More than 30 scientists from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Macao will launch a Herbalome Project to recompose the masterpiece of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) -- Compendium of Materia Medica, or Bencao Gangmu.

Hong Kong-based Wenwei Po reported Monday that experts were planning to spend five years to elaborate on the pharmacology of about 500 kinds of TCM in this masterpiece through chemical decomposition to make it easier to understand by modern people and more acceptably by western countries.

Compendium of Materia Medica, an epoch-making encyclopedic TCM work, is completed by Li Shizhen, a great medicine scientist of the late Ming Dynasty (1518-1594) with nearly 30 years of effort.

Li Zhenji, Vice Chairman of World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies, said that The Chinese Herbal, or Zhonghua Bencao, was written in 1999 and was based on Compendium of Materia Medica and other ancient medical works. It can no longer satisfy the current demand of TCM research.

With the purpose of carrying forward the essence of China's traditional medicine, the project will recompose this work as a TCM resource pool in scientific language to resolve some problems that have long-existed in this regard.