ABSTRACT
With the continuous development of traditional Chinese medicine business, the types and amounts of Chinese materia medica resources are increasingly reduced. By reviewing the origins, trading sources, and existing quality standards of the available common Chinese madicinal materials in shortage, it was found that the large amount of imported medicinal materials in domestic market or clinical application were not due to the traditional paths such as envoys presenting tribute, business trade, war conflict, national migration, and tourist travel, but due to the shortage of resources in domestic origins. Meanwhile, the former quality control standard on traditional imported medicinal materials was out of date, and the new imported medicinal materials quality control standard was in absence, resulting in unclear origins, unknown origins and processing methods, as well as more and more prominent problems on mixed use of the different varieties with same name and the same varieties from different origins. On the one hand, this situation once again sounded the alarm for the development of Chinese medicine industry from the resource perspective. On the other hand, the confusion of new varieties in Chinese herbal medicine market has also brought a serious threat to the efficacy of Chinese medicine. It is pointed out that it is an effective way to ensure the drug safety of imported medicinal materials through strengthening quality supervision of shortage of traditional Chinese medicines based on the new pharmacopoeia standards.