Gotu Kola: History and Traditional Use

Gotu kola is a plant of the water's edge. Centella asiatica creeps along the banks of rice paddies, ditches and marshes across the warm, wet parts of Asia, Africa and the Pacific, and for as long as people have written about medicine in India it has been on the list. This article follows the plant through its many names — mandukaparni in Sanskrit, gotu kola in Sinhala, ji xue cao in Chinese, pegaga in Malay — into the classical Ayurvedic compendia, the salad bowls of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, a leprosy hospital in 1930s Madagascar where a village remedy became a modern wound medicine, and the clinical trials on vein disease, scars and memory that followed. Where the record is firm we say so; where a story is legend, we call it legend.

Table of Contents

  1. A Creeping Herb of Wet Ground: Botany and Range
  2. Many Names, and the Two-Brahmi Problem
  3. Mandukaparni in Classical Ayurveda
  4. Ji Xue Cao and Pegaga: China and Southeast Asia
  5. A Food First: Gotu Kola on the Plate
  6. Legends of Longevity
  7. Into the Pharmacopoeias: The Nineteenth Century
  8. Madagascar, Leprosy and the Discovery of Asiaticoside
  9. The Clinical Chapter: Veins, Scars and Memory
  10. Tradition and Evidence Today
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections
  13. Featured Videos

A Creeping Herb of Wet Ground: Botany and Range

Gotu kola is a small perennial that hugs the ground. It spreads by stolons — thin runners that root at every node, as a strawberry plant does — and sends up fan- or kidney-shaped leaves on slender stalks, with tiny flowers tucked beneath them. It is a plant of wet, disturbed places: the margins of rice paddies, irrigation ditches, stream banks, lawns that stay damp. Depending on sun and water the same species can look quite different from one site to the next, which confused earlier botanists.

Its range is genuinely pantropical: native across tropical and subtropical Asia (the Indian subcontinent, Sri Lanka, China, Indonesia and Malaysia), Africa (including Madagascar and South Africa), Australia and islands of the western Pacific, with populations also established in the warm wetlands of the southeastern United States. That breadth matters for the history: unlike a spice carried along a trade route, gotu kola was already growing wherever the traditions that used it arose. Ayurvedic India, Sri Lanka, southern China, the Malay world and Madagascar each found it on their own doorstep.

Botanically it sits in the carrot family, Apiaceae, alongside celery, parsley and fennel. Linnaeus described it in the eighteenth century as Hydrocotyle asiatica, a water-pennywort — a name that still turns up in older pharmacy texts — and it was later transferred to the genus Centella, which is why the full name is written Centella asiatica (L.) Urb. Its English name, Indian pennywort, records that original resemblance to the small round-leaved European pennyworts.

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Many Names, and the Two-Brahmi Problem

A plant that grows in so many places collects a name in every language, and several of gotu kola's names are worth knowing because they explain how it is written about.

Then there is brahmi, and here the record is honestly confusing. In India the name brahmi — a name that invokes Brahma and the idea of a plant for the mind — is applied to two entirely unrelated species: Centella asiatica, and Bacopa monnieri, a small succulent creeper of the plantain family that also grows in wet places and is also a traditional memory herb. Which plant is the "true" brahmi has been argued for a very long time. Ayurvedic pharmacognosy generally distinguishes them as two separate medhya (intellect-supporting) drugs — brahmi for bacopa, mandukaparni for gotu kola, with jalabrahmi ("water brahmi") as a further name for the latter — but in some regions of India both plants are simply called brahmi, and the herbal trade has never fully caught up: recent authentication studies still find products labelled brahmi that contain either plant or a mixture, and note that in Thailand gotu kola is additionally confused with a look-alike pennywort, Hydrocotyle umbellata. The practical lesson for anyone reading a label — or an ancient text — is that "brahmi" alone does not tell you which plant is meant; only the botanical name does. (This site keeps Bacopa Monnieri on its own page for exactly that reason.)

