Historic preservation, adaptive reuse, and sustainable urban design that considers the full range of social, environmental, and economic factors is an essential component of sustainable urban development, while the mapping of historic buildings which can be archived and extracted for application, is the basic work on the protection of historic buildings and adaptive reuse. Traditional mapping methods need more time and more workers, and there are measured omissions, mistakes and other issues which go against the protection of the measured objects. 3D laser scanning technology is a new technique for quickly getting three-dimensional information. This paper introduced a measurement principle for 3D laser scanning technology and took Shang Shu Di, a Ming Dynasty building which is an officially protected heritage site of China in Taining County of Fujian Province, as a case study, and studied the application of mapping historic buildings based on 3D laser scanning technology. Then, a comparison of 3D laser scanning technology with the traditional method of detailed components mapping has been illustrated to indicate the advantage of 3D laser scanning technology in historic building mapping. Finally, aimed at the technical problems of the huge amount of data generated in the application process and the software defects of Cyclone, this paper presented two specific coping strategies which are “reasonable data collection and processing” and “construction of historic building components database”.