The structural design and seismic performance of Chinese traditional multi-story pavilion-style timber pagoda persistently attract researchers' attention. In this paper, a modeling method of pavilion-style timber pagoda was proposed and verified by using the shaking tablet test results of a scaled seven-story Tang-style timber pagoda. Based on it, the influence of structural swing component and lateral shear component on the seismic performance of traditional multi-story timber pagoda was investigated.The results show that increasing the lateral shear component could improve the structural stiffness and decrease the displacement response under different earthquake intensities, and obtain larger acceleration amplification coefficients and inter-story shear force of the structure simultaneously;The increase of the rocking component will lead to higher nonlinear response under high intensity earthquake.With the increase of the excitation intensity, the inter-story drifts and shear forces of lower floors increase and the acceleration amplification coefficients of upper floors increases first and then decreases.