Mo Han Lian (Cao)

Eclipta prostrata is a low-growing annual herb of the Asteraceae family, widespread across tropical and warm-temperate regions of Asia, the Americas, and Africa, typically inhabiting moist soils, rice-field margins, and ditches. The plant produces creeping to ascending branched stems up to about sixty centimeters long, often rooting at the lower nodes and clothed in stiff white appressed hairs. Leaves are opposite, sessile or nearly so, narrowly lanceolate, three to ten centimeters long, with entire to slightly toothed margins and similarly bristly surfaces. Small white daisy-like flower heads, about six to eight millimeters across, are borne singly or in pairs on slender peduncles in the upper leaf axils; the discs blacken upon drying or bruising, a feature giving the plant its common name 'false daisy' and its Chinese name referring to ink.