Combustion is and will continue to be the dominant energy technology for the foreseeable future. Climate change and depleting reserves of fossil fuels demand high-efficiency, low-carbon and low-emission combustion technologies using both conventional and unconventional fuels. These challenges will be met through accelerated research and innovation based on advanced experimental, modelling and computational methods. Combustion modelling plays an important role in diagnosis and prediction of complex combustion phenomena, leading to reduced costs and time of development cycles of combustion systems. Combustion modelling consists of physical, chemical and computational models. The talk will examine the state of the art in combustion modelling such as flamelets, PDF and CMC. The models for premixed, non-premixed and partially premixed combustion will be reviewed from a unified framework. The emphasis will be on large eddy simulation (LES) and the associated subgrid-scale (SGS) models for predicting dynamic phenomena such as ignition and quench. Examples of LES for gas combustion and multiphase combustion will be shown. It will be demonstrated that despite decades’ research efforts, combustion modelling is still an art as well as a science. The push towards “green combustion” demands better predictive tools for combustion using conventional and non-conventional fuels. For the most complex combustion systems, a multi-scale multi-physics approach may be needed. The talk will finish with speculation for the future and especially China’s role in combustion science and technology.