TTES Nos. 1–25: The Complete Official Registry of Taiwan's Tea Cultivars

Varieties & Types｜Author：祥興茶行｜Published：2026-07-13

Every TTES cultivar's seed parent, pollen parent, cross year, naming year, and official processing suitability, laid out row by row from the government's own summary table — plus a map of the databases where you can verify it all yourself.

Start with a trick question: who fathered TTES No. 25, the purple-leaf cultivar Ziyun (紫韻)? The answer — not even the government station that bred it can tell you. In the official cultivar registry, its pollen-parent column reads simply "natural hybridization," meaning the mother tree was open-pollinated in the field and nobody knows which plant the pollen drifted in from. That is not a gap in the records. It is the most honest thing about Taiwan's cultivar registry: some pedigrees the officials know cold, and for others even they can only write down the truth — natural cross, father unknown.

This article does one job: it lays out TTES Nos. 1 through 25 as a reference table you can actually look things up in — seed parent, pollen parent, cross year, naming year, and official processing suitability for every number, each row filled in from the official consolidated table. Then we take a tour: if you want to fact-check Taiwanese tea cultivars yourself, where do the government and academic databases live, and what can each one tell you? As for how the family lines connect, our companion piece "A Family Tree of Taiwanese Oolong" has already told those stories. This article is the index, not a retelling.

Taiwan's official cultivar data lives in two kinds of places Go looking for TTES Nos. 1–25 on the website of the Tea and Beverage Research Station (TBRS, under the Ministry of Agriculture) and you'll find the cultivars scattered by tea type: one page for oolong-suited cultivars, another for black-tea cultivars, a page of its own for the native mountain-tea TTES No. 24, and yet another for the purple-leaf No. 25 [8] — you would have to stitch several sub-pages together yourself. Fortunately, TBRS also compiled a single official summary table, "An Introduction to Tea Cultivars Bred by the Tea and Beverage Research Station" (prepared by its Genetics, Breeding and Biotechnology Laboratory; last revised July 25, 2023), gathering all 25 numbers' seed and pollen parents, cross and naming years, plant habit, and suitability into one sheet [17]. The registry below follows that official table row by row.

The Official Registry: TTES Nos. 1–25 in Full

The table below is filled in number by number from the TBRS summary table "An Introduction to Tea Cultivars Bred by the Tea and Beverage Research Station"; every one of the 25 entries rests on a first-hand official source [17]. One reminder before you read: where a pollen-parent cell says "natural hybrid, father unknown," that is not a blank we failed to fill. It is what the official record itself says — the mother tree was open-pollinated, the pollen source cannot be identified, and the station could only record it honestly (more on this in the next section).

TTES No. · Cultivar ｜ Seed parent ｜ Pollen parent ｜ Cross year ｜ Naming year ｜ Official suitability

TTES No. 1 (Tainung 705) ｜ Qingxin Damao (青心大冇) ｜ Kyang (Indian large-leaf) ｜ 1916 ｜ 1969 ｜ Black tea, mei tea, oolong

TTES No. 2 (Tainung 478) ｜ Daye Oolong (大葉烏龍) ｜ Jaipuri (Indian large-leaf) ｜ 1916 ｜ 1969 ｜ Black tea, mei tea, oolong

TTES No. 3 (Tainung 609) ｜ Hongxin Damao (紅心大冇) ｜ Manipuri (Indian large-leaf) ｜ 1916 ｜ 1969 ｜ Black tea, mei tea

TTES No. 4 (Tainung 684) ｜ Hongxin Damao (紅心大冇) ｜ Manipuri (Indian large-leaf) ｜ 1916 ｜ 1969 ｜ Black tea, mei tea

TTES No. 5 (Tainung 105) ｜ Fuzhou line (natural hybrid) ｜ Natural hybrid, father unknown ｜ 1928 ｜ 1973 ｜ Oolong, green tea, baozhong

TTES No. 6 (Tainung 121) ｜ Qingxin Oolong line (natural hybrid) ｜ Natural hybrid, father unknown ｜ 1928 ｜ 1973 ｜ Green tea, black tea, oolong

TTES No. 7 (line 5118) ｜ Shan single-plant selection (Shan States large-leaf) ｜ Single-plant selection (no pollen parent) ｜ 1941 ｜ 1973 ｜ Black tea

