Abstract: San-Chi, the roots of Panax notoginseng (Burk) F. H. Chen, has been considered to be one of the precious drugs in chinese traditional medicine. In recent years, saponins have been shown to be the active principles of San-Ghi for the treatment of coronary heart diseases, angina pectoris and certain other diseases.A novel method for the quantitative determination of saponins G₁, D₁, D₂, E₁ in San-Chi is reported by a combination of TLC and densitometry in this paper. The proposed procedure is as follows.Macerate 1.0g of powdered sample with 25ml methanol for 36 hours. Take exactly 5.0ml of the filtrate, evaporate to dryness and dissolve the residue in 2.0 ml of methanol. Spot 1～2μl each of the prepared sample solution and standard solution alternately on silica gel plate, develop with a mixture of 1,2-dichloroethane-butanolmethanol-water (30:40:15:25 lower phase). After drying, pass the plate through a saturated solution of ammonium bisulfate in absolute ethanol contained in a vessel. Then heat at 115～120℃ for 5～7 minutes and determine each constituent spot by a TLG scanner. The standard curve is linear in the range of 1.5～7 μg of saponins. The content of total saponin and four saponins in crude drugs including roots of different grade was determined by colorimetry and densitometry. The results agreed very well.This method is simple, rapid and reproducible.