People always live and labor in a specific environment. The interaction between humans and the environment cannot but influence their perspectives on the world.

Traditional Chinese medicine has distinct cultural characteristics. In the early stage of its birth there must have been many factors that gave rise to its distinct characteristics.

The natural environment always provides both the necessary and the constraining conditions for the survival of mankind. Especially at the early stage of human development, people relied on nature and were restricted by nature in production and life. Inevitably, the indelible mark of the natural environment was set on early civilization.

China is situated in East Asia on the west coast of the Pacific Ocean. Mountains in the west region and south-west Qinghai-Tibet Plateau are the natural defense. The east and south-east regions are surrounded by the Bohai Sea, Yellow Sea, East and South China Seas. The Mongolian Plateau is magnificently situated in the north. This is why our ancient ancestors found it was difficult to communicate with the outside world. As a result the Chinese ancient civilization preserved its own unique features.

China is rich in river water sources, and it has both subtropical climates and plains geography, which allowed ancient Chinese people to develop agriculture as its primary economic activity. All of these factors had a profound influence on its scientific and technological culture, including traditional Chinese medicine.

Traditional Chinese medicine takes the theory of yin and yang, and the five phases as its foundation, and uses them for their theoretical and technological sophistication. Due to its practical orientation and the underlying system of thought based on wholism, they naturally derived many key notions from on-serving and interacting with the natural world.

Traditional Chinese medicine advocates conforming to nature, which corresponds to the heaven and earth, and the sun and moon. Acupuncture used to regulate the flow of qi and blood in the channels, small splints adopted for treating fractures, and medicinal substances used externally to treat wounds are all examples of how people create different material civilization, or spiritual civilization, under different natural conditions.

The origins of traditional Chinese medicine were not only influenced by geography, but also by human factors.

Archeological findings testify that in the early period of the Neolithic Age the Chinese people began to take agriculture as their principal economy. Hereafter, with its continuous improvement, agriculture spread in the Yellow River, Yangtze River and Pearl River Basins. At the same time, the worldview of the Chinese people took shape with its unique features.

Traditional Chinese medicine embodies so many concepts, such as round heaven and square earth, following the tide of nature, and correspondence between humans and the universe. These can be considered as the stamp of the agricultural civilization on medicine. In traditional Chinese medicine, the kidney and spleen are taken as the innate endowment and acquired endowment, respectively, which reflects the fact that the agricultural culture relies on water and earth.

In traditional Chinese medicine, human relations are used as a metaphor for the relations of the zang-fu organs, and which is why the roles of chief, deputy, assistant and envoy are used to describe formula composition.

At the embryo stage, traditional Chinese medicine had its own distinct features. To have an accurate comprehension we have to search for the aspects which have been discarded in the remote past.

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