The quality of traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) significantly impacts their efficacy and medication safety, with the place of origin being one of the crucial factors. Traditional methods for identifying the origin of TCMs primarily include macroscopic identification and microscopic identification. The macroscopic identification methodsrely on manual observation and experience, which are prone to misjudgment. The microscopic identification methods require processes such as slicing and staining of the TCMs, which are cumbersome and not applicable to rare TCMs. In recent years, spectral analysis has attracted increasing attention in the identification of TCM origins due to its advantages of rapidness and non-destructiveness. Among these, near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR) is widely employed. Therefore, this review summarizes the research on the origin identification of TCMsusing NIR over the past 10 years. It conducts geographical zoning of TCMs and systematically summarizes the distribution of Dao-di herbs in China, as well as the research popularity of different TCMs for origin identification. Currently, research on the origin identification of TCMs mainly focuses on precious and easily counterfeited herbal medicines in terms of origin, such as Panax notoginseng, Panax ginseng, Gastrodia elata Blume, and Dendrobium officinale. In the application of NIR for origin identification of TCMs over the last decade, the combination of traditional NIR with chemometric methods has remained the mainstream approach. Although two-dimensional NIR correlation spectroscopy has been applied in various fields, including food, agriculture, and industry, its use for the origin identification of TCMs has been limited to the past two years, making it an emerging technology in this field. NIR hyperspectral imaging can simultaneously obtain spectral and image information of samples, thereby improving identification accuracy. The combination of NIR with ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy can obtain information on chemical bonds and conjugate relationships of compounds in samples. NIR combination with mid-infrared spectroscopy can provide more abundant information on molecular skeletons, and its combination with laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) can obtain information on molecular vibration and elemental composition. The multi-spectral hyphenated technology based on NIR achieves multi-dimensional information complementarity, effectively overcoming the limitations of single-spectral technology, and enhances the effectiveness of identifying the origin of TCMs. This review also summarizes the chemometric methods used in the origin identification of TCMs, including spectral pre-processing, variable selection, and chemical pattern recognition. Spectral pre-processing methods can be divided into smoothing, scattering correction, baseline correction, and scaling, which are often used to eliminate the influences of noise, baseline, and background. Variable selection methods remove redundant variables, further improving the accuracy of discrimination models. Deep learning algorithms are increasingly applied in the analysis of the origin identification of TCMs. This review provides a methodological framework for the rapid and accurate identification of the origin of TCMs.