Dear authors,
many thanks for your responses to individual referee comments. From both reviews and your responses to reviewers it follows that the paper has a good potential to be accepted for publication in Climate of the Past. But improvement of your paper in the direction shown by referee critical comments is necessary. After obtaining of your revised paper and new evaluation of it you will be informed about next steps. I wish you much success in the preparation of the revised version of your paper.
With best regards,
Rudolf Brazdil

Dear authors,
your revised manuscript was again reviewed and now is recommended for minor revisions based on comments specified below. I hope you have a good potential to revise your paper in requested directions. I would particularly to stress importance to prepare your revised manuscript in agreement with instructions for authors given in Climate of the Past. Moreover, all changes and additions in your manuscript has to be clearly identified in different colour or in standard Word corrections and replayed individually to each of comments. I believe that you will fully use your very good potential to prepare your revised paper to be finally accepted for publication in the drought special issue of Climate of the Past.
With best regards and expecting of your revised paper,
Rudolf Brazdil

Comments:
1) Please read carefully and follow instruction of Climate of the Past for the formal preparation of your manuscript – many points and parts of your manuscript does not follow them. The manuscript has to be carefully formally revised.
2) Since authors claim that the meteorological drought, agricultural drought, hydrological drought and socioeconomic drought are the key innovative findings, I did not see the series of each category in the manuscript. The authors should list them and compare them with your adopted indicators to dig out the linkage in between. How four kinds of drought fluctuated in historical China? How four kinds of drought are connected with other disasters as mentioned? 3) It is suggested to the authors to share the data series as an attachment for free download. The attachment should be a computer-readable file. It will also increase the paper publicity.
4) In Introduction you mention potential of reconstruction of drought indices (PDSI) from tree-ring data (Old World Drought Atlas). It would be correct to say somewhere, that similar high-quality quantitative drought-indices series (SPI, SPEI, Z index, PDSI) can be reconstructed from documentary data as shown, for example for the Czech Lands (Brázdil et al. 2016, Možný et al. 2016) with monthly, seasonal, half-year or annual resolution. Moreover, some other special drought indices series were developed in Europe like Drought Rogation Index in Spain (Barriendos 1997) or Drought Index in Italy (Diodato and Belocchi 2011).
Brázdil et al. 2016 https://doi.org/10.3354/cr01380
Možný et al. 2016 https://doi.org/10.3354/cr01423
Barriendos 1997 https://doi.org/10.1177/ 095968369700700110
Diodato and Belocchi 2011 https://doi.org/10.3354/cr01020
5) Lines 118-171: Please include Section 2 as logic continuation of Introduction – you characterised situation with drought generally and now you are giving the Chinese results. Then Section 2 Data should follow etc.
Lines 128-143: I recommend you to include this description of Grades 1-5 into simple table.
6) Section 6: Please try to separate this section to two separate sections Discussion and Conclusions. Conclusions in a few several point should shortly summarise your main results, which should be clearly communicated in the context of existing Chinese papers (what is new) and also as a contribution to drought studies in historical climatology in the international scale (e.g. with respect to the context of Brázdil et al. 2018 paper and recommended future research directions mentioned there).
7) Please add also other requested points into manuscript (Data availability, Author contributions etc.) – see instructions for authors.
8) Authors in quotations in the text should be listed according to the year of publication, not according to their alphabet
9) Please check your References if everything is quoted in the requested style – there are several quoted differently.
10) Examples of needed formal corrections:
Lines 75, 89 etc. - please use instead of documented “documentary”
Line 144: Why not only “REACHES database”
Figure 1: if you have in caption 1a and 1b, please put (a) and (b) directly into figures and delete “upper panel” and “lower panel” from figure caption.
Figs. 2, 3 and further: Please use in description of y-axes “Number of …” not only N
Line 385: please add to http when it was accessed
Line 411: famers or farmers?
Line 454: 2019p?
Line 460: Frank et al. (2010).
Lines 563-564 and further figures: is it correct … drought 7(a) and … 7(b) … 7(c)?

Dear authors,
I would like to congratulate you for final acceptation of your paper for the drought special issue of the Climate of the Past journal. Many thank that you contributed with this valuable paper which significanly complements papers published or submitted into the special issue up to now.
With many thanks and best regards,
Rudolf Brazdil as handling editor