Cotinus coggygria Scop. (Anacardiaceae) is a deciduous shrub or small tree that is native to a large area covering from southern Europe, east across central Asia, and the Himalayas in northern China. Shotgun 454 pyrosequencing was used to develop microsatellite markers from the genome of C. coggygria. In this study, 349 microsatellite loci were identified from 40,074 individual sequence reads produced by one-sixteenth run, and primer pairs were designed for these loci. To test the primer amplification efficiency, 50 microsatellite primer pairs were tested across 12 individuals from two C. coggygria populations (Wuzhi Mountain: 36°30'N, 113°39'E; Tianlong Mountain: 37°42'N, 112°26'E). Among the 50 tested primer pairs, eight were found to be polymorphic. The average allele number of the microsatellites was 3.5 per locus, with a range from two to five. The inbreeding coefficient ranged from -0.478 to 0.222. The observed and expected heterozygosities varied from 0.167 to 0.750 and from 0.163 to 0.743, respectively. This set of markers is potentially useful for assessing the genetic diversity, as well as for understanding the population structure and phylogeographical and landscape genetic patterns, of C. coggygria.