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Mandukaparni in Classical Ayurveda

The oldest written record of gotu kola as a medicine is Indian. Reviews of the plant's pharmacology consistently note that it is listed in the Sushruta Samhita, the classical surgical compendium of Ayurveda, and it is named in the Charaka Samhita, the great medical compendium, as one of the medhya rasayanas — the rejuvenating preparations held to sharpen intellect and memory. In the Charaka text's chapter on rejuvenation (the Rasayana section of the Chikitsa Sthana), four such plants are grouped together, and mandukaparni heads the list, alongside liquorice root (yashtimadhu), guduchi (Tinospora cordifolia) and shankhapushpi (Convolvulus pluricaulis). The dating of these Sanskrit compendia is genuinely uncertain and much debated by scholars; the texts as we have them were compiled and revised over centuries, and the safest statement is that gotu kola has been part of the Ayurvedic materia medica for on the order of two thousand years.

What was it used for? Ayurveda classifies a drug by taste, potency and the balance it restores among the three doshas, the constitutional forces of the traditional system; mandukaparni was described as bitter and cooling, and as medhya "by its special nature", its mind-supporting effect regarded as intrinsic. Beyond the mind, it was a standard wound and skin remedy — fresh leaf juice or paste on sores and ulcers — and was given for fevers, digestive complaints and as a general tonic. These are indications recorded by the tradition, presented as what practitioners believed and did, not as evidence of effect; the wound use is the one later laboratory work would most clearly support, the memory use the one where modern evidence is thinnest.

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Ji Xue Cao and Pegaga: China and Southeast Asia

In Chinese medicine gotu kola is ji xue cao, and the whole herb is classed as sweet in flavour and cold in nature — in the traditional scheme, a herb that "clears heat". Its recorded uses run to injuries, bleeding, swellings, fevers and poisoning, and it remains an official drug in the Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China. Reviews often repeat that China regarded it as a "miracle elixir of life" two thousand years ago; we could not trace that phrase to a specific classical text, so we report it as a claim of the modern literature rather than as history.

Across the Malay world the plant is pegaga, and the line between medicine and food all but disappears. In Malaysia and Indonesia the fresh leaves are a staple of ulam, the raw-vegetable salads eaten with rice and a chilli relish; on Java and the other Indonesian islands the plant has a long folk-medicine record for the same wounds, fevers and skin conditions as in India. In Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand the leaves are eaten raw in salads and cold rolls, and in Thailand, where it is bua bok, they are pounded and pressed into a green cooling drink sold in markets. In Myanmar raw pennywort is the main ingredient of a salad with onion, crushed peanut and bean powder. In none of these places did gotu kola need to arrive by ship: the plant grows in every one of them, and each cuisine and each folk medicine picked it up locally.

Madagascar deserves special mention, because it becomes the centre of the scientific story: the plant grows abundantly there, Malagasy healers used it on wounds and skin disease, and it was that local knowledge, not an imported Asian text, that a French botanist would meet in the 1930s.

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A Food First: Gotu Kola on the Plate

It is easy to tell gotu kola's history as a history of medicine and forget that, for most of the people who have used it, it is simply a vegetable. Nowhere is that clearer than in Sri Lanka, whose name for the plant the English-speaking world now uses. Gotu kola mallung (or mallum) is among the most popular of the country's shredded-green dishes: the leaves are finely chopped and tossed with freshly grated coconut, sliced shallot, green chilli, lime juice and salt, sometimes with a little Maldive fish, and served as an accompaniment to rice. A raw version, gotu kola sambol, is the same idea without the wilting. In Bengal the leaves are thankuni pata, fried in batter as fritters; in Thailand and Vietnam a drink and a salad green; in Malaysia and Indonesia an ulam. The pattern is the same everywhere the plant grows: a slightly bitter, grassy green eaten fresh and in quantity, with a reputation for "cooling" the body that sits between nutrition and medicine. The modern capsule, standardised to a few milligrams of triterpenes, is a recent and narrow reading of a plant its home cultures ate by the handful.

