Complete Guide to Eggplant Varieties and Their Names

These days, an awful lot of people eat eggplant. For example, many restaurants have eggplant dishes, such as pounded chili eggplant, fish-fragrant eggplant, minced pork eggplant, eggplant with green beans, and more. And grilled eggplant at street barbecue stalls has become one of the must-order dishes. So what eggplant varieties are there exactly? I believe everyone has seen the long strip-shaped ones at the market, as well as the round, plump ones.

There are currently about 200-plus local varieties of eggplant and nearly 4,000 germplasm resources. Eggplant varieties can be classified by fruit form, plant form, or by how early or late they mature. By maturity, they can be divided into 3 types: early-maturing, mid-maturing, and late-maturing. By skin color, they can be broadly divided into purple eggplant, red eggplant, green eggplant, white eggplant, and other types. At present, most people are used to dividing eggplant by fruit form into round eggplant, long eggplant, and egg (dwarf) eggplant, which are the 3 botanical varieties.

1. Jingqie No. 10

Bred by the Vegetable Research Center of the Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences and the Beijing Jingyan Yinong Science and Technology Development Center. It is a first-generation hybrid of mid-maturing long eggplant with excellent traits such as high yield and disease resistance. The plant has strong growth vigor and an upright plant type, dark green leaves, large leaves, and many fruits per plant. The fruit is long club-shaped, 30-40 cm long, 6-7 cm in transverse diameter, with a single fruit weight of about 300 g and a yield of over 4,000 kg per mu. The skin is purple-black and glossy, and the flesh is light greenish-white, tender and fine in texture, of excellent quality and good marketability.

2. Purple Gold Crown Eggplant

Strong growth vigor, plant height about 150 cm, with stems, leaves, leaf veins, petioles, fruit stalks, and sepals all green. The fruit is long oval, glossy black-purple, 25-30 cm long, with a single fruit weight of 700-1,000 g. The flesh is white, fresh and tender, with few seeds and not prone to becoming old. It tolerates weak light and can color normally in protected cultivation, making it suitable for protected cultivation, open-field cultivation, and long-season cultivation.

3. Purple Gold Long Eggplant

Vigorous growth, plant height 130 cm, fruit diameter 40 cm, single fruit weight 200-300 g, flesh white and tender, of extremely good quality, and can be eaten raw or cooked. It is drought-tolerant and waterlogging-tolerant, highly disease-resistant, does not decline early, and has strong tolerance to low temperature and weak light. It is suitable for protected and open-field cultivation, and its thick skin makes it easy to transport.

4. Early Red Ox Horn Eggplant

Early-maturing, with vigorous growth and low-temperature tolerance. It begins flowering at the 8th-9th node, has many branches and a high fruit-setting rate. The fruit is long club-shaped, 25-30 cm long and 4-5 cm in diameter. Young fruits are purplish-red, while marketable fruits are bright red with good gloss, resistant to becoming old, with few seeds, tender fine flesh, and extremely good quality. Single fruit weight is 250-350 g. It is disease-resistant, early-maturing, high-quality, and high-yielding, suitable for planting in areas that prefer long eggplant.

5. Round Eggplant

Round eggplant is one of the earliest eggplant varieties cultivated in China, and it is also one of the most widely planted eggplants in northern China. This eggplant has relatively tall plants, and the round eggplants it produces are also relatively large. It is called round eggplant because this kind of eggplant is generally round-spherical, flat-spherical, or oval-spherical. Another characteristic of this eggplant is that its flesh is very tender and generally not prone to becoming old, so even when harvested relatively late it is still fairly fresh and tender. Round eggplants generally come in three colors: purple skin, black-purple skin, and green skin.

6. Long Eggplant

Long eggplant is generally suitable for planting in southern China. In the southern Chinese market, long eggplant is much more common than other types of eggplant, mainly including Nanjing purple-line eggplant, Beijing line eggplant, Guangdong purple eggplant, and Chengdu black eggplant. The long eggplant plant has average growth vigor, and the fruit is slender and club-shaped, in purple, green, white, and black. Long eggplant generally has no late-maturing varieties; they are basically all early-maturing or mid-maturing varieties.

Actually, if we really went through every eggplant variety one by one, we would never finish. Here we have only introduced a few that people mention more often. Feel free to tell us in the comments about the most famous eggplant variety in your area and its characteristics.

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