Surprisingly, the book where you found that recipe, The Food & Cooking of China (Canada, UK) doesn’t include these herbs and spices in its glossary - so they must be pretty obscure. The recipe comes from the chapter on herbal specialties. Here goes, but we’re not sure this will be much help:
- deng shen root is codonopsis root (also spelled dang shen)
- huang qi root is astragalus root
- gancao is licorice root
- rougi is cassia or cinnamon
- cao guo is the fruit of amomun or amonum
- dingxiang is cloves
Given the challenge of finding some of these herbs on the Internet in reasonable quantity or price (or finding them at all), we’re skeptical that a good Chinese market is going to stock all of these, but it may be worth a try. Apparently all of these herbs are available at windsandwaters.com and probably other sites on the web that carry Chinese herbs.