Quality control is an important issue for the globalization of traditional Chinese herbal drugs. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is the most accepted technique among the analytical methods employed. It is extensively used for qualitative and quantitative analysis of crude drugs or commercial extract. In this review report, we collect papers issued in journals from 1988 to 2002 about analyzing and purifying the heat-clearing herbs and herbs for relieving exterior syndromes and table them. This is an attempt to build an HPLC database for the separation of traditional Chinese herbs. After comparing the method employed, the reversed-phase mode is most widely used separation method for analyzing and purifying the heat-clearing herbs and herbs for relieving exterior syndromes.