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Variation in winter temperature is less well understood than in annual and summer temperatures over long timescales, particularly in low-latitude (0–30° N) montane regions with large spatial and topographic heterogeneity. Understanding these variations could be critical for forest manageemnt in these important tree growing regions. We collected tree-ring cores from Yunnan Province in montane southwest China, to determine how winter temperature has varied in the past and to explore its possible drivers in this region. Six highly correlated site chronologies were combined into a long and well-replicated regional composite (RC) chronology. The RC chronology correlated strongest with mean early winter season temperature (EWST) from November to January during 1959–2015. We applied RC chronology to reconstruct EWST from 1653 to 2015. The reconstruction shows five relatively warm historic intervals (1658–1718, 1743–1755, 1771–1791, 1929–1959, and 1995–2015) and cold intervals (1720–1742, 1792–1852, 1860–1883, 1905–1928, and 1960–1994). The 1950s with six anomalous warm seasons and 1980s with five anomalous cold seasons were the warmest and coldest decades, respectively. The EWST reconstruction generally agreed with other winter temperature reconstructions from nearby areas and with historical documents. Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) might be a key forcing of multidecadal winter temperature variations in montane southwest China over the past three and half centuries. Both warm and cold temperature periods coincide with respective positive and negative phases of AMO. Besides, the cold intervals during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may also have been influenced by large volcano eruptions in low-latitude regions of south and east Asia. Our EWST reconstruction not only improves our understanding of the trends and variations of winter climate history, but also supports planning for resilience in conservation, agriculture, and forestry management in montane southwest China into the future.