At present, Pu 'er tea that can be tasted can be divided into three important times:No. grade tea, India grade tea and Qizi cake. Tea lovers who have drunk old tea will find that there is a string of four digits on the packaging paper of Qizi cake tea.

The numbers on the outer packaging of tea cakes refer to the numbers used by manufacturers to code tea cakes in order to conveniently identify the age, grade and factory of tea, which is actually the "tea code". These numbers are also called "marks", which are transliteration of English "mark".

"Ma Hao", also known as "Ma Tou", originally means "trademark" and "brand" in Guangdong dialect. In tea trade, it refers to the name of tea expressed by numbers or numbers supplemented by words.

The first two digits of the tea code indicate the invention date of the formula, the third digit indicates the tea cyanine series, and the fourth digit indicates the tea factory.

for example, the first two digits of 8582 cake are 85, which is the year of formula invention, not the year of production, the third digit is 8 grade tea, and the last digit is 2, which is the code name of Menghai Tea Factory.

The number of the last tea factory was formulated by Yunnan Tea Company in 1976. At that time, the largest tea factories were compiled as follows: 1. Kunming Tea Factory, 2. Menghai Tea Factory, 3. Xiaguan Tea Factory and 4. Pu 'er Tea Factory.

after the system reform, some experts and capital of state-owned tea manufacturers gradually flowed to individual portals, no longer using the original tea codes, and began to design their own numbers, resulting in the confusion of repeated numbers among tea manufacturers, which is of little significance.