Potaninia mongolica Maxim. is a relict and endangered desert plant in arid and semi-arid areas of Northwest China, which plays an important ecological role. Predicting the potential geographical distribution areas and migration routes of Potaninia in China under climate change scenarios in the past, contemporary and future will provide a certain scientific basis for the protection and utilization of Potaninia and the reasonable establishment of populations. This study was based on 73 effective distribution sites and 8 environmental factor variables of P. mongolica in China, The MaxEnt model and ArcGIS software were used to simulate the potential distribution of P. mongolica in the Last Interglacial, the Last Glacial Maximum, the current and the future. Comprehensive analysis of the main environmental factors affecting the distribution of P. mongolica and its suitablerange, and the response curve was used to determine the suitable range of environmental factor variables. The accuracy of model was tested and evaluated by area under the curve (AUC) of the test subject working characteristic (ROC).The results showed that (1) the prediction accuracy of the Maxent model is extremely high, area under the curve (AUC) of the test subject working characteristic (ROC) is 0.988. The prediction shows that current P. mongolica is mainly located in the central and western regions of Inner Mongolia (Alashan Region), northeastern and northwestern Ningxia, Central and eastern Gansu, a small number of narrow and long distributions in Central and western Xinjiang. The total suitable area of the potentially geographical distribution of P. mongolica is about 51.94×10⁴ km². (2) The main environmental factor variables affecting the potential geographical distribution of P. mongolica are precipitation (the driest monthly precipitation、annual average precipitation、the wettest monthly precipitation and coldest quarter average precipitation) and temperature (hottest monthly highest temperature). (3) From the Last Interglacial to the Last Glacial Maximum, the suitable area of potentially geographical distribution of P. mongolica was greatly reduced; From the Last Glacial Maximum to the current,the suitable area of potentially geographical distribution of P. mongolica was increased, but did not recovered;Under the four future climate scenarios, the suitable area of potentially geographical distribution of P.mongolica increase under the condition of RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 in 2050 and RCP4.5 in 2070, which was reduced slightly under the condition of RCP8.5 in 2070. But the most and moderately suitable areas decreased, while the lowly suitable areas increased significantly. Furthermore, the distribution center of P. mongolica tended to migrate to the southwest.