A code is an institution’s signature
Where a country’s tea plants were selected by a national research organisation, they are almost always numbered, and the prefix names the organisation. Where they were selected by planters on estates, they usually carry the estate’s initial and a serial number. Where a country’s tea culture predates institutional breeding, the plants have descriptive names instead. So the shape of a cultivar name is a fairly reliable indicator of who selected the plant and roughly when — before or after the arrival of a national programme. That is more information than it sounds. A code tells you that somebody documented the selection, kept records, and expected the plant to be distributed beyond where it was found. A descriptive name tells you the plant was named by the people who grew it. Both are legitimate; they belong to different systems, and mixing them in one list — as this catalogue does — makes the underlying difference in institutional history visible in a way that a single naming convention would hide.
India: TV, UPASI, and estate letters
TV stands for Tocklai Vegetative, the clones released by the Tocklai research station in Assam, and the number is a serial within that series. UPASI clones come from the planters’ association research institute in southern India and are numbered likewise. Alongside these sit the estate selections, which carry a letter for the garden and a number for the selection: AV2 and B157 and P312 in Darjeeling, BB35 and its relatives elsewhere. The letters are abbreviations of estate names, which is why they look cryptic — they were never meant to be read by anybody outside the district. The consequence for a reader is that an Indian clone code tells you the institutional route the plant took. A TV number came out of a station with a breeding programme and an extension service. An estate letter code came out of a planter noticing a good bush in their own field and propagating it, which is a different kind of selection with different documentation behind it, and it is the older of the two practices.
Sri Lanka: number bands
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
Sri Lankan clones carry the prefix TRI, for the island’s Tea Research Institute, and a four-digit number. The numbers are grouped into bands — the 2000s, 3000s and 4000s — released in successive phases of the programme, so the band places a clone in the institute’s history and roughly indicates the objectives it was selected against. TRI 2025 is the most widely planted and is grown across every elevation band on the island, which is a useful corrective to the assumption that Uva, Dimbula and Ruhuna taste different because they grow different plants. They largely do not. The institute also publishes planting recommendations matching clones to districts and elevations, which is the intended use of the series: match the plant to the site. Whether that guidance is followed depends on what a nursery has available, and a smallholder plants what they can get.
Kenya: the slash
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
Kenyan clones are written as TRFK followed by two numbers separated by a slash — TRFK 6/8, 31/8, 301/4, 303/577. The prefix is the country’s tea research foundation, and the two-part number is a selection reference identifying the trial or seed source and then the individual selection within it. That is why the codes look like fractions and why they cannot be sorted meaningfully by size. The purple cultivar that has attracted attention in export markets is TRFK 306/1, and it belongs to the same series as the ordinary black-tea clones rather than being a separate class of plant. Kenya is worth dwelling on because of the scale involved. A country that is among the world’s largest tea exporters runs on a few dozen numbered selections made in the second half of the twentieth century, distributed through smallholder cooperatives, and sold onward into blends where no plant is ever named. Several of the most planted tea clones on earth have no name at all.
Taiwan: numbers with names attached
Taiwan’s research station releases cultivars as Taicha numbers — Taiwan Tea No. 12, No. 18, No. 21 — and gives each a Chinese name as well: Jin Xuan, Hong Yu, Hong Yun. The number is the registration and the name is what the market uses, and the two are interchangeable in trade. The series runs continuously from the early releases to recent ones, and the public awareness of it is entirely commercial: a number becomes famous when a tea made from it sells well, and the rest stay in the record. Anyone reading the catalogue will notice the gaps in coverage between the famous numbers. Those gaps are not missing plants; they are plants that were released, trialled and never widely adopted, which is the normal fate of a research release everywhere. The Taiwanese system is unusually legible in this respect, because the numbering makes the full extent of the programme visible in a way that a naming convention would not.
Japan and China: names rather than codes
Japanese cultivars have names — Yabukita, Okumidori, Saemidori, Benifuuki — built from ordinary words, and they encode information: oku means late, wase means early, midori means green, beni means crimson and marks a black-tea selection, kaori means fragrance. A Japanese cultivar name is therefore partially readable even to someone who does not know the plant. Japan does register cultivars nationally with numbers, and the numbers are not what anybody uses. The two exceptions in this catalogue prove the rule: Shizu 7132 and Inzatsu 131 are selection numbers that entered commercial use before a name was attached, and they look conspicuously out of place. Chinese cultivar names are descriptive in the same way — da bai means great white, zao means early, and a provincial prefix like Fuyun or Zhenong names the institution and the province. China also runs a national and provincial approval system, so a cultivar may be described as nationally approved, which is a regulatory status rather than a quality grade.
What a code cannot tell you
A code identifies a selection. It does not tell you that the plant in a particular field is that selection, because propagation chains drift, nurseries mislabel, and fields get patched with whatever was available. It does not tell you the plant’s traits, because those live in the institute’s published description rather than in the number. And it does not tell you anything about the tea, which depends on site, season, management and manufacture at least as much as on the plant. The most useful thing a code does for a reader is locate a plant in an institutional history: this was selected by this organisation, in this country, at roughly this stage of its programme, for the conditions that organisation was working against. That is genuinely informative context and it is the level at which the codes are trustworthy. Any claim finer than that is resting on records the buyer cannot see.