The palaeoclimate records from lakes at the arid central Asian region (ACA) climatically dominated by the Westerly circulation shows synchronous and coherent moisture changes during the Holocene. Therefore, the sediment records from lakes in ACA with reliable chronologies and robust proxies were selected to reconstruct moisture histories based on a five-class ordinal wetness index with assigned scores from the driest to wettest periods at individual sites for 200-year time slices. There are 8 lakes suitable for the synthesis. The results show that ACA as a whole experienced a dry early Holocene, a wetter (less dry) early to mid-Holocene, and a moderately wet late Holocene, which is different from Holocene monsoon history recently recovered by documents such as speleothem. We propose that the pattern of Holocene effective-moisture evolution in the westerly dominated ACA was mainly determined by North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) and high-latitude air temperatures that affect the availability, amount and transport of water vapor.