Mordenite (MOR) has shown great potential to catalyze dimethyl ether (DME) carbonylation to methyl acetate (MA) in industry.The synergy between metal species and Brφnsted acid sites accelerates DME conversion.Here we designed and prepared two catalysts with different Ag locations by seed-directed growth method and two-step impregnation method (named as Ag@HMOR and Ag/HMOR-out,respec-tively),to explain the effect of Ag location on catalytic performance.The results of TEM,XPS,CO-IR and UV-Vis showed that Ag species mainly presented as Ag0 species over both Ag@HMOR and Ag/HMOR-out.Meanwhile,Ag0 species mainly located in the micropores of Ag@HMOR,while as for Ag/HMOR-out,Ag0 mainly existed on external surface.After comparing the performance of the catalysts with different Ag positions,we confirmed that the Ag0 species encapsulated in the channels of HMOR pro-moted the DME carbonylation,which revealed the importance of spatial adjacency on the acid-metal catalysts.