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Legends of Longevity

Gotu kola carries a reputation as a herb of long life, and two stories are repeated so often that a history has to address them — while being clear that they are stories.

The most famous concerns Li Ching-Yuen, a Chinese herbalist and martial-arts teacher from Sichuan who died in May 1933. Western newspapers, including the New York Times and Time magazine, reported his death that month with the claim that he had been born in 1677 and was therefore 256 years old (Li himself is said to have given 1736). He was described as having made his living gathering and selling medicinal herbs — among them lingzhi, goji, wild ginseng, he shou wu and gotu kola — and the herbal trade has attached his supposed longevity to gotu kola ever since. Gerontologists regard the age claim as a myth: no birth record supports it, the figure 256 is a culturally auspicious multiple of eight, and historians who have looked at the case think he was more plausibly somewhere around ninety to a hundred when he died. Nothing about the story is evidence that gotu kola prolongs life; what it tells us is that by the early twentieth century the plant already had a name for it.

The second is the saying that elephants, famous for memory and long life, owe both to browsing on gotu kola. We could not trace it to any source older than modern herbals and marketing copy; it is folklore of uncertain origin. The kernel of truth behind both legends is the classical Ayurvedic classification of mandukaparni as a rasayana, a rejuvenator — a traditional category, not a measured outcome.

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Into the Pharmacopoeias: The Nineteenth Century

European medicine met gotu kola through the colonial tropics. During the nineteenth century physicians in India and the Indian Ocean territories took an interest in the local use of "hydrocotyle" for leprosy and stubborn skin disease, and in that century the plant and its extracts were incorporated into the Indian Pharmacopoeia, recommended, besides wound healing, for leprosy, lupus (the skin disease), varicose ulcers, eczema, psoriasis, diarrhoea, fever and gynaecological complaints — a list that reproduces the traditional indications. (The popular literature often credits a named French physician with reporting the leprosy use in 1852; we could not confirm the primary source and do not assert it.)

From there the plant spread slowly into other pharmacopoeias — the British Herbal, French, Dutch, German, Italian, Polish and Chinese among them, and eventually the European Pharmacopoeia, which today carries a quality monograph for Centellae asiaticae herba. In 1999 the World Health Organization included Herba Centellae in the first volume of its WHO Monographs on Selected Medicinal Plants. A pharmacopoeial listing is a statement about identity and quality standards, not a verdict on efficacy, but the number of them measures how far the plant had travelled from the paddy margin to the dispensary.

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Madagascar, Leprosy and the Discovery of Asiaticoside

The scientific history of gotu kola has an unusually precise beginning, and it is not in India but in Madagascar. Pierre Boiteau (1911–1980), a young French horticulturist, arrived on the island for military service in 1932 and stayed on, taking up a post at the Tsimbazaza botanical and zoological park in Antananarivo in 1935. In 1936 a physician invited him to a leprosarium, and because Boiteau spoke Malagasy he was able to learn from local practitioners which plants they used on the sores of leprosy patients. Centella asiatica was among them. Clinical studies of the plant on leprosy lesions began in 1937.

The chemistry followed. In the early 1940s the active principle was identified as a crystalline triterpene glycoside, named asiaticoside — a large ring-shaped molecule with a sugar chain attached — and the identification is credited in the French record to the pharmacist Bontems. Boiteau then worked with the Malagasy scientist Albert Rakoto Ratsimamanga and with chemists in France on the compound and its derivatives. In February 1949 Boiteau, Buzas, Lederer and Polonsky published a short paper in Nature, "Derivatives of Centella asiatica used against leprosy", and in the same year a note to the French Academy of Sciences reported a water-soluble derivative, oxyasiaticoside, tested for activity against tuberculosis. Later work characterised the related glycoside madecassoside and the free acids asiatic acid and madecassic acid; the name madecassoside echoes the old French word for Malagasy.

