Developing cost-effective approaches for fabricating porous carbon (PC) based catalysts with favourable oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) performance is highly significant for fuel-cell devices. Herein, we reported a precursor controlled, molten salt-templated approach to prepare ultrafine CoO nanoparticles embedded nitrogen-doped PC materials with high surface area (1236 m(2) g(-1)) and large pore volume (0.68 cm(3) g(-1)). This method is simple and feasible, which produce CoO nanoparticles that were uniformly distributed on carbon skeleton with diameters in the range of 5-10 nm. The unexpected collapse of porous structures and agglomeration of metal nanoparticles were suppressed in the synthetic process. The as-made sample not only showed efficient catalytic activity towards ORR in alkaline media with a half wave potential (E-1/2) of 0.85 V (vs. RHE), but also exhibited better stability and stronger resistance to methanol than Pt/C. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.