Quilled or channeled, 3~10 cm long, 0.5~1.5 cm wide, 1~3 mm thick. Outer surface greyish-yellow to brownish-yellow, rough, with ruuegular longitudinal fissures, easily exfoliated. Inner surface yellowish-white to greyish-yellow, relatively even, with fine longitudinal wrinkles. Texture light and fragile, easily broken, fracture uneven, outer layers yellowish-brown and inner layers greyish-white. Odour, slight; taste, sweetish and then bitter.

Afternoon fever and night sweating in consumptive diseases; cough, hemoptysis and epistaxis due to heat in the lung; diabetes caused by internal heat.

1.Clearing away blood-heat to relirve hectic fever:

It can be used to treat syndrome of blood-heat due to Yin deficiency, marked by hectic fever and night sweating, or the syndrome of infantile malnutrition with fever. The drug has the function in treating asthenic heat and it is often used with Carapax Trionycis, Rhizoma Anemarrhenae, etc.

2.Clearing and purging lung-fire:

To treat cough and dyspenia or expectoration of bloody sputum due to invasion of lung by heat evil, it may be used with Cortex Mori Radicis, Radix Glycyrrhizae, etc. Besides, it is used in treating diabetes mellitus, characterized by thirsty and polyuria in combination with feverish sensation and restlessness.