The commercial result was a titrated extract of Centella asiatica — abbreviated TECA, or TTFCA for "total triterpenic fraction" — standardised to roughly 40% asiaticoside and 60% asiatic and madecassic acids, and formulated as a wound-healing ointment, powder and tablet. It was marketed in France and other European countries from the mid-twentieth century, and its proceeds helped found the Malagasy Institute of Applied Research (IMRA) in Antananarivo. The leprosy indication that started it all was overtaken by antibiotic therapy, but the extract stayed in European pharmacies for wounds, ulcers and scars — and, from the 1980s, for vein disease. Asiaticoside and its relatives are the compounds nearly every gotu kola study has measured since, and Madagascan plants remain among the richest in them.

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The Clinical Chapter: Veins, Scars and Memory

Because a standardised extract existed early, gotu kola entered the era of controlled clinical trials sooner than most herbs. Three lines of research define its modern record.

Chronic venous insufficiency. In 1987 Pointel and colleagues in France reported a placebo-controlled trial of TECA in 94 patients with venous insufficiency of the legs, at 60 or 120 milligrams a day for eight weeks, finding improvements in leg heaviness, oedema and venous distensibility. Through the 1990s and into 2001 an Italian group around Cesarone, Belcaro, Incandela and De Sanctis published a run of randomised trials on the total triterpenic fraction in venous hypertension, ankle swelling and capillary filtration, several gathered in a 2001 supplement of Angiology. A 2013 systematic review by Chong and Aziz found the trials, taken together, pointed to improvement in the signs and symptoms of venous insufficiency, while noting that many were small, old and of modest quality.

Wounds and scars. The oldest indication remained a live one. Small clinical studies from the 1970s onward examined the titrated extract on surgical wounds, burns and keloids, and laboratory work traced the effect to stimulation of fibroblasts, the cells that lay down collagen. Reviews in dermatology treat wound repair as the plant's best-supported use while noting that the human trials are few and heterogeneous. It is also the one indication a European regulator has recognised. In 2010 the European Medicines Agency's herbal committee (HMPC) issued a public statement: the purified triterpene extract had been an authorised medicine in six member states for more than thirty years, but it was too refined to count as a "herbal preparation" under EU law, so no monograph could yet be written. In March 2022 the committee adopted a European Union herbal monograph for Centella asiatica herb as a traditional herbal medicinal product, for cutaneous use only, "to aid in healing of minor wounds" — efficacy accepted on long-standing use rather than trials.

Memory and mood. The medhya tradition was tested late and lightly. A 2000 placebo-controlled study found a single large dose blunted the acoustic startle reflex, the involuntary flinch at a sudden noise, used as an objective marker of anxiety. In 2008 Wattanathorn and colleagues in Thailand reported a small two-month trial in healthy elderly volunteers in which a standardised extract improved some measures of working memory and mood. When Puttarak and colleagues pooled the human evidence in a 2017 systematic review and meta-analysis, they found it too limited and inconsistent to support gotu kola for cognition, while judging the rationale worth better trials. Twenty centuries after the Charaka Samhita, the mind claim remains the least proven part of the plant's reputation.

Safety. The clinical record also brought the first documented harm. In 2005 Jorge and Jorge, in Argentina, described three women aged 49 to 61 who developed jaundice after taking gotu kola for three to nine weeks, with biopsies showing granulomatous hepatitis; all improved on stopping, and one relapsed on re-exposure. Further case reports have followed. Such reactions appear rare, but modern references now list liver injury as a recognised, if uncommon, risk of oral use, alongside the allergic contact dermatitis reported from topical products since the 1990s.

