To investigate the amino acid content of cigarette produced in Yunnan, the contents of 19 kinds of free amino acids in 40 samples of cigarettes produced in Yunnan were analyzed. The results showed that the mean content of proline is the highest (2 270.55 μg/g), followed by aspartic acid (220.98 μg/g) and phenylalanine (144.03 μg/g). The contents of glutamine, valine, tryptophan, histidine, glutamic acid, tyrosine, cystine, alanine, lysine, arginine, threonine and serine ranged from 10.59 to 81.37 μg/g, and those of isoleucine, leucine, asparagine and glycine were lower than 10 μg/g. There were moderate or high correlations among amino acids except for lysine. Tyrosine, histidine, serine, glutamine, threonine, tryptophan, phenylalanine, arginine, leucine, isoleucine, asparagine, valine and proline contributed significantly to cigarette quality. The 40 cigarette samples could be clustered into 3 types, and the clustering results agreed well with the actual quality of the samples.