The endemic plants in China in Compendium of Materia Medica

China is one of the countries with the richest medicinal plant resources, with a long history of discovery, utilization and cultivation of medicinal plants. In ancient Chinese historical materials, there are records such as "Fuxi tasted hundreds of herbs" and "Shennong tasted hundreds of herbs and encountered seventy poisons a day". Although they all belong to legends, it shows that the discovery and utilization of medicinal plants are the result of accumulated experience and knowledge by ancient humans through long-term life and production practice. By the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, there had been written records about medicinal plants. More than 50 kinds of medicinal plants are recorded in The Book of Songs and The Classic of Mountains and Seas. 1973 The silk book "Fifty-two Diseases Prescription" unearthed from the No.3 Han Tomb in Mawangdui, Changsha is the oldest existing medical prescription in Qin and Han Dynasties in China, in which 1 15 kinds of plant medicines are recorded. After Zhang Qian's voyage to the West in Han Dynasty, exotic medicinal plants such as safflower, pomegranate, walnut and garlic also spread to China. The books devoted to drugs by scholars of past dynasties are called Materia Medica. The earliest existing pharmaceutical monograph in China, Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing, was written around the Qin and Han Dynasties, recording 365 kinds of drugs, including 252 kinds of plant drugs. Since then, famous works on materia medica have included Tao Hongjing's Notes on Materia Medica in the Liang Dynasty, Su Jing's Newly Revised Materia Medica in the Tang Dynasty, Tang Shenwei's Materia Medica in the Song Dynasty and Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica in the Ming Dynasty. Among them, Emergency Materia Medica collected and summarized all kinds of materia medica before the Song Dynasty according to historical materials, and contained more than one kind of plant medicine 1 100, so many lost materia medica materials were preserved. By the Ming Dynasty, Compendium of Materia Medica contained 1200 kinds of plant medicines.

With the development of medicine and agriculture, medicinal plants have gradually become cultivated plants. The Book of Qi Yaomin written by Jia Sixie in the Northern Wei Dynasty recorded the cultivation methods of more than 20 kinds of medicinal plants, such as Lysimachia christinae, Carthamus tinctorius and Evodia rutaecarpa. In the Sui Dynasty, Chinese medicine department set up two positions, namely "chief physician" and "medicinal doctor", which were responsible for the cultivation of medicinal plants. According to Sui Shu Classics, there are some books about the cultivation of medicinal plants, such as Plant Medicine Law and Plant Mind. By the Ming Dynasty, there were more than 80 kinds of medicinal plants with cultivation methods in Compendium of Materia Medica. 1949, the medicinal plant resources were investigated, developed, utilized, introduced and cultivated in a planned way. A lot of work has also been done in the determination, separation and extraction of components and pharmacological experiments. On this basis, a variety of drug monographs such as Flora of Chinese Medicinal Plants, Flora of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Pharmacology, Dictionary of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Compilation of Chinese Herbal Medicines, China People's Pharmacopoeia, etc. It has been compiled and published, and more than 5,000 species of medicinal plants have been collected and more than 200 species have been cultivated. In BC 1600, there were records of botanical medicines in Egypt's Paper Herbal Medicine and later India's Veda of Life. Five years after A.D. 18 15, German scholars published a book "Pharmacognosy" focusing on plant medicines. Herbal Atlas (1828) written by Japanese herbalist Masamasa Iwasaki has collected more than 2,000 kinds of medicinal plants. During the 1950s and 1980s, the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Soviet Union, France, Japan and other countries made many achievements in resource investigation, introduction and cultivation, chemical composition and pharmacological action analysis, tissue culture and so on.

There are about 270,000 known plants in the world. China has a vast territory, from cold temperate zone to tropical zone, with complex terrain and diverse climate. It is one of the countries with the richest biodiversity in the world. There are about 25,700 known plants in China, many of which have medicinal value. In 1980s, China conducted a comprehensive and systematic resource survey, and found that the medicinal plant resources in China included 383 families, 2 309 genera1146 species, including 459 species of algae, fungi and lichens, and 459 species of bryophytes, ferns and seed plants 10 687 species. Among these medicinal plants, there are more than 700 kinds of medicinal plants commonly used in clinic, including more than 300 kinds cultivated artificially, and 80% of traditional Chinese medicine is wild resources. Some medicinal plants are endemic to China, such as ginseng, Eucommia ulmoides, ginkgo, etc.