The recurring descriptors
MAO FENG — "downy peak" — describes a fine pluck of bud and one or two leaves with visible down. Huangshan Mao Feng is the famous one; Mao Feng appears attached to a dozen other places and means the same thing about the leaf each time. MAO JIAN — "downy tip" — similar, a fine tippy pluck, most famously Xinyang Mao Jian. YIN ZHEN — "silver needle" — bud-only, downy, needle-shaped. Bai Hao Yin Zhen is the white tea; the phrase turns up elsewhere. BAI HAO — "white down" — the fine white hair on an unopened bud, indicating a young pluck. GONG or GONGCHA — "tribute" — historically a tea presented to the court, now a quality claim with no fixed meaning. HAO or HAOYA — down, downy tip. YA — bud. XIANG — fragrant. HONG — red, meaning what English calls black. LU — green. QING — a colour word covering green and blue-green, and a genuine source of confusion. So "Yunnan Hong Mao Feng" decomposes into place, category and pluck description, and names no unique tea at all.
Why this matters commercially
Because a descriptor attached to a famous place reads like a famous tea and is not one. Once you can see that Mao Feng is a description, "[somewhere] Mao Feng" stops looking like a proper name and starts looking like what it is: a fine-plucked green tea from somewhere, which may be excellent and is not Huangshan Mao Feng. It also explains the apparent explosion of tea names a beginner meets. There are not thousands of distinct teas; there is a modest vocabulary of places, categories, cultivars and descriptors recombining, and the recombination is systematic.
The grading acronyms do the same job in English
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
The Indian and Ceylon letter grades are the same phenomenon in another language: OP, BOP, FOP, GFOP, TGFOP, FTGFOP, SFTGFOP. Read them right to left. OP is Orange Pekoe, a leaf-size grade rather than a quality one and nothing to do with oranges. B is broken. F is flowery, meaning bud content. G is golden, meaning the colour of those buds after processing. T is tippy. The further F is finest, and S is special, and by that point the letters are competitive rather than descriptive. The key correction: these describe LEAF SIZE and BUD CONTENT, not quality, and they are not certified by anybody. A high-lettered grade from a poor garden is a well-plucked poor tea.
Poetic names, and how much of the story is documented
A separate class: Da Hong Pao (Big Red Robe), Tie Guan Yin (Iron Goddess of Mercy), Shui Xian (Water Sprite), Bi Luo Chun (Green Snail Spring), Que She (Sparrow's Tongue). Most carry an origin legend — an emperor's robe draped over bushes, a goddess appearing in a dream, a name changed because the original was too coarse for the court. Those stories are traditional narratives and are recorded as such rather than as documented history; several are attested only long after the events they describe. Some of the poetic names are also shape descriptions doing double duty. Sparrow's Tongue and Green Snail Spring describe what the dry leaf looks like, which makes them useful as well as pretty.
What to do with a name you do not recognise
Split it. Ask which part is a place, which is a category word, which is a pluck descriptor and which — if any — is unique to this tea. Most of the time the unique part is smaller than it looked, and what is left is a compact and genuinely informative description of a green tea, from a region, picked at a standard. That is a better thing to know than a name you have memorised without understanding.