Furanodiene, a sesquiterpene component extracted from the essential oil of the rhizome of Curcuma wenyujin Y.H. Chen et C. Ling (Wen Ezhu), is widely used in traditional Chinese medicine. A sensitive analytical method was established and validated for furanodiene in rat plasma, which was further applied to assess the pharmacokinetics of furanodiene in rats receiving a single dose of furanodiene. Liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS) in multiple reaction monitoring mode was used in the method and costundide was used as internal standard. A simple protein precipitation based on methanol was employed. The simple sample cleanup increased the throughput of the method substantially. The method was validated over the range of 1-1000ng/mL with a correlation coefficient >0.99. The lower limit of quantification was 1ng/mL for furanodiene in plasma. Intra- and inter-day accuracies for furanodiene were 88-115 and 102-107%, and the inter-day precision less than 14.4%. After a single oral dose of 10mg/kg of furanodiene, the mean peak plasma concentration of furanodiene was 66.9±23.4ng/mL at 1h, the area under the plasma concentration-time curve (AUC ) was 220±47.8h ng/mL, and the elimination half-life was 1.53±0.06h. After an intravenous adminstration of furanodiene at a dosage of 5mg/kg, the area under the plasma concentration-time curve was 225±76.1h{dot operator}ng/mL, and the elimination half-life was 2.40±1.18h. Based on this result, the oral bioavailability of furanodiene in rats at 10mg/kg is 49.0%. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.