A general method to separate and quantify simultaneously 6 active ingredients (arteannuin, rutin, isoquercitrin, salicylic acid, quercitrin, quercetin) in traditional Chinese medicine: Artemisia annua L. was established by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), this method has a wide linear range, low relative standard deviation, high precision and perfect reproducibility. Optimized apparatus condition was explored: An Tiahhe Kromasil C18 100 A (5μm，250 mm×4.6 mm) reversed-phase column was applied under 30℃; the wavelength of ultraviolet detector was set at 279nm; mobile phase was double-distilled water contained 50% (V/V) methanol and 0.02% trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) with a flow rate of 0.5ml/min in the performance. Compared with evaporative light scattering detector, ultraviolet detector had a high sensitivity to all ingredients except arteannuin in the experiment.
