The moderate spatial resolution and high temporal resolution of the MODIS imagery make it an ideal resource for the time series surface water monitoring and mapping. We used MODIS MOD09Q1 surface reflectance archive images to create Inland Surface Water Dataset in China (ISWDC), which maps the water body larger than 0.0625 km<sup>2</sup> in the terrestrial land of China for the period 2000–2016, in 8-day temporal and 250 m spatial resolution. We assessed the accuracy of the ISWDC by comparing with the national land cover derived surface water data and the Global Surface Water (GSW) data. The results show that the ISWDC is closely correlated with the national reference data with the determinant coefficients (R<sup>2</sup>) greater than 0.99 in 2000, 2005, and 2010, while the ISWDC has similar spatial patterns in different regions with the GSW data set in 2015 too. The ISWDC data set can be used for studies on the inter-annual and seasonal variation of the surface water systems. It can also be used as reference data for other surface water data set verification and as input parameter for regional and global hydro-climatic models. The ISWDC data are available at http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1463694.