Abstract
Chinese herbal medicines (CHMs) are one of the important bioresources of medicine, which works by unlocking nature's ability to prevent diseases and recover from illnesses. Recently, it has ascended to the world stage and become a global icon. Nowadays, a considerable of researches have focused on the quality evaluation of CHMs. However, it is difficult to meet the reasonable needs of human beings for safe drug use to evaluate the quality of a huge number of inferior goods for the CHMs contaminated by pesticides and heavy metals. Hence to explore an eligible medicinal plant cultivation pattern, which can provide high quality CHMs sustainably, is most promising. This review analyzed the situation and characteristics of medicinal plant resources in different periods, including wild-harvested and cultivated resources during different stages, putting forward that ecological cultivation must be the way to develop medicinal plant cultivation and to obtain high quality CHMs.