Development of saffron: Saffron is not only widely used in medicine, excellent therapeutic effect, and a large number of applications in the daily chemical, food and dye industry, is an important and valuable raw material for beauty cosmetics and spice products, the demand at home and abroad is great, the price is as expensive as gold (the international market of 2,000 U.S. dollars per kilogram).

Saffron is native to the Mediterranean coast, Spain, Greece, India, Iran, France and other countries in the temperate zone of the abundance of the region; Japan is also cultivated. China's medicinal use mainly rely on imports.

In the past, more from India through Tibet, so the name of saffron. From the middle of the 1960s began to introduce, now Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Fujian, Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai and other places are cultivated. Because of the domestic to meet the medicinal needs, still need to be imported from abroad, has been listed by the State Science and Technology Commission as a key development project of Chinese herbal medicine.