TTES No. 8 (line 184) ｜ Jaipuri single-plant selection (Indian large-leaf) ｜ Single-plant selection (no pollen parent) ｜ 1941 ｜ 1973 ｜ Black tea

TTES No. 9 (Tainung 435) ｜ Hongxin Damao (紅心大冇) ｜ Kyang ｜ 1947 ｜ 1975 ｜ Green tea, black tea

TTES No. 10 (Tainung 358) ｜ Huanggan (黃柑) ｜ Jaipuri ｜ 1947 ｜ 1975 ｜ Green tea, black tea

TTES No. 11 (line 311) ｜ Daye Oolong (大葉烏龍) ｜ Jaipuri ｜ 1947 ｜ 1975 ｜ Green tea, black tea

TTES No. 12 Jin Xuan (line 2027) ｜ Tainung 8 ｜ Yingzhi Hongxin (硬枝紅心) ｜ 1938 ｜ 1981 ｜ Oolong, baozhong

TTES No. 13 Cui Yu (line 2029) ｜ Yingzhi Hongxin (硬枝紅心) ｜ Tainung 80 ｜ 1938 ｜ 1981 ｜ Oolong, baozhong

TTES No. 14 Baiwen ｜ Tainung 983 ｜ Baimao Hou (白毛猴) ｜ 1960 ｜ 1983 ｜ Oolong, baozhong

TTES No. 15 Baiyan ｜ Tainung 983 ｜ Baimao Hou (白毛猴) ｜ 1960 ｜ 1983 ｜ Oolong, white tea

TTES No. 16 Baihe ｜ Tainung 335 ｜ Tainung 1958 ｜ 1960 ｜ 1983 ｜ Longjing, baozhong scenting base

TTES No. 17 Bailu ｜ Tainung 335 ｜ Tainung 1958 ｜ 1960 ｜ 1983 ｜ Oolong, shou mei

TTES No. 18 Hong Yu (line B-40-58) ｜ Burmese large-leaf (Burma) ｜ Taiwan native mountain tea ｜ 1946 ｜ 1999 ｜ Black tea

TTES No. 19 Bi Yu ｜ TTES No. 12 (Jin Xuan) ｜ Qingxin Oolong (青心烏龍) ｜ 1962 ｜ 2004 ｜ Baozhong, oolong

TTES No. 20 Yingxiang ｜ Line 2022 ｜ Qingxin Oolong (青心烏龍) ｜ 1962 ｜ 2004 ｜ Baozhong, oolong

TTES No. 21 Hongyun (line FKK-22) ｜ FKK-1 ｜ Natural hybrid, father unknown ｜ 1953 ｜ 2008 ｜ Black tea

TTES No. 22 Qinyu ｜ TTES No. 12 (Jin Xuan) ｜ Qingxin Oolong (青心烏龍) ｜ 1996 ｜ 2014 ｜ Baozhong, oolong

TTES No. 23 Qiyun ｜ Keemun line (natural hybrid) ｜ Natural hybrid, father unknown ｜ 1938 ｜ 2017 (2018 on another page) ｜ Black tea

TTES No. 24 Shanyun ｜ Taiwan native mountain tea, Yongkang variant ｜ Native-population selection (no pollen parent) ｜ 2001 ｜ 2019 ｜ Green tea, black tea

TTES No. 25 Ziyun ｜ Burmese large-leaf (Burma) ｜ Natural hybrid, father unknown ｜ 1992 ｜ 2021 ｜ Green tea, black tea

How to read this table: the line names (in parentheses, or the Tainung numbers) are internal breeding codes — Jin Xuan was line 2027, Hong Yu was B-40-58. Seed parent and pollen parent are the two sides of the cross. The cross year is when the hand-pollination was completed; the naming year is when the cultivar was formally registered and released, and the two are often decades apart (Jin Xuan was crossed in 1938 and not named until 1981). The numbers whose pollen-parent cell reads "natural hybrid, father unknown" (5, 6, 21, 23, 25) are genuine official records of "mother known, father unknown." Nos. 7, 8, and 24, marked "single-plant selection / native-population selection," were never crosses at all — they are superior individuals picked out of seedling populations, so there is no pollen parent to name [17].

