Embodiments of the present invention provide a terminal device and a positioning system, and relate to the field of communications technologies. The terminal device is configured to: obtain identifiers of at least two antenna elements and attribute information of a reference signal corresponding to each of the at least two antenna elements; receive at least two reference signals based on the attribute information, where the at least two reference signals are sent by corresponding antenna elements of the at least two antenna elements, respectively; obtain positioning information; and send, to the network device, the positioning information and identification information of antenna elements corresponding to the positioning information. Positioning signals obtained by different antenna elements are different, so that the terminal device can identify which antenna element a received positioning signal comes from. Therefore, an improved distributed antenna system can implement terminal device positioning, and improve indoor positioning accuracy.