Grade is numbered, and it is per tea
Chinese grading does not use a cross-category letter system. It runs as a numbered or named ladder within a particular named tea, so a first grade of one tea and a first grade of another are two independent claims and there is no common scale. The vocabulary typically runs from a special or supreme designation at the top through numbered grades downwards, and the criteria — plucking standard, uniformity, appearance, aroma, liquor — are specific to that tea’s tradition. Some famous teas have their own named tiers instead: Keemun carries its own designations, white tea uses a picking ladder from buds only down to mature leaf, and Wuyi tea is traded on growing zone rather than on a numbered grade at all. The practical consequence for a buyer is that a numbered grade is meaningful within one producer’s range and close to meaningless across sellers, which is the same conclusion the orthodox letter system reaches by a different route. Where a grade is stated alongside the picking window and the producing area, the three together are informative; the grade alone is the least useful of the three.
The picking window, which usually outranks the grade
For Chinese green tea the date is the field that carries the most, and the traditional vocabulary is calendrical rather than numeric. Mingqian denotes tea picked before the Qingming festival in early April, yuqian tea picked before Guyu later that month, and material picked after that is described accordingly. The premium on the earliest pickings is real for the reasons the season pages give — slow growth out of winter dormancy in cool weather and modest light produces a leaf richer in the amino acid fraction relative to the polyphenols — and it is also the easiest thing in Chinese tea to game, since an early-budding cultivar reaches market first and can be shaped and sold as a famous tea it is not. A production date is the other date to look for and is commonly printed. Between a numbered grade with no date and a modest grade with an early picking window and a recent production date, the second is the better-described tea, and for a category where freshness is most of the product it is usually the better tea as well.
Standard codes and production licences
Chinese packaged food carries a code identifying the national or industry standard the product is made to, generally printed as a designation beginning GB or GB/T followed by a number, and a production licence identifier for the manufacturer. TeaHQ does not state which standard number corresponds to which tea, because that mapping is revised and has not been verified here, and a confidently wrong pairing is worse than an absence. What is worth knowing is what the presence of these fields signals. A pack carrying a standard code, a licence identifier, a net quantity, a production date and a shelf-life statement is a properly packaged commercial product from a registered manufacturer, and one carrying none of them is not — which is an entirely ordinary situation for tea bought loose from a small producer and a reason for caution on a sealed retail pack that looks like a factory product. The code is also the field that lets a buyer ask a precise question, since it identifies what the manufacturer claims to have made rather than what the front of the pack says.
Place, and the ladder of specificity
Origin on a Chinese pack can be stated at province, city or county, town or village, and mountain or garden, and each step down is a claim a seller can be held to. The step that matters most depends on the tea. For Wuyi rock tea the growing zone is the product and the tier vocabulary — the core cliff area, the surrounding zone, the outlying areas — is what a buyer is really purchasing. For Yunnan sheng, the village and mountain are the claim. For Longjing, whether the tea comes from the small original West Lake area or from the much larger surrounding production zone is the whole question. For a Fujian white tea, the county distinguishes production traditions. A provincial name alone in these cases has the resolution of a country name, since Yunnan spans old-growth mountain material and large plantations and Fujian produces four categories from unrelated districts. This is why the catalogue records growing regions as entities in their own right rather than treating province as the finest useful unit, and why a pack that narrows to a district is doing something a pack that narrows to a province is not.
Terms that occupy a field without being a specification
Several recurring words look like classifications and are not. Terms translating as wild, ancient tree, old bush and high mountain point at real distinctions and have no threshold, no register and no authority behind them, and the quantity sold under some of them vastly exceeds any plausible supply. Hand-picked and hand-made are nearly always partly true of speciality tea and therefore rarely distinguishing. Terms translating as tribute or imperial allude to historical court supply and are used today as tier names by sellers with no connection to any such history, although a handful of teas do have documented tribute records worth reading on their own pages. Organic behaves differently from the rest, being a controlled term in the major markets that points at a certifier who can withdraw the right to use it. The general test is the one the Sprint 31 pages apply throughout: ask whether there is a body that could stop a seller using this word. If not, it is a description of intent, and the informative fields are the specific ones beside it.
Buying when you cannot read the pack
Three habits get a non-reader most of the way. Learn to recognise the shape of a date and of a net quantity, since numerals survive any script and a production date and a weight are the two regulated fields most likely to be present. Ask the seller to translate the specific fields rather than to describe the tea, since the request for a production date, a producing county and a grade is answerable and the request for a description is not. And prefer importers who reproduce the producer’s own fields rather than replacing them with copy, which is visible from a listing at a glance. Where none of that is available, the fallback is the one this catalogue gives for every unverifiable claim: buy a small quantity first, taste it against something known, and let the cup rather than the packet decide. A pack in a language a buyer cannot read is not a reason to distrust a tea. It is a reason to buy less of it before committing, which is sound practice for a tea in any language.