Over the past two decades, as the programs of DSDP and ODP revealed increasingly a great quantity of information from the deep ocean, the Tertiary chronostratigraphy has been one of the frontiers that advances most rapidly in contemporary geosciences. The progress was initially stimulated by the availability of well-preserved and undisturbed deep-sea cores, and then continuously nourished by new information from the projects. Based upon the improvements of plankton biostratigraphic datum events, rediochronology and correlations with magnetic polarity anomalies, the Tertiary stratigraphy has been brought to the brink of a breakthrough that is approaching the limits of stratigraphic resolution. A synthesis on these progress, as well as the global Tertiary stratotype stratigraphy, is presented in this paper.