As an important symbol of civilization and culture, architectures originally were built for sheltering human beings from weather disasters and therefore should be affected by climate change, particularly the associated change in the occurrence of extreme weather events. However, although meteorology has been considered as a factor in modern architecture design, it remains unclear whether and how the ancients adapted to climate change from the perspective of architecture design, particularly on a millennium time scale. Here we show that the periodic change and trend of the roof slope of ancient architectures in northern China clearly demonstrate the climate change adaptation over the past thousand years. We show that the snowfall fluctuation caused by the paleo-climate change was an essential driving factor within the roof modification process of ancient Chinese timber architecture. Our study indicates that climate change may act as a much more important factor on human behaviour than we ever thought.