Four Things This Registry Does Not Say

The worst thing a reference can do is dress up secondhand lore as official fact. The four points below are the ones most often written wrong — and the best test of whether a registry like this one is being honest.

Hongyun (No. 21) was not bred by crossing Kyang with Keemun The official summary table records Hongyun's seed parent as FKK-1 and its pollen parent as "natural hybridization" [17]; the station's black-tea page likewise describes it as descended from a hand cross of Indian large-leaf and Keemun, "then selected after a subsequent natural cross" [3]. In plain terms: its maternal line is the breeding line FKK-1 — it is FKK-1 that descends from the Indian large-leaf × Keemun cross — while its father is whatever pollen drifted in during open pollination, which the officials cannot identify. The accurate summary is "mother known, father unknown": the maternal line is traceable, the pollen parent is not. Collapsing this into "Kyang crossed with Keemun gave us Hongyun" promotes distant ancestors into direct parents, and gets the pedigree wrong [3][17].

Officially, Ziyun's (No. 25) mother is not TTES No. 13 The official summary table records No. 25's seed parent as Burmese large-leaf (Burma) and its pollen parent as "natural hybridization"; nowhere does it list TTES No. 13 as the mother [17]. The purple-leaf cultivar page says the same — "a natural hybrid of Burmese large-leaf" [7]. A claim circulating in the trade (from 七三茶堂, among others) has it as "TTES No. 13 × Burmese large-leaf," but the official record does not carry it — treat it as a lead worth checking, never a conclusion. Which brings us back to the opening question: its father is precisely that unidentifiable open-pollination source.

On Qiyun's (No. 23) naming year, the officials disagree with themselves The official summary table and the TBRS No. 23 cultivar page both record it as named in 2017 (ROC year 106) [4][17] — yet the station's consolidated black-tea page says 2018 [3]. All three sources are official, so this article reports both years side by side and takes no side. The gap may be the difference between approval and public announcement, but no source confirms that, so we won't invent an explanation.

Shanyun's (No. 24) "glacial relict" story comes from the press, not the cultivar page: you often hear that TTES No. 24 Shanyun "clusters apart from western mountain tea in DNA groupings and is a relict plant left over from the ice ages." That intriguing account comes from semi-official media reports such as AgriHarvest, and does not appear in the official fields of TBRS cultivar page id=4741 [5][6]. It is useful for appreciating the genetic distinctiveness of Taiwan's native mountain tea — but cite it as journalism, never promote it into the cultivar page's official verdict.

The Timeline: Taiwan's Breeding Priorities at a Glance

Plot all 25 numbers on a timeline by official naming year and a clear arc emerges. The early releases (1969–1983) revolve almost entirely around black tea, mei tea, and oolong, borrowing Indian and Burmese large-leaf pollen parents — Kyang, Jaipuri, Manipuri — over and over. After 1999, the named stars appear one by one: Hong Yu, Bi Yu, Yingxiang, with Qingxin Oolong serving repeatedly as the pollen parent for the baozhong series. By 2019 and 2021, the breeding focus has shifted to native mountain tea and an ornamental purple-leaf cultivar. Every naming year on the axis is backed by the official summary table, so the whole timeline can be plotted with a clear conscience [17].

Want to Verify It Yourself? A Map of Five Databases

Fact-checking a Taiwanese tea cultivar takes more than a search engine. Breeding traits, germplasm conservation, DNA fingerprinting, whole-genome sequences — each lives in its own official or academic home. The map below draws out the division of labor. Remember which question goes to which database, and you'll never need to memorize the numbers.

Meet the five databases, one by one NPGRC, the National Plant Genetic Resources Center (under the Ministry of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Institute) is the national body responsible for collecting, conserving, and distributing crop germplasm — billed as "Taiwan's Noah's ark for crops," it keeps accessions in long-term cold, dry storage with capacity for hundreds of thousands of samples, and it also publishes the standard trait descriptor list for tea, effectively the official field framework for cultivar registration [12]. TBRS (the Tea and Beverage Research Station) owns breeding, cultivar traits, plant variety rights, and DNA molecular identification [8][9]. GenBank is the international sequence archive; it holds complete chloroplast genomes (roughly 156–157 kb) for several tea cultivars, and because chloroplasts are maternally inherited, they are especially suited to tracing seed parents [15]. TPIA2, maintained by Anhui Agricultural University, is the flagship platform: 10 Camellia genomes, 437,253 protein-coding genes, and 354 organelle genomes, plus resequencing data for 350 accessions yielding roughly 15.4 million SNPs — free to query, no registration required [13]. TeaPVs, from Nanjing Agricultural University, is the integrated variation database: 238 resequenced whole genomes, 213 transcriptomes, and 96 hybrid offspring, all organized so that variant sites are actually searchable [14].

