As a kind of living cultural heritage, traditional dwellings of ethnic minorities require protection and transformation in both time and space dimensions. Taking the Miao traditional dwellings in Xiangxi as an example and based on semiotic theory, its symbolic identification system can be constructed from three levels: discourse, syntax, and context. Meanwhile, the study has been done for the sustainable development of ethnic minorities' traditional dwellings and the effective transformation of ethnic cultures by combining the cultural coordinates of time and space, with the conservation principles of the symbols' authenticity, recognizability and resident identification, and applying the renewal methods of homogeneity and heterogeneity, positional reconstruction, and imagery to reach realm.