Extreme and high frequency weather events caused by the global warming, have brought huge influences to human activities as well as ecological environment. Within this context, analyzing extreme temperature event that is one of the extreme weather events is of paramount importance for human activities. The Pearl River Basin, one of the richest basins in China, locates in the subtropical monsoon region where the climate characteristics are quite complicated. Meanwhile, as global climate changes, the extreme temperature event in the basin should bring some new change which, however, is still unknown. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the temporal and spatial variation characteristics of the extreme temperature event in the Pearl River Basin. In this paper, 16 indexes related to extreme temperature were selected. The data about these indexes at 43 weather stations (1960-2012) have been collected and processed to guarantee the rationality of the results. Linear regression, Mann-Kendall as well as wavelet analysis were used to analyze the temporal variation characteristics of the extreme temperature. Kriging, one of the spatial interpolation technologies, was also used to analyze the spatial variation characteristics. The results show that: 1) for the temporal trend, the indexes of ID0, TXn, TX10p and GSL showed non- significant trend whereas the others showed significant increasing or decreasing trend (P<0.05). 2) Spatially, the indexes of TN10p, CSDI, DTR and TX10p showed an overall downward trend whereas the others showed an overall upward trend in the basin, with non- significant spatial variations. 3) The mutation analysis disclosed that except the indexes of ID0, TX10p and GSL, the other indexes all passed significance inspection and most of the abrupt change points happened in 1980s but that of TR20 and SU25 occurred in 1994 and 2001 respectively. 4) The wavelet analysis discovered that there existed multiple periodic oscillations for the values of most indexes and the primary periods were 2-4 years. SCSMI and ENSO are the main factors caused the extreme temperature event in the study area. This study has the potential to provide valuable references for agricultural protection, water resources management, drought disaster control, and other crucial applications in the Pearl River Basin.