Abstract: To address the challenges in discriminating soil types and fertility grades in agricultural and forestry production, a soil classification system was developed based on the fertility characteristics of the effective soil layer, leveraging established methodologies from both domestic and international systems. This method is used to evaluate the fertility of typical zonal upland soils in China, and the result is as follows: dark soil > dark brown soil > brown soil > purple soil > yellow-brown soil > cinnamon soil > yellow soil > sierozem > red soil. This result demonstrates that the new fertility evaluation method can effectively reveal the zonal differences in soil fertility. Empirical analysis comparing this classification and naming system with the “Third National Soil Survey” (TNSS) classification, naming, and fertility evaluation shows that: this classification and naming system can establish a one-to-one correspondence with the soil species names in the TNSS based on the morphological characteristics of soil profiles, and the order of soil fertility grades (from high to low) is roughly the same. This classification method has advantages such as easy collection of indicators and simple operation. It achieves the unification of soil names and soil fertility, and has the guiding significance for agricultural and forestry production.