This paper proposes a skew detection method for real Chinese handwritten documents. After analyzing the characteristics of Chinese characters, it utilizes the horizontal stroke histogram. Its accuracy, ability to increase the recall rate of text line separation, and CPU time consuming are investigated using 853 real Chinese handwritten documents. The results show that: 1) the method can identify 98.83% of the skew angles within one degree, with an improvement of 8.44% than Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD) method; 2) when incorporated into text line separation, the recall rate has an improvement of 2.54% than WVD method; 3) the method only consumes one-twentieth of WVD method on the same test environment.