Abstract: Pond wetlands have been widely used in the treatment of drainage water from paddy fields. However, wetland hydraulic performance and purification effects are affected by many factors, such as water depth, flow rate, aspect ratio and vegetation distribution, and the better understanding of these factors would be helpful to improve the quality of wetland design, operation and management. This paper analyzed the effect of three different water depths (20, 40 and 60 cm) on the hydraulic performance of pond wetland through the dye tracer experiments with Rhodamine WT. The hydraulic indices, i.e., effective volume ratio, nominal serial complete mixing tanks (N), hydraulic efficiency (λ), were selected for analysis through the hydraulic residence time distribution (RTD) curve. The results showed that the effective volume rate rose from 0.421 to 0.844 and the hydraulic efficiency from 0.281 to 0.604 when the water depth declined from 60 cm to 20 cm. This indicated that the wetland hydraulic performance improved as the water depth decreased. In addition, the hydraulic performance of the first half of the wetland was significantly better than that of the second half. The flow regime of the first half approached complete mixing because of the mixing index (N) approaching 1 and its effective volume rate was above 0.9 when the water depth was relatively low (20 and 40 cm). The normalized RTD curves demonstrated a good agreement between moment analysis parameters and hydraulic parameters, and a great consistency between the hydraulic parameters and moment index which was not affected by tail truncation error. The experimental study concluded that a lower water depth was favorable to improve the hydraulic performance of pond wetlands.