The recent research on HP-UHP metamorphic tourmaline is summarized in this paper. Tourmaline is a common mineral existent in sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rocks. A variety of experiments demonstrate that this mineral can be stable in an exceptionally large p-t range, i.e. at p-t conditions ＞850℃ and ＞4 GPa. Owing to the low volume diffusion, the preservation of growth zones in tourmaline has become an effective key to investigating the boron evolution in rocks, the fluid-chemical history and the metamorphism of rocks. The research on the structure and chemistry of tourmaline reveals that components, such as Al and F are correlated with the formation temperature. According to different boron sources, the formation modes of HP-UHP tourmaline can be categorized into three types, i.e., Type A, Type B and Type C. Based on the analyses of typical HP-UHP tourmaline in the world, the authors sum up the general characteristics of this mineral: ① most HP-UHP tourmaline is dravite; ② the crystallographic X-site is highly occupied (＞0.8 pfu); ③ excess B (3.2～3.3 pfu) is common; ④ Ti, Mn, Li and Cl have low abundances; and ⑤ the δ¹¹B values range from -16‰ to +1‰. As for future work on HP-UHP tourmaline, we should highlight the relationships between crystal chemistry and p-t conditions during its formation, the trace-element partitioning between tourmaline and fluids, and the phase equilibrium modeling for B-bearing mineral assemblages.