Cross-shaped joints are the key components for Chinese traditional timber structures, which sustain vertical and lateral loads. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the seismic performance of cross-shaped joints, including experimental and theoretical analysis. The common and representative categories of cross-shaped joints with dowel were carried out under cyclic loading tests. The seismic behaviors of joints, such as the failure characteristics, hysteresis and stiffness variation, energy dissipation, and ultimate moment resisting capacity, were investigated under cyclic loading tests. This paper shows that the cross-shaped joints with dowel have higher bearing capacity than that of cross-shaped joint without dowel. In addition, the dowel has been proved to be an effective detail for substantially increasing the rotational ductility of the cross-shaped joints and restricting the extraction of the tenon. According to the structural characteristics of the joints, the moment-rotation relationships of the cross-shaped joints were also derived with the experimental results. The proposed theoretical calculation method can accurately estimate these joints moment-rotation relationship by comparing with the experimental results. Based on the theoretical model, the effect of dowel size on the rotation capacity of the joint was investigated. The results show that the rotation capacity of joint is at a higher level when the dowel size is 10∼30mm.