Abstract: This paper presents an overview on current thinking about sources, ages, and thermal histories of Chinese non-marine crude oils. Terrestrial source rocks, deposited under non-marine conditions in continental environments, have been divided into four major groups: Group A, sedimentary formations of big lake basins in the interior of the Chinese plate; Group B, lacustrine clastic formations in fault-bounded basins; Group C; salt lake evaporite- clastic formations in fault- bounded basins; and Gruop D, lagoonal- lacustrine volcano-clastic formations of intermontane basins. A number of representative crude oil samples were collected from the following four type of source rocks:(1) Lacustrine fresh-brackish water mudstones;(2) Saline to hypersaline mudstones;(3) Lacustrine dolomitic mudstones;(4) Lagoonal tufferous mudstones. The samples were analysed by GC and GC-MS to reveal the characteristic distributions of biological markers in their aliphatic fractions. The distribution of n-alkanes, isoprenoids, steranes and hopanoids as well as other biological marker compounds are discussed briefly. In terms of biological marker parameters of their aliphatic fractions, some immature to marginal mature oil samples sourced from hypersaline and saline mudstones are described. Immature or marginal mature crude oils occurred in shallow depth in Jianghan basin contain high amount of sulphur and organic sulphur compounds, especially abundant thiophene and thiolane homologues with remarkable even carbon number predominace.