Abstract: Effectively improving the residents' life quality in Xiang-Gan Border Area (HJBA) is not only the "direction standard" for promoting the revitalization and development of the old revolutionary base area, but also the "touchstone" for testing the common prosperity of all people. This study focused on the "red cradle" HJBA and aimed to establish a comprehensive framework to evaluate residents' life quality from the perspective of common prosperity. This study employed entropy weighting, kernel density estimation, and spatial variation function, to highlight the spatio-temporal characteristics of residents' life quality in the HJBA. Additionally, the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method was utilized to explore potential pathways for improving residents' life quality. The results showed that: (1) In temporal evolution, life quality in the HJBA from 0.270 3 in 2010 to 0.586 0 in 2020, and the absolute difference in the growth of life quality gradually narrowed in the later period of the study. (2) In the spatial pattern, the life quality in the HJBA exhibited "strong in the west and north, weak in the east and south". The life quality in the sub-areas of Hunan was slightly higher than the sub-areas of Jiangxi, and the high-value areas such as Liuyang, Liling, Pingjiang, Yuanzhou and Anyuan showed a "cluster shape", the non-equilibrium structure within the region was relatively stable. (3) fsQCA configuration analysis showed that there were four path models for the growth of life quality in the HJBA: Economic driven improvement, government-led improvement, urbanization-transportation dual-core driven improvement, economy-resources-government collaborative improvement. The two dependent variables of economic development level and urbanization level were identified as the necessary conditions.