This paper explores two Mandarin-speaking children's (3;2 and 3;3) ability to refer to the past in mother–child conversation. The approach encompasses morphosyntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic perspectives. The results show that the children tend to refer to immediate past spontaneously, but rely heavily on elicitation when referring to earlier past. It is suggested that maternal scaffolding functions as a discourse support for children to participate in conversation involving earlier past. When establishing past reference with overt temporal markers, the children resort mainly to aspect markers. In addition, they also rely on semantic and discourse-pragmatic resources for temporal inferencing, such as inherent semantic aspect, shared background knowledge and situational context.