Holocene (10-0 Ica) and late Pleistocene (0.8-0 Ma), which we use to analyze the fire activity patterns at an orbital time scale; then we compile the late Cenozoic MC record to investigate the long-term fire history by analyzing four cores from the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) area, East Asia (representing 8-0 Ma) and three sites in Inner Asia (representing 18-2 Ma). The results show that the (i) MC remained higher during the relatively dry late Holocene/glacial stages than that during the humid middle Holocene/interglacial stages at individual sites; (ii) MC increased with time in both Inner Asia and East Asia after 18 and 8 Ma, respectively; and (iii) MC always remained higher in the dry Inner Asia than in the contemporaneous wet East Asia. All these characteristics imply that late Cenozoic fire occurrence in mid-latitude Asia experienced a gradual increasing trend along with the global temperature/ice volume change, and indicates a continuous aridification trend across mid-latitude Asia. The global cooling, rather than the Tibetan Plateau uplift, might have played a key role in this observed trend. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.