To develop EST-SSRs functional markers in the tea (Camellia sinensis), the characterization of simple sequence repeats (SSRs) were analyzed by 3288 EST(expressed sequence tag) sequences in Camellia sinensis from NCBI. A total of 2083 non-redundant EST sequences were obtained from 3288 sequences by redundant analysis and there were 486 EST-SSRs present in 385 ESTs out of the non-redundant sequences with one EST-SSR in every 2.10 kb of EST sequence in average. Among the different motifs ranging from 2 to 6 bp, dinucleotide repeats were most abundant (51.97%), followed by trinucleotide repeats (19.55%) and mononucleotide repeats (23.35%). Among all identified motif types, AT/TA had the highest frequency (4.73%), followed by AAG/CTT (4.73 %). The software, Primer 5, designed 206 pairs of SSR primers. Among 72 pairs of primers selected randomly from them, 31 primer pairs were successfully amplifying DNA fragments with 29 polymorphic primers. The proportion of primers that produced polymorphic fragments was 93.5%. Furthermore, the availability of microsatellite markers can be expected to enhance the power and resolution of genomic analysis in tea tree．