Counter-current chromatography (CCC) has been playing a critical role in the separation of natural products,which has been recognized as an important source of pharmaceutical agents.Since CCC was first invented in 1970,various apparatus have been developed for higher resolution,such as droplet CCC,high-speed CCC (HSCCC),horizontal flow-through coil planet centrifuge (CPC),and high-performance CCC (HPCCC).In addition,recently researches indicated that spiral coil has better separation efficiency including higher retention of stationary phase,and solutes resolution than other CCC coils,such as helical and toridal coils.However,these coils both are distributed in one- or two-dimensional centrifugal force field except the cross-axis CCC which holds a three-dimensional centrifugal field.This work introduced a novel conical CCC with upright conic coils,which was wound on three identical upright conical holder hubs by head-to-tail and left-hand direction (Fig.1).Compared with helical and spiral CCC,conical CCC holds a special centrifugal force gradient both in axial and radial direction enabling the CCC much higher resolution.And in details,it enables different linear velocity not only in the same layer of column but also between different layers,and large volume of column and sample loop which make higher sample loading capacity.In this work,the novel CCC was successfully applied to isolate and purify danshinones from crude extract of Salvia miltiorrhiza Bunge.As shown in Fig.2,higher resolution has been obtained compared with traditional CCC apparatus by the solvent system of hexane-ethyl acetate –ethanol-water with the volume ratio of 5:5:7:3.As a result,4 tanshinones were well resolved from 500 mg to 1g crude samples.