China's aquatic vegetables mainly include 12 categories, such as lotus, water bamboo, taro, water chestnut, arrowhead, water spinach, water caltrop, gorgon eurgale, water celery, water shield, common cattail and watercress. They have a long cultivation history in China and are characteristic aquatic economic crops. The national aquatic vegetable germplasm resources repository (Wuhan) has long been engaged in the collection, conservation, evaluation and utilization of aquatic vegetable germplasm resources and has become the richest resource repository in terms of the types, resource quantity, ecological types and forms of aquatic vegetables in the world. As of December 2024, the germplasm repository has collected and conserved over 3,449 accessions of aquatic vegetable germplasm resources from both domestic and international sources, establishing a comprehensive conservation system. A total of 140 elite germplasm resources have been identified. These efforts have significantly propelled fundamental research on the genome annotation, genetic diversity, and molecular markers of important traits in aquatic vegetables. They have also effectively promoted the breeding of new varieties, optimization of variety structure, and sustainable development of the aquatic vegetable industry. This paper summarizes and reviews the current situation of the collection and conservation of germplasm resources in the aquatic vegetable resource repository in the past 2 decades, as well as the progress made in the innovative utilization of aquatic vegetable germplasm resources, and looks forward to the research directions regarding the collection, conservation, identification, evaluation, and sharing mechanisms of germplasm resources, in order to provide references for the conservation, the effective utilization and industrial development of China's aquatic vegetable germplasm resources in the future.