Abstract: In order to find out the variation trend of intrinsic quality of strips stored in cases, blended strips of a cigarette brand from Yunnan were stored in wooden cases for 4, 14, 24, 48 and 96 hours, respectively. By collecting the near-infrared spectra of strips samples stored for different durations, the corresponding characterization class models were developed with principal component analysis-Mahalanobis distance (PCA-MD) classification method, and validated by sensory evaluation. The results showed that the variation of tobacco quality decreased with the length of storage duration. The quality of tobacco improved significantly and tended to stabilize after storing for 48 hours.