Climate has great impacts on organism development and distribution. It is one of the most important abiotic factors that affect biodiversity. In this paper, we utilized flower species Cornus kousa subsp. chinensis as the research object, which was widely distributed in China, to investigate its distribution through the field survey and herbarium search, and used MaxEnt model and Arcgis to simulate its historical, current and future distribution trends and to analyze its distribution pattern in each historical period and explore the cause of species distribution changes. Research results showed that C. kousa subsp. chinensis distribution was strongly affected by Min temperature of the coldest month and Mean temperature of the coldest quarter. According to the distribution pattern of C. kousa subsp. chinensis in the Last Glacial Maximum, and Chinese geographical and geological features, we proposed that: central/western mountainous region and East mountainous region of China were the core area of the potential distribution for C. kousa subsp. chinensis, since these regions could provide more suitable habitats for C. kousa subsp. chinensis than other regions and be the refugia where the current C. kousa subsp. chinensis was expanded from.