A universal method to separate and quantify 13 phenolic acids (gallic acid, chlorogenic acid, gentsicacid, vanillic acid, caffeic acid, syringic acid, sinapic acid,
p-coumaric acid, ferulic acid, anisic acid,rosmarinic acid, salicylic acid, and cinnamic acid) in some compound herbal medicines was establishedby liquid chromatographic (HPLC). On an Agela XBP-C18 (5
m, 4.6 mm × 150 mm) column, amultistep binary gradient elution program and a simplified sample pretreatment approach were usedin the experiment. For all of the phenolic acids, detection limits ranged around 0.01 mg/L. Linearranges of higher than 2 orders of magnitude were obtained with a correlation coefficient of 0.9991 to1. Repeatability was 0.39-2.24% (relative standard deviation, RSD) for intraday, 1.17-3.96% (RSD)for interday, and 0.14-5.33% (RSD) for drug sample analysis. Recovery, tested by a standard additionmethod, ranged from 83.3% to 104.9% for various trace phenolic acids.Keywords: Phenolic acid; compound herbal medicines; traditional Chinese medicine (TCM); high-performance liquid chromatography.