The invention brings forward a method for reconstructing a Chinese ancient building meaning model and a component gallery from a single image and is aimed at generating a complete, reusable three-dimensional building component gallery with correct meaning, the three-dimensional building component gallery is used for generating a three-dimensional building model, and a large scale city model can be generated. The method brings forward a method for automatically determining a roofing tile direction, and an image is calibrated according to symmetry and the roofing tile direction of a building. In order to identify a construction component in the image, a roof is automatically segmented into roofing tiles based on repeatability of the roofing tiles, then based on a position and width of an inner side column pointed out by a user, an outside column is identified. A dimension and texture of the construction component are automatically obtained from the calibrated and segmented image, the building component is generated, and a shape grammar compiler rapidly and automatically generates a three-dimensional Chinese ancient building model and a changed scene from the three-dimensional building component and shape grammar.