Under the global crisis of energy shortage and environmental pollution, the climate responsive strategies used in vernacular buildings have attracted much attention for their po-tential to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions. However, the relationships be-tween these traditional climatic strategies were not precisely perceived, which may cause the inapplicability of these strategies for contemporary rural houses. In this paper, taking the Turpan vernacular buildings in arid region of China, the climate responsive strategies of buildings in the most significant periods such as the Gaochang period (before 1318), the Khanate and Republican period (1318-1949 ), the Modern period (1949-2010 ), and the Contemporary period (2011-present) were summarized. In addition, two different types of cli-matic strategies organizations, namely multilayer spaces and integrated building envelopes, were identified based on the temperature difference measurement and comparative analysis. The assessment of thermal performance of the organizations was conducted by the methodol-ogy of software simulation. Furthermore, the applicability of the organizations in rural areas was discussed, and a new combined organization was proposed. Consequently, this study can contribute to provide the main approaches for climatically responsive rural houses.(c) 2023 Higher Education Press Limited Company. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).