Abstract:Citri Reticulatae Pericarpium (CRP) peel is an important medicine and food homologous product, and its quality is closely associated with factors such as its origin and harvesting period. In order to explore the changing trend of key characteristic flavonoid components and their contents in CRP obtained from different provinces and harvest periods, quality evaluation and identification of CRP were performed, a total of 278 CRP samples were collected from Chongqing, Sichuan, Guangdong, and Fujian provinces, and during three harvesting periods from Xinhui. The differences in contents of five flavonoid components in CRP samples, including naringin, hesperidin, evodiamine, 3,5,6,7,8,3′,4′-heptamethoxyflavone, and tangeretin, were determined and compared using high-performance liquid chromatography combined with chemometric methods. The results showed that Guangdong CRP had the lowest contents of naringin (0.33 mg/g) and hesperidin (27.20 mg/g), Sichuan CRP had the lowest contents of neohesperidin (3.50 mg/g) and tangeretin (1.14 mg/g), and Fujian CRP had the lowest content of 3,5,6,7,8,3′4′-heptamethoxy flavone (0.14 mg/g). The origin discrimination model achieved a classification accuracy up to 94.64% for CRP samples from the four provinces, for Citrus reticulata ‘Chachi’ and Citrus reticulata Blanco, the classification accuracy exceeded 98.20%. Hesperidin, neohesperidin, and naringin were identified as the key differential components to distinguish CRP samples from different provinces. The contents of the five flavonoid components generally decreased with the delay of harvesting period, although this was not suitable for distinguishing based on different harvesting periods. This result provides a theoretical basis for the quality evaluation and origin identification of CRP and offers a reference for CRP’s development and utilization.