The invention provides a method for preparing high-purity beta elemene from natural plants containing the beta elemene such as curcuma zedoary (earthnuts or tubers of the curcuma zedoary), cedronella (fresh leaves of the cedronella), yellowtop (roots, stems, leaves, flowers and seeds of the yellowtop) and so on, which can improve the production efficiency from starting materials to the high-purity beta elemene and reduce the production cost. Compared with the prior art, the method is mainly different in that the roots, stems, leaves, flowers and seeds of the natural plants are taken as raw materials; oleum volatile of specific parts of the natural plants is obtained by methods for extracting different oleum volatiles, and is rectified by the rectification method to obtain the beta elemene with high content; impurity compositions are removed by the macroporous adsorption resin separation method or macroporous adsorption resin combined with the ethanol extraction method, and the silver nitrate complex extraction method in turn; and finally the beta elemene with the content between 95.0 and 99.9 percent is obtained through reduced pressure distillation or rectification. The bulk pharmaceutical chemicals not only can be prepared into oral dosing preparation such as emulsion oral liquid, self-emulsifying/ self-microemulsifying capsules, soft capsules and so on, but also can be prepared into non-alimentary dosing preparation such as emulsion injection, liquid drugs injection, transdermal absorbent, lung sprays, suppository and so on. The method has the advantages of novel design, simple apparatus, concise operating steps, obvious shortened operating time, improvement of the production efficiency and high yield coefficient, and is suitable for industrialized production.