Nowadays the pollution of SO₂ becomes more and more serious, it has a wide range of effects on plants, for example, it can affect the photosynthesis, physiological characters and tissue structure of many plants. Therefore, more and more researchers began to study these problerm. Leaf-colored plants have the impotant place to enrich the landscape and reduce the polution on environment, and they are considered one of the effective ways to purify the air of city. In order to provide seientific evaluation of SO₂ resistance and seientific references for selecting proper species as ornamental trees in landscape, the resistance of four golden-leaf tress species to sulfur dioxide its mechanism to adapt to sulfur dioxide stress were studied in this paper,. An artificial simulation method was employed to treat two-year-old saplings of four golden-leaf tress species, i.g. Ligustrum vicaryi, Caryopteris clandonensis, Physocarpus opulifolius var. lutein and Cornus alba with different concentration, such as 5.71, 11.43, 17.14, 22.86 mg/m³ of sulfur dioxide. The acute injury symptoms were observed, membrane lipid peroxidation, osmose gulatory molecules and protective enzyme activity were measured, and the methods of subordination function and grey correlation analysis were used to evaluate the resistance to sulfur comprehensively. The results showed that all four tree species had purification ability to SO₂, the membrane permeability, contents of malondialdehyde (MAD), proline (Pro), soluble sugur (SS), sulfur content and the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), peroxidase (POD) and catalase (CAT) were increased, while the contents of chlorophyll (Chl a b) and pH value were decreased with the increment of sulur dioxide concentration. The purification ability to SO₂ of four tree species were different, i.e.: C. alba was maximum, L. vicaryi and P. opulifolius var. lutein were medium,and C. clandonensis was minimum, it was the same as the order of the sulfur contents of the four tree species. However, the resistance of the four tree species to sulfur dioxide ranked from L. vicaryi>C. clandonensis>C. alba>P. opulifolius var. lutein. These demonstrated that the purification ability to SO₂ was different with the resistance to sulfur of these plants. But these couldn't indicate that the four golden-leaf tress species, i.g. L. vicaryi, C. clandonensis, P. opulifolius var. lutein and C. alba couldn't be used in Lanzhou region. Beacause the minimum concentration of SO₂ (5.71 mg/m³) that was set up in this experiment was higher than the practical maximum polution concentration of SO₂ (0.277 mg/m³) which once appeared in Lanzhou, this means that these plants can all be used in safety in Lanzhou region. From the ten criteria tested, eight (membrane permeability, MAD, SOD, CAT, Pro, POD, chl a b and SS) can be considered as main criteria for evaluating the resistance of these four trees to SO₂, but sulfur contents and pH value were not. Injury degree of the four tree species was adverse to the resistance to sulfur dioxide, it indicated that injury symptoms also can be regarded as the basis to judge the resistance to sulfur dioxide of the four tree species.