Summary Modern monothetic hierarchical soil classification systems such as the Chinese Soil Taxonomy (CST) are semi‐quantitative and their future development is likely to trend towards a fully quantitative system using the concepts of numerical taxonomy. Previous researchers have calculated the taxonomic distances between individual soils based on soil physiochemical properties, not, however, based on spectra of full soil profiles with different horizons. We hypothesized that numerical taxonomy implemented by cluster analysis of the taxonomic distance matrix based on vis–NIR spectra would accord with some CST Orders assigned by pedologists, and not with others, depending on how closely spectral features represent the diagnostic features used in the classification. Taxonomic distances in spectral space were computed for all pairs of 191 profiles, resulting in a distance matrix on which hierarchical cluster analysis was performed. Different indices were calculated to determine the optimum number of clusters, resulting in four spectral soil classes. These were then compared with CST Orders assigned to the profiles by expert allocation. The numerical classes and CST Orders matched poorly because of the completely different classification philosophies behind numerical taxonomy and the CST, which is based largely on presumed genesis and uses sharp thresholds leading to very similar soils being allocated to different classes. Thus, we consider the numerical classification as information that is complementary to the monothetic hierarchical system. Numerical classification can reveal the taxonomic objective aspects of the relation between the defined classes and can suggest new groupings. Highlights Taxonomic distances can serve as an objective measure of soil similarity. Soil spectra are a good candidate for numerical classification based on taxonomic distances. The conceptual basis of Chinese Soil Taxonomy (CST) does not match that of taxonomic distance. Numerical classification based on spectra can suggest revisions to the CST.