The city pavilion is among the most indicative public landscape symbols in Chinese historical urban landscape (HUL). It contains landscape scenery, ritual education, social value and other multiple construction mechanism. However, current fragmented protection and construction that ignore the formation mechanism of city pavilion split its context continuity in HUL. It is an urgent problem in the protection and reconstruction of traditional urban landscape. The paper takes 251 city pavilion literature describing official constructions recorded in The Complete Works of Song as the object, and points out that city pavilion is an important content of the Song Dynasty city landscape construction. Through the statistics of word frequency of the pavilion building goal, the paper sorts out 3 kinds of pavilions: 1) the ritual system type, 2) educational type, 3) viewing type; and analyzes 4 kinds of spatial distributions: 1) axial symmetry layout based on the ritual, 2) enjoying topographical advantages from Fengshui, 3) on the gates and the wall, 4) being attached to the garden. Thus, the study ravels out the coupling relationship between city pavilion spatial distribution and its internal formation mechanism. This paper provides basic information for the protection and reconstruction of HUL.