Indoor triaxial tests and direct shear tests are adopted to study the mechanical characteristic of coarse and fine particle layered structure of tailings, including two and three layer structures, and the influence of the change of lay thickness is taken into account. Triaxial tests results show that hierarchical structure’s cohesions, generally, are lower than those of fine and coarse particle tailings, and internal friction angles are between the fine and coarse particle tailings’. For the two layer structure, the specimen’s cohesion reduces and internal friction angle increases with the increase of coarse particle tailings’ layer thickness. For the three layer structure, when the coarse particle tailing is the interlayer, the specimen’s cohesion reduces with the increase of interlayer thickness; while when the fine tailing is the interlayer, the specimen’s internal friction angle decreases with the increase of interlayer thickness. Direct shear tests results show that hierarchical structure’s cohesions and internal friction angles are all lower than those of coarse and fine particle tailings.