Abstract: Understanding the current situation of rural development is the premise of rural revitalization. Big data technology and portrait technology can help governments to better depict the appearance of rural development. On this basis, the government departments can make specific measures according to local conditions. This paper reviews systematically the literature on rural big data portrait, and finds that the existing literature pays more attention to user’s and enterprises’ portrait, but less attention to rural portrait. Based on this, the paper gives the definition of the big data portrait system for rural revitalization, and elaborates the four characteristics of the system: comprehensive, dynamic, intelligent and visual, as well as the three functions: understanding the whole picture, finding the cause of differences, monitoring and early warning. The paper gives the specific architecture of the rural revitalization big data portrait system, including data collection, data preprocessing, data storage, feature engineering, data mining and rural portrait.