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This is a well-structured and substantial manuscript. Through a highly comprehensive framework, the author compared six drought cases across Germany and China's Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, spanning agricultural, industrial, and modern eras. The integration of multi-source data and establishment of a unified analytical framework are two key achievements of this work. They made the comparative analysis reasonable and conclusions credible. The revelation of unchanging nature of drought holds significant value for understanding and better addressing drought challenges.

Some suggestion:

(1) What is the orange boundary in Figure 1(b)? It seems not right if it represents the boundary of the North China Plain.  

(2) Section 3.3 - I noticed that in the impact categories, water deficit or deterioration involved multiple categories. How to identify them in different materials？

Although detailed theoretical classifications are provided, it might be also important to clarify how these categories were recorded, described, or quantified across historical, early modern, and modern source materials. 

(3) Section 3.4 - I totally understand that defining the start and end of meteorological-level precipitation deficits is relatively straightforward and. However, as I know, historical textual records often reflect lagged effects of drought impacts. How do the authors view the omission of such lagged information, and to what extent might this affect the conclusions? A brief clarification would be helpful. 

(4) Figure 6- What are the specific criteria for identifying "heat-related manifestations"  

I found that the results and discussion emphasize the focus on concurrent high temperatures during droughts (as reflected in the conclusive title of Section 4.3 and the analytical discussion in Section 5.3). I think that why authors caring about high temperature would be better explained in the main text rather than being confined to table notes (Table 1).  

 

(5) The current title seems to emphasize regional differences. I think it may be more clear to explicitly highlight the study's scope and conclusions in the title.  For example: Cross-era Case Comparison Between Germany and Jing-Jin-Ji Region (China) reveals Invariance and Changes in Drought Impacts and social Responses.