You can brew a tea you can’t read, but you’ll get more out of it if you can read the tin. A Chinese tea label is mostly a compliance document — a record of who packed the tea, under what license, to which standard, and when. It is not a tasting note, and it is not a promise. Knowing which field does which job stops you from reading marketing words as facts, and helps you spot the handful of things that genuinely matter: the license number, the standard code, the dates, and the marks.
If you’re new to the categories themselves, Chinese Tea Basics and The Six Major Types of Chinese Tea are good companions to this page.
The label fields, one by one
Most prepackaged tea in China is labeled under the national food-labeling standard GB 7718 (currently GB 7718-2011; a revised version, GB 7718-2025, was published on 2025-03-27 and takes effect on 2027-03-16 after a two-year transition). That standard shapes which fields appear. Here’s what you’ll typically find on the back of a tea tin.
| Chinese term | Pinyin | English | What it tells you | What it can’t tell you |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 产品名称 | chǎnpǐn míngchēng | Product name | The name the producer sells it under | Doesn’t guarantee the style, cultivar or origin matches the name |
| 配料 | pèiliào | Ingredients | For plain tea, usually just 茶叶 (the tea itself) | Doesn’t confirm cultivar, garden or picking standard |
| 净含量 | jìnghánliàng | Net content | How much tea is in the pack, in grams | Doesn’t indicate leaf grade, leaf size or serving count |
| 生产者名称/地址 | shēngchǎnzhě míngchēng / dìzhǐ | Producer name and address | Who is legally responsible for the pack | The address may be a packing facility, not a tea garden |
| 产地 | chǎndì | Place of origin | Where the tea was produced, often at province level | Not a village, mountain or specific plot |
| 生产日期 | shēngchǎn rìqī | Production date | When the tea was made or packed | Not the picking date (see below) |
| 保质期 | bǎozhìqī | Shelf life | How long it keeps under the stated conditions | Says nothing about how it has actually been stored so far |
| 贮存条件 | zhùcún tiáojiàn | Storage conditions | How the producer wants it kept | The pack can’t enforce them — that part is yours |
| 食品生产许可证编号 | shípǐn shēngchǎn xǔkě zhèng biānhào | Food production license number | The producer or packer holds a license | Not quality, not exact origin — see the SC section |
| 产品标准代号 / 执行标准 | chǎnpǐn biāozhǔn dàihào / zhíxíng biāozhǔn | Product standard code | The rules the producer says they follow | Following a standard is not a verdict on how good the tea is |
| 质量等级 | zhìliàng děngjí | Quality grade | Where the named standard defines grades | Only meaningful relative to that standard |
| 地理标志专用标志 | dìlǐ biāozhì zhuānyòng biāozhì | Geographical indication mark | The product is presented as a recognized GI product | Worth cross-checking rather than trusting at a glance |
Two rows there repay the most attention: the license number and the standard code. Take them in turn.
The SC number, decoded
The food production license number starts with the letters SC — short for 生产 (shēngchǎn), “production” — followed by 14 digits. It replaced the old QS mark, which is no longer permitted and was phased out by October 2018, so a new tin carrying a QS logo is telling you something about its age or its paperwork.
The 14 digits are not random:
- Digit 1 — food (as opposed to a food additive)
- Digits 2–3 — the food category. Category 14 is tea and related products (茶叶及相关制品), so tea licenses begin SC114
- Digits 4–9 — province, city and county codes
- Digits 10–13 — a sequence number
- Digit 14 — a check digit
A made-up example of the format, not a real company’s number: SC114XXXXXXXXXXX. That pattern tells you the packer is licensed for tea, and roughly where the licensing authority sits. Nothing more.
This is the key limit: the SC number identifies the licensed producer or packer. It does not certify that the tea is good, and it does not certify that the tea came from the place named on the front. A perfectly legal, properly licensed facility can pack tea bought in from elsewhere. The license answers “who is accountable for this package?” — a useful question, but a narrow one.
If you want a buying rule that’s easy to remember: a tin packed in mainland China with no SC number at all, or with a number that doesn’t begin SC114, is worth a polite question to the seller before you spend much. Tea packed outside mainland China — in Taiwan or Hong Kong, say, or repacked by a shop abroad — follows other labeling rules and won’t carry an SC number, so its absence there isn’t a warning sign.
The standard code (执行标准)
The 执行标准 — sometimes printed as 产品标准代号 — is the standard the producer declares the product follows. The prefix tells you what kind of document it is.
- GB — mandatory national standard. Compulsory.
- GB/T — recommended national standard. Widely used for named teas; the “T” means recommended (推荐).
- GH/T — industry standard from the supply and marketing cooperatives sector.
- NY/T — industry standard from the agriculture sector.
- DB + province code + /T — provincial local standard. DB34/T, for example, is Anhui.
- T/ — group standard, written by an association rather than the state.
- Q/ — a company’s own enterprise standard, written by the producer itself.
That last one matters when you’re comparing. A Q/ standard isn’t automatically weaker — a serious producer may write a demanding one — but it is a standard you can’t compare against anything else, because it belongs to that company alone. A GB/T code, by contrast, refers to a published document you can actually read.
