Abstract: The identification of historical buildings is essentially a kind of legal restriction on public power. Because the land-ownership of historical buildings is either state-owned or rural collective, the research on the identification of historical buildings can also help us free from the confine of landownership and focus on the construction of a unitary legal system of real property expropriation compensation. We may overcome the difficulties in China’s legal system of expropriation compensation from the perspective of expropriation rather than that of expropriation. In other words, we shall construct a legal system of expropriation compensation through equalization compensation.