The theoretical system and exemplary practice of ecological civilization in China lay the foundation for the comprehensive promotion of ecological civilization across China. In practice, the specific road map and proper policies should be laid on the spatiotemporal characteristics and potential of each province in constructing ecological civilization. This paper constructs a five-dimension evaluating ecological civilization index system of social, economic, political, cultural and ecological aspect and uses provincial panel data from 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2019 to characterize the spatial and temporal changes of ecological civilization for 31 provinces (excluding Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan) in four stages of before, initial, in progress, and current periods. The concepts of speed and acceleration are proposed to describe the capabilities variation of the provinces in constructing ecological civilization. The years for achieving the expected targets are calculated to represent the future potential of ecological civilization of each province by assuming the historical development speed. The relationship between the ecological civilization and economic development of each province is slightly discussed by simply regression. The research results show that:(1) in general, each province has made predominant progress in ecological civilization. Nevertheless, there is a significant variability of the achievement for different provinces from time-series change. In the progress of construction, although all provinces made progress rapidly in the first stage and slowly in the later stages, the extent of improvement was different for different provinces, which underpinned widen gaps among different provinces. Spatially, it is obvious that for the ecological level reviewed by the ecological index, the eastern region is better than the western region, and the southern region is better than the northern region. By analyzing the ecological civilization grades of the six regions to which 31 provinces belong, we found that the eastern region and the central and southern regions were ahead of other regions and have made the most outstanding progress at each stage, while the northeastern region and the northwestern region were lagging behind and making slow progress. Considering the relationship of ecological civilization construction and economic development, the regression analysis has revealed positive correlations for all provinces, while there existed considerable differences in the degree of correlation. At the same time the differences have been extended along with the periods of four stages. (2) Each province has showed great capacity of constructing ecological civilization with their different speed and acceleration. But the slowdown effect of the speed and acceleration ability along the four stages reflects that the enhancement of civilization of each province is getting smaller and smaller, with the sharply declining of enhancement capacity happened for a few provinces. (3) About 70% of provinces have not reached the assumed goals of ecological civilization, Tibet, Ningxia, Xinjiang, and Jilin were the lagged ones. This paper provides a framework on studying regional differentiation of ecological civilization for the Chinese provinces, and the empirical results provide scientific knowledge for practicing ecological civilization in different regions and the implications for classifying and grading strategies for different provinces and regions in China. The base, progressing capability and potentials of these provinces provide insights and implications for road maps and policies on ecological civilization construction. Furthermore, renewing goals of civilization construction timely is found urgent for provinces. From the perspective of research, the ecological civilization index system, the driving mechanism of regional differentiation, such as material and energy metabolism in each region are among the elements that need attention in the future.