Abstract: Using 80 spring sun-dried tea samples from Jingmai and Mangjing and different years as materials, standard chromatograms of Jingmai and Mangjing spring tea were constructed by HPLC fingerprint. There were 22 and 24 characteristic peaks in Jingmai and Mangjing standard chromatograms respectively, with 18 shared peaks. Jingmai and Mangjing spring sun-dried tea showed large differences in EGCG and ECG contents. Because of the uncertainty in pu-erh tea storage and the high similarity between Jingmai and Mangjing spring sun-dried tea, there might be some errors in cluster analysis of different years. For example, one of 20 tea samples can not be clustered successfully. Cluster analysis could successfully distinguish spring sun-dried teas from Jingmai area (including Jingmai spring tea and Mangjing spring tea) from other areas. Similarity analysis showed that the similarities between the standard chromatogram and tea samples from Jingmai and Mangjing were 98.9% and 99.2%, which were lower than 95% for tea samples from other areas. In conclusion, HPLC fingerprint was able to identify the sun-dried tea production areas in Jingmai of the same year, which provided a more scientific and complete method for the identification of sun-dried tea from different areas.

Key words: HPLC fingerprint, Jing-mai, sun-dried tea, cluster analysis