Hollow piers are widely applied on railway bridges.In high intensity seismic regions，hollow piers and solid piers differ greatly in the arrangement of the longitudinal reinforcements and stirrups.In addition，plastic hinge mechanisms and positions of hollow piers are very different from those of solid piers.Experiments must be completed to examine solid piers on plastic hinges and then the findings applied to hollow piers.In this paper，methods of testing and numerical analysis are introduced and used to study the plastic hinge’s mechanism and position of hollow piers.Firstly，based on the hollow piers on the Dali Ruili railway，three large-scale models were made to study reasonable reinforcement arrangement，seismic damage model，and plastic hinge zone length by using pseudo-static test methods.Pseudo static test methods are the most widely used test methods for studying structural or component performances.This method maximizes the number of specimens and provides an abundance of information such as the bearing capacity，stiffness, deformation capacity，energy dissipation，and damage characteristics.From the scale model，hysteresis loop，plastic hinge zone length，and failure characteristics of hollow piers were obtained under the cyclic horizontal loads.The results show that under the design reinforcement arrangement，the model presents ductile failure whose characteristics are concrete crushing with obvious plastic hinge region.In addition，the plastic hinge zone length is similar to the dimension of the pier section （along the stress direction） at the bottom of the pier.Secondly，a fiber element model was made by using the software Opensees.During the finite element analysis，no constraint model was used for protective layer of concrete and Mander model was used for core concrete.Then，a monotonic loading skeleton curve and hysteresis loop were obtained through numerical modeling.Finally，after comparing the model results and test hysteresis curves，it was shown that numerical results were consistent with results obtained experimentally.