Despite the small number of species involved, the taxonomy of East Asian herbaceous Aralia is not sufficiently understood. Karl Thunburg (1784) was the first to describe the plant, naming Aralia cordata based on material from Japan. Almost a century later, the Russian botanist F. Schmidt discovered herbaceous Aralia on Sakhalin, and Vladimir Komarov described it from continental Russia. Up until 1935, the species occurring in China, Korea, and Russian Primorye was called A. cordata; but, in 1935, Japanese botanist Masao Kitagawa identified a new species, A. continentalis, distinguishing it from A. cordata and describing its range as Manchuria and Korea. He noted that A. continentalis is often confused with A. cordata, but separated the former by its smaller size and denser inflorescences, and by its thicker, shorter, and less downy peduncles and petals, which are commonly fused together in their lower part. The present authors agree with Kitagawa in recognizing two species of herbaceous Aralia: A. cordata, occurring in insular East Asia; and A. continentalis, confined to the continental East Asia.

In Russian literature, A. I. Poyarkova (1950) was the first to examine herbaceous Aralia growing in Russia. She recognized three species: A. cordata, A. continentalis, and A. schmidti Pojark, distinguishing the latter species by its large umbels, the shape of its inflorescence, and by its reduced branching of the second order axes. She concluded that A. schmidti is restricted to the southern and central parts of Sakhalin, that A. cordata is found only in the southern Kuril Islands, and that A. continentalis is restricted to the continent. In the latest report on the vascular plants of the Far East (Vol. 3, 1987), A. schmidti and A. cordata were reunited as A. cordata.