It is a worldwide challenge to simultaneously improve the strength and damage tolerance of ceramics, which is a core issue in the development of ceramics and a goal pursued by materials scientists. While the pre-stressed design has been widely used to improve the strength of concrete and glass for over a century, a little progress has been made for ceramic materials. In this paper, the research progresses of ceramic reinforcement are summarized, and a new pre-stressed design and model of high strength and high damage tolerance composite ceramics are proposed. The novel design focuses on the generation of residual compressive stresses on the surface of ceramic components to inhibit crack initiation and growth, and offset the external tensile stress, which can be applied to different fields such as structural ceramics, architectural ceramics, domestic ceramics and so on. This simple and economical technique with no limitation of size and shape in ceramic components has great application prospects.