A key societal aspect is to recognize the factors controlling the spatial variability and the distribution patterns of rainfall in a season, and its long as well as short term variability due to natural factors. We archive the climate variations from instrumental as well as land and marine archives for the entire SE Asia which are crucial for its agrarian economy. We decipher decadal to millennium scale changes in climate variability, important among these are LIA and medieval warming. Recent instrument records show persistent warming in the last decades of twenty century, which is endorsed also in tree ring data. Glacial archives are not very frequently used for annual variability, comparable with available instrumental records Our results show rapid climate instabilities during upper and recent Holocene in response to solar forcing. Importance: this is first ever comprehensive record of climate variability from all the countries of SE Asia, encompassing instrument and multi proxy interpretation of climate variability