How DNA Blood-Tests a Pedigree

Can you trust the parents written down in the literature? The modern way to check is to go straight to the DNA. A team led by Hu Chih-Yi at the tea station laid out the principles and uses of this "molecular marker" toolkit in a review-style introductory article published in the Agricultural Biotechnology Industry Quarterly [10].

A molecular marker is a stretch of DNA chosen because it varies from cultivar to cultivar — a barcode on each variety's ID card. Unlike catechins, whose astringency you can actually taste, what's being read here is the DNA sequence itself [10]. Two families do most of the work: SSR (simple sequence repeats) and CAPS (cleaved amplified polymorphic sequences). CAPS was designed specifically for telling cultivars apart, and the review names it the tool of choice for cultivar identification [10].

Even lookalike close relatives come apart cleanly The most persuasive exhibit is an SSR capillary electropherogram: Qingxin Oolong, Jin Xuan (TTES No. 12), and Bi Yu (TTES No. 19) — three closely related cultivars — each throw peaks at their own positions on the instrument, distinguishable at a glance [10]. In other words, a handful of highly specific SSR/CAPS markers is enough to separate Taiwan's mainstay green, baozhong, and oolong cultivars, no expensive whole-genome sequencing required [10].

The pedigree on paper has molecular receipts Bi Yu's (TTES No. 19) pedigree reads "seed parent Jin Xuan, pollen parent Qingxin Oolong." The electropherogram bears this out exactly: No. 19 shows both a 110 bp and a 120 bp peak — the 120 bp peak inherited from its mother Jin Xuan, the 110 bp peak from its father Qingxin Oolong [10]. Each parent contributes one band; the offspring carries both. It is a textbook case of the written pedigree and the DNA-verified pedigree lining up. And since Qingxin Oolong was already the shared father of several baozhong cultivars, this kind of molecular confirmation carries all the more weight [10].

Even finished tea can be tested Fresh leaves can be typed — and so can made tea. With a CAPS marker, PCR first amplifies a 647 bp fragment, which an enzyme then cuts into pieces of 441 and 206 bp; the same cultivar gives the same pattern whether it has been processed into green tea, baozhong, or oolong, identical to fresh leaf [10]. Rolling and roasting, in other words, do not erase the DNA barcode. And because chloroplasts pass down only through the maternal line and mutate slowly, they are particularly suited to confirming seed parents and tracing germplasm origins [10].

Where this technology bites: in 2005 (ROC year 94), Taiwan amended the law to bring tea plants under the protection of the Plant Variety and Plant Seed Act, so any suspected misuse of a licensed cultivar needs scientifically reliable proof. The tea station has used these highly specific SSR/CAPS markers to build DNA identification profiles for important cultivars, serving as the evidentiary basis for variety-infringement cases and forensic enforcement [9][10]. (The source speaks only of evidence and forensics — not of customs seizures or fines — so neither will we.) One aside worth knowing: conventional breeding takes at least two decades per new cultivar — the review puts it at a minimum of 21 years — and molecular markers can shorten that long verification stage. The station has also used SSR, ISSR, and RAPD markers to assemble the skeleton of Taiwan's first tea genetic linkage map [10].

There is a set of frequently quoted figures — a few dozen EST-SSR markers, a hundred-odd alleles, a polymorphism information content of "zero point something" — that does not actually come from this review, but from a separate specialist paper the same team published in the Taiwan Tea Research Bulletin [10]. Since we have not obtained that primary full text, this article declines to commit those precise numbers to print. Likewise, different abstracts disagree on exactly how many primer sets can identify how many cultivars, so until the original can be checked we say only this much, conservatively: a small number of highly specific molecular markers is enough to distinguish Taiwan's dozen-plus major tea cultivars [10]. Pin down what can be pinned down; leave honest blanks where you can't — that is this article's posture throughout. As for the claim that TTES No. 24 Shanyun "clusters apart from western mountain tea in DNA groupings," it is an extension of the same molecular-clustering logic, but it comes from media coverage rather than the cultivar page's official fields — as flagged above [6].

