Countercurrent chromatography (CCC) is a liquid-liquid purification technology with both liquid mobile and stationary phases.This feature provides the best conditions for handling herbal crude extracts including particulates.100% sample recovery,lack of irreversible adsorption and low risk of sample denaturation make CCC a most versatile separation technique for the isolation of active principles from TCMs.The variety of CCC instruments from analytical to pilot scale commercially available these days makes this technology particular attractive for different applications from component fingerprinting to the production of reference materials (standards).CCC is being widely used in China.There were 200 papers published between 1988 and 2007 which report the isolation by CCC of 354 natural product small molecules (up to ca 1000Da),across the polarity and chemical class range,from 108 different plant species from 56 plant families.