Abstract: The pattern recognition of domestic flue-cured tobaccos grown in different areas in terms of producing area, stalk position and grade was carried out by Mahalanobis distance criterion on the basis of principal components of the leaves characterized by near infrared spectra (NIRS).The results indicated that:1) the prediction accuracy ranged from 74%to 97%, depended upon the complexity and number of tobacco samples.The samples whose rate of misidentification happened to be over 80%were mainly from the border between Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou and Chongqing, where the biological environments were more complex and versatile.Therefore, it challenged the rationality of classifying tobacco producing areas according to administrative demarcations;2) the prediction accuracy of stalk position and grade of tobacco was lower than that of producing area, which related to that the sample number was not enough and leaf grading was substantially affected by man-made factors.