<p>The palace-style wooden structure with infilled construction is common in the traditional Chinese architectures, and the mechanical behavior of this kind of structure is, however, not yet clear. Hence, this paper presents the experimental and numerical study on the load-bearing mechanism and energy-dissipating performance of the palace-style wooden structure with infilled construction. Firstly, a quasi-static test on a 1:3 scaled palace-style wooden frame with infilled construction is conducted for analyzing the deformation load-bearing characteristics, and a corresponding finite element model is also established. Then the experimental and numerical results including deformation characteristics, hysteresis performance, stiffness degradation and energy dissipation are discussed. The influence of vertical load, infilled construction and geometric scale ratio on the lateral performance of the wooden frame with infilled construction are finally assessed. The results show that the numerical model effectively reflects the deformation and load-bearing characteristics of the wooden frame with infilled construction. The hysteresis curves exhibit contracting and bulging characteristics at the low and large loading amplitudes respectively. The infilled construction enhances the energy-dissipating capacity of the wooden structure without weakening its self-recovery ability. The parametric assessment further reveal that the infilled construction improves the lateral load-bearing capacity of wooden frame, with 74.3% increase in peak lateral force and 107.7% increase in the initial stiffness. The peak lateral force and initial stiffness value of the wooden structure are respectively increased by 16.01% and 118.2% when the vertical load is raised by 66.7% from 6kN to 10kN. Moreover, the larger frictional coefficient shows enhancement effect in peak lateral force and initial lateral stiffness, but this effect is most pronounced in the loading stages before reaching the peak value than descending phase.</p>