Porous lead zirconate titanate (PZT) ceramics are of great interest for hydrophones and medical imaging applications. The 0-3 type and 3-3 type porous PZT ceramics have been extensively discussed these years but the 1-3 type PZT ceramics have seldom been reported. This paper describes the fabrication process to obtain such 1-3 type porous PZT ceramics with one-dimensional pore channels by using tert-butyl alcohol-based directional freeze-casting method, and presents analysis of both microstructure and functional properties. The 1-3 type porous PZT ceramics with porosity ranging from 28.1% to 68.7% were fabricated by adjusting initial solid loading. With the increase of porosity, relative permittivity (epsilon(r)) decreased slightly and longitude piezoelectric coefficient (d(33)) exhibited only a small decline, which could be attributed to the special 1-3 type porous structure. The resultant samples with 61.3% porosity possessed a high value of hydrostatic figure of merit, > 100 times higher than that of dense materials. The acoustic impedance (Z) showed a linear dependence on porosity with the lowest magnitude reaching 1.3 MRayls (106 kg center dot(m2 center dot s)-1), matching very well with biological tissue or water.