Abstract. The damage of masonry structures in earthquakes is generally more severe than other structures. Through the analysis of two typical earthquake damage buildings in the Wenchuan earthquake in Xuankou middle school, we found that the number of storeys and the construction measures had great influence on the seismic performance of masonry structures. This paper takes a teachers' dormitory in Xuankou middle school as an example, selected the structure arrangement and storey number as two independent variables to design working conditions. Finally we researched on the seismic performance difference of masonry structure under two variables by finite element analysis method. IntroductionEarthquake is one of the world's largest natural disasters that endangers human life and property, and China is one of the countries in the world with a frequent occurrence of earthquakes, there are more than 600 times six and above magnitude earthquake occurred in the Twentieth Century in China. The Wenchuan earthquake in May 12, 2008 was the most serious earthquake since the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, which had wide range of seismic impact and highly destructive.In this earthquake, the earthquake damage on the teachers' dormitories were different, the destruction of middle school teachers' dormitory in the northwest corner of school, students dormitories and the teaching building appeared different seismic performance. This was caused by the difference between the design and construction and the arrangement of the structural measures. In this paper, we selected the five storeys Xuankou middle school teachers' dormitory as an example to study on the influence of the arrangement of structural measures and the number of storeys on the seismic performance of masonry structures and calculated the percentage of amplitude effect.