Abstract: The palace-style wooden building in Chinese Tang dynasty has important historical, cultural and scientific values because of its long history, rare quantity and special construction. The wooden frame is composed of three horizontal structural layers, which are beam-column layer, Dou-gong layer and roof truss layer, from bottom to top connected with each other by mortise and tenon joints. A refined full-scale solid finite element model for a palace-style wooden frame in Tang dynasty is established to analyze the lateral resistance mechanism of this kind of structure. The deformation characteristics, failure modes, hysteretic curve, lateral stiffness and energy dissipation of the frame are studied through quasi static simulations. The results show that the main deformation of the frame is column rocking of the structure with cyclic uplifting of column foot joints. The Dou-Gong layer behaves as a rigid body without obvious shear deformation. The main failure modes are the collapse of Lu-dou joints and the buckling of column foot edges. The S-shaped hysteretic curve of the structure is anti-symmetric with a pinch effect. The skeleton curve has large initial lateral stiffness but with a significant degradation after yielding. The whole structure has good aseismic performances contributed from the plastic deformation of column foot and Lu-dou joints, the frictional slip between components, as well as the column rocking of the structure.