Abstract: Xichang city was taken as the research area. Based on the land use data obtained by DEM and remote sensing interpretation, the distribution characteristics of land use under the influence of four terrain factors were obtained by superposition processing of extracted topographic factors (elevation, slope, aspect, topography) and land use status map with the support of GIS software and spatial technology. And the coupling relationship was further analyzed between land use spatial distribution and topographic factors. The results showed that (1) the land use type in Xichang City was mainly forest land, accounting for 50.51% of the total area. The area size of grassland was close to that of cultivated land, paddy field, or construction land, and the proportion of water body and other land types were small; (2) Each land use type showed a law of ladder change in different elevation, slope and topographic level; the land use degree of sunny slope and semi-sunny slope was higher than that of shady slope and semi-shady slope, and the water body was not affected by slope direction; (3) Land use types in Xichang City were relatively strictly limited by topographical factors, and currently, there was no extremely large-scale distribution caused by strong human disturbances and geological disasters.