💡 The whole article in one line: family-tree stories tell the pedigree, databases and DNA markers test the pedigree, and the registry lays every number's mother, father, and years honestly on a single table.

The Takeaway, Over One Last Cup

Further reading: "A Family Tree of Taiwanese Oolong: the bloodlines from Qingxin Oolong to Jin Xuan and Cui Yu" — that piece tells the story; this one is its lookup table.

References

  1. 農業部茶及飲料作物改良場（TBRS）．臺茶 1 號品種頁．https://www.tbrs.gov.tw/ws.php?id=4682
  2. 農業部茶及飲料作物改良場．育成適製部分發酵茶（烏龍茶）品種（臺茶 12／13／17／19／20／22 號）．https://www.tbrs.gov.tw/ws.php?id=4740
  3. 農業部茶及飲料作物改良場中部分場．育成適製紅茶品種（臺茶 7／8／18／21／23 號）．https://www.tbrs.gov.tw/ws.php?id=4739
  4. 農業部茶及飲料作物改良場．臺茶 23 號（祁韻）品種頁（記民國 106／2017 命名）．https://www.tbrs.gov.tw/ws.php?id=3979
  5. 農業部茶及飲料作物改良場東部分場．臺茶 24 號（山蘊）原生山茶品種頁．https://www.tbrs.gov.tw/ws.php?id=4741
  6. 農傳媒．臺茶 24 號山蘊育成報導（DNA 分群、冰河孑遺說法出處，媒體報導）．https://www.agriharvest.tw/archives/101850/
  7. 農業部茶及飲料作物改良場中部分場．臺茶 25 號（紫韻／紫豔）紫芽茶品種頁．https://www.tbrs.gov.tw/ws.php?id=4698
  8. 農業部茶及飲料作物改良場．育成品種總覽（依茶類分子頁）．https://www.tbrs.gov.tw/ws.php?id=1500
  9. 茶業改良場（TRES／TBRS）．DNA 分子標誌應用於茶樹品種鑑定（官方技術報告頁，id=1666）．https://www.tres.gov.tw/ws.php?id=1666
  10. 胡智益、蔡右任、林順福（2011）．DNA 分子標誌應用在茶樹之現況與潛力．農業生技產業季刊（植物種苗生技）第 25 期，頁 30–37（產業性刊物、回顧／導論型文章，非同儕審查期刊；文中所引 41 組 EST-SSR／253 對偶基因／PIC 0.64 等量化數據，出自其參考文獻另一篇《應用 EST-SSR 分子標誌於臺灣茶樹栽培品種鑑定》〔茶業研究彙報〕，不在本文，本文未寫入具體數字）．
  11. 胡智益（2013）．茶樹品種分子鑑定技術之開發及遺傳圖譜之建構（國立臺灣大學碩士論文，DOI 10.6342/NTU.2013.03059；遺傳圖譜 cM／連鎖群細節之延伸來源，本文未引具體數值）．
  12. 農業部農業試驗所．國家作物種原中心（NPGRC）機構功能與茶樹性狀描述子．https://www.npgrc.tari.gov.tw/
  13. Xia E., et al. TPIA2: an updated tea plant information archive for Camellia genomics. Nucleic Acids Research, 2023, 52(D1):D1661–D1667. https://tpia.teaplants.cn
  14. TeaPVs：茶樹綜合型變異資料庫．BMC Plant Biology, 2022（PMID 36324064）．https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9632082/
  15. NCBI GenBank．Camellia sinensis「鐵觀音」葉綠體完整基因組，登錄號 MW148820．https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MW148820
  16. Tea Research and Extension Station（TRES/TBRS）．機構沿革（1903 製茶試驗場 →1968 TTES→2003 TRES→2023 TBRS）．https://www.tres.gov.tw/en/ws.php?id=987
  17. 農業部茶及飲料作物改良場．《茶及飲料作物改良場育成之茶樹品種介紹》官方彙整表（作物改良科遺傳育種及生物技術研究室製表，修正製表日期 112.07.25／2023-07-25）．

Teas mentioned