Abstract: Chinese traditional villages are one of the important carriers of farming civilization and traditional cultural heritage with protection value. However, with the repid progress of the urbanization, traditional villages are gradually declining or even disappearing. Therefore, exploring the characteristics of land use change in traditional village gathering places is of great significance for promoting the protection and development of traditional villages and their gathering places. This article takes Xijiang Town, Leishan County, where traditional villages gather in Guizhou Province, as the research area. Based on the four phases of remote sensing image data, by using the land use intensity index, land use degree change model to scientifically analyze the spatial-temporal variation of Xijiang Town land use change from 2000 to 2017. And elevation, slope, distance to town government, distance to village committee, distance to public service land, distance to road, distance to river and policy factors were selected as driving factors in this paper. With the help of GeoDetector, we analyzed the role of these eight factors in Xijiang Town land use chnge. The results indicated that: (1) On time series, high-intensity land use in the study area doubled from 2000 to 2017, increasing from 22.59% to 47.63%; spatially, the change of land use intensity presents the evolution pattern of “road directivity” and “village center directivity”; (2) Under the background of tourism development in the traditional villages of ethnic minorities in mountainous areas, the land use has undergone a transformation from traditional agriculture to multifunctional tourist villages that combine life and production; (3) The change of land use in traditional village gathering places is the result of multiple factors. Changes in land use development trends are constrained by the natural environment and socio-economic factors, such as elevation, distance to highways, distance to public services, distance to village center. (4) The traditional villages of Xijiang Town have gradually increased their decisive force to the land use changes in the study area. The decisive power increased from 0.000 4 in 2000-2005 to 0.023 9 in 2010-2017, rising from the 8th to the 5th in the ranking of the determinants of the driving factors.