Chinese herbal medicine has been widely used to prevent, diagnose and treat diseases. It largely consists of natural medicines and produced ones, namely medicines made from herbal, animal, mineral, some chemical substance and biological substance. The invention and application of Chinese medicine has a history of thousand of years. Yet the word "Chinese medicine" appeared only after western medicine was introduced into China, which aimed to make a difference between the two.

Chinese history once told a fiction of a person named Shen Nong who tasted many herbs at the same time and was then poisoned. It told us what difficult times that ancient Chinese people had when discovering the medicines.

Dating back to the period around 22 century B.C. to 256 B.C (in which China was in Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasty), there appeared alcohol medicine and soup medicine. A book, The Book of Songs (or Shi Jing) in the Zhou Dynasty (11 century B.C. to 771 B.C.), wrote something about medicine. More...