Abstract: A new type steel-lead viscoelastic damper is developed, and its principle, configuration, characteristics are illustrated. The new type steel-lead viscoelastic damper model is tested under slow reversed cyclic horizontal loads. The non-linear hysteretic behavior of the SLVD is modeled to adopt the Bouc-Wen model and bilinear model. The results show that: 1) hysteretic curve of the steel-lead viscoelastic damper is slippery, and has good seismic energy dissipation capabilities; 2) the lead core, steel core and viscoelsatic material plays an important part in energy dissipation of shear deformation, which can obviously increase the horizontal shear force, initial-stiffness and energy dissipation ability of the SLVD; 3) the SLVD has no tear and creak phenomenon of the viscoelastic material in a large displacement case, and can recovery the initial position. It has good self-recovery function and large deformantion performance; 4) the simulating hysteretic curves with Bouc-Wen model and bilinear model are identical to the test results, it is feasible to adopt the Bouc-Wen model and bilinear model to simulate the damper element in the analysis of a structure with the SLVD.