A novel chromatic dispersion (CD) monitoring technique based on asynchronous amplitude histogram (AAH) for higher order modulation formats is proposed in this paper. Without demodulating the signal, in the monitoring scheme, the received signal is sampled asynchronously, and thus clock information and high-speed sampling units are unnecessary, resulting in low cost and high reliability. Simulations of CD monitoring technique for non-return-to-zero/]return- to-zero (NRZ/RZ) 16- and 64-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) systems with different optical signal-tonoise ratios (OSNRs) and duty cycles are investigated, and the tolerance of the scheme is also discussed. Simulation results show that the presented CD monitoring technique with high sensitivity can be applied to monitor the residual CD of a transmission link in the next-generation optical networks.