The six kinds of name on a Chinese packet
A GEOGRAPHIC NAME — a province, county, mountain, village or specific slope. These nest: Yunnan contains Xishuangbanna contains Yiwu contains particular villages. The narrower the geography, the more it constrains what is inside. A TEA NAME — Longjing, Tie Guan Yin, Bai Hao Yin Zhen. These name a style and a method, and several of them originated as a place name and stopped being one. A CULTIVAR NAME — Fuding Da Bai, Qingxin, Jin Xuan. Sometimes overlapping with a tea name, which is the source of most of the confusion in this whole area. A GRADE OR DESCRIPTOR — words meaning special grade, superfine, first grade, or a description of the pluck. A FACTORY OR PRODUCER — including, for pu-erh, the state-era factories whose names still carry weight, and the recipe numbers attached to them. A TRADE MARK — a registered brand belonging to a company, which may own no fields at all. All six can appear on one wrapper and packaging convention does not separate them.
Why mountains are the trickiest
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
In pu-erh especially, mountain and village names carry enormous price differentials — Laobanzhang, Bingdao, Yiwu and a handful of others command multiples of neighbouring material. Three things follow. A mountain is a LARGE AREA containing many villages and many producers of very different quality, so the name constrains far less than its price implies. Volumes sold under the famous village names exceed what those villages produce, by a margin that is widely acknowledged within the trade. And a name may be used as a STYLE claim — material made in the manner associated with a mountain — without any statement that it came from there. The honest reading: a mountain name is a broad geographic claim and a strong price signal, and those two facts sit uneasily together.
Reading a pu-erh wrapper specifically
A cake wrapper is the only provenance most pu-erh carries, and it typically holds several separable pieces of information. The FACTORY or brand, in the largest characters. A RECIPE NUMBER on some traditional cakes — a four-digit code where the digits encode the recipe year, the leaf grade and the factory. A PRODUCTION YEAR, which for an ageing tea is the single most price-relevant fact and the most commonly overstated. A REGION or mountain. A WEIGHT, conventionally 357 g for a standard cake. And frequently an internal ticket — a small paper pressed into the cake itself — which is harder to substitute than the outer wrapper. None of this is verification. A wrapper is printed paper, and wrappers are reproduced. It is a description whose internal consistency you can check: a wrapper whose stated factory, recipe number and year do not sit together sensibly is worth asking about.
The same problem in Japanese and Taiwanese packaging
JAPAN: a prefecture or district name is a growing-area claim with some regulatory force behind proportion labelling; a merchant's name is a finisher; a cultivar is a plant; and a competition award is an award for a specific lot, not for the product line it appears on. TAIWAN: a mountain name is geographic and heavily counterfeited in the same way pu-erh mountains are; a competition ranking is lot-specific and dated; and a cultivar name is genuinely predictive of style, more so than in most origins. The general rule holds everywhere: identify what KIND of thing each name is before weighing any of them.
A practical order of operations
Work out which names are geographic and how narrow they are. Work out which name is the tea style. Find the year or harvest if there is one. Find who made or finished it. Then, and only then, look at the grade words and the awards, which are the least portable information on the packet. If a packet gives you a famous geographic name and nothing else — no year, no producer, no narrower location — it has told you the least informative thing it could have told you, at the highest price the name supports.