Link to Bencao Index

Free to use and republish with visible attribution and a link back to the source page. The catalogue is a reference work and is knowingly incomplete; nothing in it is medical advice.

No permission needed and no form to fill in. If you are linking from a page about a particular herb, link to that herb rather than the home page — it is more useful to your reader and it says more about what you are linking to.

The wording inside a link is what tells a search engine what the page is about, so it is worth more than "click here". Every record and category page carries a Link to this block with its own wording already filled in.

SVG, a few hundred bytes each, sharp at any size. Host them from here or save a copy — either is fine.

Every herb and formula has a machine-readable copy at the same address as its page with record.xml on the end — for example https://bencaoindex.com/herbs/bai-zhi/record.xml. It holds the names, the category, the channels, and the recorded actions and indications, along with the attribution and a canonical link back.

The descriptions are deliberately not in it. They are the part somebody wrote, and a feed that hands them over in full gives a copy of this site rather than a link to it. The factual structure is what is useful to syndicate, and it is what is offered.

There is also an RSS feed of what has changed most recently across 1,058 herbs and 492 formulas, which most site builders and aggregators will read without being told anything.

Anywhere you use the data, this is enough:

If you are quoting a single record, link that record instead of the home page. Every XML file carries the exact link to use in its <canonical> and <attribution-html> fields, so it can be wired in automatically.