Abstract: To study the relationship between the physical structure and the timbre of Chinese Sheng, a physical model of Sheng and its sound synthesis method are proposed. Based on the vibration model of reed tongue, the equivalent circuit of Sheng pipe is constructed by considering the transfer matrices of tone hole and tuning slot. By combining the reed and the pipe, a complete physical model of Sheng is built. An experiment system of Sheng is designed to validate the physical model, and physical quantities of sounding Sheng pipe are measured simultaneously by multi-channels. The performance of this model is analyzed by comparing temporal-spectral features and timbre descriptors of measurement and simulation results. It shows that the proposed model simulates the sounding mechanism of Sheng pipe well, and the synthesized sound is able to capture the timbre-related features of real Sheng sound in an accurate way.