You can look up GB, industry and local standards on the national standards platform at std.samr.gov.cn. It’s a plain database, not a shopping site: search the code, and you’ll see the standard’s title, status and date. Ten minutes there will teach you more about a specific tea than any product page.
Many famous teas have their own product standards — GB/T 18650-2008 for Longjing, GB/T 22111-2008 for Pu’er, GB/T 18745-2006 for Wuyi rock tea, GB/T 19598-2025 for Anxi Tieguanyin. Seeing one of those on a tin is a real piece of information. Compare it against our pages on Longjing, Pu’er, Da Hong Pao and Tieguanyin and the label starts to read like a sentence instead of a scrawl.
Dates: production date, shelf life and harvest words
生产日期 is the production or packing date. It is not the picking date. A tea picked in late March and packed in June will carry a June date, and that’s normal — processing, resting, sorting, blending and packing all take time.
This is where labels most often get over-read. Words like 明前 (míng qián, “pre-Qingming”) and 春茶 (chūnchá, “spring tea”) are claims about harvest, and they sit outside the regulatory fields described above. They may be true. They are not proof. If harvest timing matters to you, read them alongside Tea Harvest Seasons, where the calendar behind those words is laid out.
The shelf-life field is straightforward but worth noticing, because it’s changing. Under the revised GB 7718-2025, effective 2027-03-16, labels will show the production date and a shelf-life expiry date (保质期到期日) in a dedicated area of the main panel, in year-month-day order; foods with a shelf life over six months may omit the production date. If you buy tea over the next couple of years you’ll see both systems in circulation, and neither one is a sign of a fake.
Once you’ve checked the dates, the storage field is the one to act on. Our How to Store Chinese Tea by Type guide takes 贮存条件 from a printed line to something you can actually do.
Grades
Grades like 特级 (tèjí, special grade) and 一级 (yījí, first grade) look absolute. They aren’t. A grade only means something relative to the specific standard named on the pack, because it’s that standard which defines the grade. 特级 under one standard and 特级 under another need not describe comparable tea.
So read the two fields together. A grade with no standard code beside it is a word floating on its own. A grade with a GB/T code is a claim you can trace back to a definition — and if the grade matters to your purchase, that’s the version to look for.
Geographical indication and organic marks
China’s geographical indication system was unified in April 2020 under a single official GI mark (地理标志专用标志) issued by the National Intellectual Property Administration, CNIPA. Older marks had a transition period that ran until 2020-12-31, so older packaging may still show them.
The GI mark’s value is that it pairs with a standard. A Longjing tin carrying both the GI mark and the Longjing standard code is making a checkable statement; a tin with the mark and no standard code is making a vague one.
Organic works differently, and it has a check built in. China’s organic product certification mark is round, with a green outer ring and the words 中国有机产品. Certified products also carry a 17-digit organic code (有机码) next to the mark — often printed under a scratch-off coating — and you can verify that code on the China Food and Agricultural Products Certification Information System at food.cnca.cn. The underlying standard is GB/T 19630-2019.
That code is the closest thing on a tea label to a verifiable fact, which is why it’s worth scratching off. If a tin shows an organic mark but no code, or a code that doesn’t return a result, treat the claim as unverified. Our Organic Tea vs Ecological Tea page explains what certification does and doesn’t cover, and how it differs from looser “ecological” wording.
Red flags and honest limits
A label can be entirely in order and still sit on tea you won’t enjoy. Keeping that in mind, here’s what tends to deserve a second look:
- On a tin packed in mainland China: no SC number, or one that doesn’t begin SC114
- A QS mark, which was phased out by October 2018
- A grade with no standard code to anchor it
- A GI mark with no matching product standard
- An organic mark with no 17-digit code, or one that doesn’t check out
- Strong harvest wording (明前, 春茶) printed where the regulatory fields are thin
And here is what no label can prove, however complete it is:
- That the tea tastes good, or suits your palate
- That it was stored well before it reached you
- That the leaf came from the specific mountain, village or garden implied by the name
- The picking standard, leaf size or processing detail, unless the named standard happens to define them
- That the tea inside is what the front of the tin suggests
Labels do one job well: they establish identity and legal responsibility. Everything else you decide with your nose, your mouth and a bit of practice — How to Taste Chinese Tea walks through a method for that.
A 60-second label checklist
- Find the SC number. Does it start with SC114?
- Find the standard code. Is it GB, GB/T, GH/T, NY/T, DB or T/ — or the producer’s own Q/?
- If a grade is printed, is there a standard code next to it?
- Read the production date. Then read the shelf life. Do the two make sense together?
- Check the storage conditions against how you’ll actually keep the tea.
- If it’s a GI tea, is the matching product standard also printed?
- If it’s organic, is there a 17-digit code? Scratch it and check it at food.cnca.cn.
- Look at the ingredients line. Plain tea should read as tea; scented tea will name its flowers.
- Note any harvest words — and file them as claims, not facts.
- Then stop reading and start brewing.
That last step is the point of the exercise. Once you’ve confirmed the pack is honest about who made it and to what rules, the label has done its work — and the rest is water, temperature and time. How to Brew Chinese Tea covers the method from scratch, and the Water Temperature Guide is the single field most worth getting right on the first attempt. If the tin arrived as a gift, Received Chinese Tea as a Gift? picks up from there.