The wrapper, the neifei and the neipiao
Three separate pieces of paper travel with a cake and they are not interchangeable. The outer wrapper is the printed cotton paper the cake is folded into, and it carries the factory or brand, the product name, the year in most cases and often the recipe. The neifei is a small printed ticket pressed into the surface of the cake itself during manufacture, so that it cannot be moved to another cake without visible damage — it is the identifying mark that is hardest to transfer, which is precisely why it exists. The neipiao is a larger paper insert placed loose inside the wrapper, describing the product, the producer and sometimes the material and the intention behind the pressing. A cake missing its neifei is not necessarily wrong, since practice varies and older material predates some conventions, and a cake whose wrapper, neifei and neipiao disagree with one another has a question to answer. All three are storage equipment as well as documentation, which is the argument for leaving the wrapper on: it is permeable enough for the slow exchange the tea needs, opaque enough to exclude light, and it carries the only identity the cake has.
The four-digit recipe convention
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
A large part of the factory pu-erh trade uses a four-digit code, of which 7542 and 7572 are the best known, and the conventional reading is that the first two digits give the year the recipe was established, the third indicates the leaf grade the blend is built around, and the fourth identifies the producing factory. TeaHQ reports this as the convention circulating in the trade and in collector literature rather than as a verified specification: the reading is repeated consistently, TeaHQ has not found an authoritative statement of it, and practice has broadened as more producers adopted similar codes. What the convention is genuinely useful for is comparison. A recipe number denotes a blend built to a repeatable specification rather than a single lot, which means the same code across two years is a fair comparison of two harvests against a fixed target — the pu-erh equivalent of a house blend. It also means a recipe number is not a provenance claim: a coded cake is a factory product assembled from material the factory bought, and asking where the leaf came from is asking a question the format was not designed to answer.
Tongs, jian and how quantity is described
Cakes are bundled for transport and storage in units with their own vocabulary. A tong is a stack of cakes wrapped together, traditionally in bamboo leaf or bamboo shoot husk, and a jian is a larger case of tongs. The bundle is a storage decision as much as a shipping one, because a quantity of tea stored together buffers its own atmosphere better than a single cake in the same room — the mass effect the collectors describe, and one of the few pieces of storage folklore with a mechanism anyone can state. For a buyer the practical consequences are two. A tong bought intact is a better store and a fairer sample of a production than a single cake, and it is also a much larger commitment to a tea that has usually only been tasted young. And a cake sold out of a broken tong is entirely normal, which means the absence of a tong wrapper says nothing. Where a seller offers both, the price per cake is generally lower in the tong, and that discount is the same size-discount trap the storage pages warn about wherever a tea is fragile — except that here the tea is not fragile, which is why the calculation genuinely changes.
What a year on a wrapper does and does not claim
It claims a production date and nothing else, and the years since are the entire question. A cake stored warm and humid for five years and one stored in a dry northern flat for fifteen can look and taste closer to one another than their dates suggest, and colour deepens with warm storage in months as readily as with genuine years. So an age statement narrows what a tea can be and does not place it, and a seller who describes storage — where, in what conditions, for which periods, and whether the tea has moved — is telling you something checkable in principle where a seller offering only a year is offering the least informative half of the pair. Nothing on a wrapper distinguishes a well-stored old cake from a badly stored one, which is why buying aged pu-erh is the part of the trade with the least verification available at any price. The reasonable response is the one the catalogue gives throughout: buy small quantities first, prefer sellers who describe storage specifically rather than romantically, and weight the judgement towards the cup and the wet leaf rather than the date.
Wrappers as an authenticity signal, and their limits
Wrapper details — printing quality, paper texture, the exact typography of a factory mark, the placement of a neifei — circulate widely as authentication methods within the collector community, and they are worth understanding for what they are. They are genuine evidence in the narrow sense that a careless reproduction can be spotted, and they are the weakest possible defence against a careful one, because paper is the easiest part of a cake to reproduce. Certificates and holograms are in the same category and are as reproducible as labels. TeaHQ therefore records that these checks are used and declines to publish a checklist, because a checklist implies a level of assurance that does not exist and because the arms race moves. What actually reduces risk is unchanged from every other famous-name page in this catalogue: buy the category rather than the name, prefer sellers who describe their sourcing and their storage and who say when they do not know, read a price far below what the named product could plausibly cost as strong evidence about what it is, and taste comparatively against a known example.
Loose material, and the formats that carry less
Not everything in this part of the trade is a wrapped cake. Loose maocha, aged loose sheng and the hei cha traditions come in sacks, baskets, wrapped bricks and tins, and each carries less identifying apparatus than a cake does. Bricks and tuocha usually carry a printed wrapper and no neifei; basket-aged Liu Bao is identified by the producer’s marks on the basket; and loose material bought at origin frequently arrives with nothing at all. That is not a warning sign so much as a description of a different supply chain, and the response is to shift the weight of the judgement to the seller and the cup. It is also a reason to write down what a household knows about a tea at the moment it is bought — the seller, the date, the price, what they said about it — because a loose tea in a jar becomes an unknown within a month and a dark tea kept for a decade will outlast anybody’s memory. The catalogue makes the same point about ageing generally: the collectors who can say what a tea has experienced are in a position to learn from it.