Chinese medicines have an important feature of infrared spectroscopy. The objective of this paper is to describe the latest development of infrared spectroscopy, especially the near infrared spectroscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and the latest application of the infrared spectroscopy in Chinese medicines. As we can see, the new technique of infrared spectroscopy has been applied to fast identification, quantitative analysis monitoring of Chinese crude drug and Chinese medicines. And it can be used for exploitation new drug and research the pharmacology of Chinese medicines. Overall, infrared spectroscopy is shown to have significant potential as a rapid ,nondestructive and accurate method for study Chinese drug.