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Tradition and Evidence Today

Set the two records side by side and the shape is clear. Tradition made three claims for gotu kola: that it heals the skin, that it strengthens and cools the body, and that it sharpens the mind. Modern research has been kindest to the first — the wound and scar use has a plausible cellular mechanism, a seventy-year pharmaceutical history and a regulator's traditional-use monograph behind it. The second found an unexpected echo in the vein trials, where the same connective-tissue effect appears to firm leaky veins and capillaries. The third, the medhya claim that made the plant a rasayana and the object of longevity legends, is the one the evidence has left largely untouched: a few small trials, a suggestive laboratory literature, and a 2017 meta-analysis asking for more.

Today gotu kola leads a double life: in Sri Lanka, Bengal, Thailand and the Malay world a green picked by the handful and eaten with rice; elsewhere a "cica" cream, a standardised capsule sold for memory and circulation, and a European traditional herbal medicine for minor wounds. The Madagascar leprosarium, the paddy margin and the Sanskrit compendium are all still visible in it. For the modern evidence in detail, see the Gotu Kola Benefits pages, and for what the herb is and how it is used, the Gotu Kola hub.

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Key Research Papers

The list covers the standard pharmacological reviews of Centella asiatica, the 1949 Madagascar chemistry landmark, the first placebo-controlled vein trial and its successors, the key cognition studies and the hepatotoxicity case series. Historical primary texts (the Charaka and Sushruta Samhitas, the nineteenth-century Indian Pharmacopoeia, the EMA documents) are named in the article, not cited here.

  1. Gohil KJ, Patel JA, Gajjar AK (2010). Pharmacological Review on Centella asiatica: A Potential Herbal Cure-all. Indian Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences. — PubMed PMID: 21694984
  2. Brinkhaus B, Lindner M, Schuppan D, Hahn EG (2000). Chemical, pharmacological and clinical profile of the East Asian medical plant Centella asiatica. Phytomedicine. — PubMed PMID: 11081995
  3. James JT, Dubery IA (2009). Pentacyclic triterpenoids from the medicinal herb, Centella asiatica (L.) Urban. Molecules. — doi:10.3390/molecules14103922
  4. Boiteau P, Buzas A, Lederer E, Polonsky J (1949). Derivatives of Centella asiatica Used Against Leprosy. Nature. — doi:10.1038/163258a0
  5. Pointel JP, Boccalon H, Cloarec M, Ledevehat C, Joubert M (1987). Titrated extract of Centella asiatica (TECA) in the treatment of venous insufficiency of the lower limbs. Angiology. — doi:10.1177/000331978703800106
  6. De Sanctis MT, Belcaro G, Incandela L, Cesarone MR, Griffin M, Ippolito E, et al. (2001). Treatment of edema and increased capillary filtration in venous hypertension with total triterpenic fraction of Centella asiatica: a clinical, prospective, placebo-controlled, randomized, dose-ranging trial. Angiology. — PubMed PMID: 11666125
  7. Chong NJ, Aziz Z (2013). A Systematic Review of the Efficacy of Centella asiatica for Improvement of the Signs and Symptoms of Chronic Venous Insufficiency. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. — doi:10.1155/2013/627182
  8. Wattanathorn J, Mator L, Muchimapura S, Tongun T, Pasuriwong O, Piyawatkul N, et al. (2008). Positive modulation of cognition and mood in the healthy elderly volunteer following the administration of Centella asiatica. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. — PubMed PMID: 18191355
  9. Puttarak P, Dilokthornsakul P, Saokaew S, Dhippayom T, Kongkaew C, Sruamsiri R, et al. (2017). Effects of Centella asiatica (L.) Urb. on cognitive function and mood related outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Scientific Reports. — doi:10.1038/s41598-017-09823-9
  10. Jorge OA, Jorge AD (2005). Hepatotoxicity associated with the ingestion of Centella asiatica. Revista Española de Enfermedades Digestivas. — PubMed PMID: 15801887

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. PubMed: Gotu kola ethnobotany and traditional use
  2. PubMed: Gotu kola history of pharmacology
  3. PubMed: Brahmi authentication — Centella versus Bacopa

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