Abstract: Improvement of the structural seismic resilience is fundamental to city resilience construction. It is important to improve the seismic resilience level of structures based on developing structural seismic damage-control elements with functions, including damage-free, damage identification and replaceability. Based on previous study on conventional flat-plate fuses, an innovative pre-arching fuse is proposed to control the damage of beam-to-column joints through in-plane pre-arching mechanism. The configuration and working mechanism of pre-arching fuses were described. Six sets of pre-arching fuses with different pre-arching conditions and slenderness ratios were designed, and the mechanical mechanism and seismic performance were studied by pseudo-static tests. The test results show that the pre-arching fuses exhibited more stable compressive strength and full hysteresis loops than the flat-plate fuses. The strength degraded more slowly for pre-arching fuses with smaller slenderness ratio and larger pre-arching height. When the compressive rotation of split pier exceeded about 0.07 rad, the strength of pre-arching fuses decreased, which can be suggested as a criterion for replacement. A mechanical model was proposed to estimate the yielding and maximum strength of the pre-arching fuses.