Gelsemium elegans Benth is a kind of traditional Chinese medicine, eight alkaloids have been isolated from this herb. In recent years, an HPLC method for the separation and determination of five of these alkaloids, ie. gelsemium A (G), koumine (F), kumantenidine (D), kumantenine (B) and kumantenmine (A) is described, dichroine being used as the internal standard. In this report a RP column of C18 and the mobile phase methanol--water--n-butylamine (78:22:0.1 V/V) were employed. The flow rate was 1.0 ml/min, the column temperature was 25 degrees C and the detection wavelength was 256 nm. The calibration curves showed good linearity over the range of 0.02-0.12 microgram, r = 0.9835-0.9977 and the recoveries were 95.01-99.70% for the five alkaloids. The method is simple, sensitive and reproducible and can be used for the quality control of Gelsemium preparations for clinical evaluation.