Gyirong Valley
More actions
| Gyirong Valley | |
|---|---|
| Kyirong; Jilong; 吉隆沟 (Jílóng gōu) | |
| ActiveGrown here in 2000 or later | |
| Geography | |
| Country | China |
| Province/State | Tibet |
| Prefecture-level city | Shigatse |
| Coordinates | 28.39, 85.33 |
| Landscape | |
| Area | 743 km² |
| Terrain | The valley of the Gyirong river on the south slope of the Himalayas, in Gyirong County of Shigatse, on the frontier with Nepal; approximately that county. Ground above 4,000 m, snow and ice and bare ground are left out |
| Growing history | |
| Documentation | |
| Appellations | 0 |
| Accessions | 0 |
| Conservation | |
| Populations | none documented yet |
Gyirong Valley (Kyirong; Jilong; 吉隆沟, Jílóng gōu) is a cannabis growing area on the south slope of the Himalayas, in Gyirong County of Shigatse in Tibet, China, on the frontier with Nepal. Cannabis grows wild in the valley.[1] A reference genome of what its authors call wild Cannabis sativa was assembled from a plant collected in the Kyirong Gully.[2] A study of 2026 sampled a population there that its authors call feral.[3] The Tibetans and the Daman of Gyirong Town use the bark of the plant to make rope and tools; the Tibetans also feed the plant to cattle.[4][5]
Uses in Gyirong Town
Gyirong Town lies in the south of the county, on the border with Nepal, among coniferous and mixed forest, with mean temperatures of 10–13 °C.[5] Guo Chang-An and colleagues studied the wild plants used by its Tibetans between August 2019 and September 2021. Their list gives cannabis the local name Si1-ma1 with its bark used for tools (eight use reports) and for feeding cattle (four).[4]
In a second study, made in September 2019 and September 2021, the same authors compared the plant knowledge of the Tibetans with that of the Daman, a community of 207 people in 57 households at Daman village, about 30 km from the border, who have no farming or herding of their own and collect wild plants for income. The Daman call cannabis sei1-ma1 and use its bark to make rope (three use reports).[5]
Wild plants and their genomes
Gao Shan and colleagues collected their samples in the Kyirong Gully, a plateau gorge, in their words, that runs from 1,700 to 6,000 m on the south slope of the Himalayas. They sequenced one female plant of a wild-type variety they call JL and assembled a genome of about 808 Mb.[2] Hu Jinyuan and colleagues later collected leaves, stems, roots and seedlings at the vegetative, flowering and fruiting stages from wild-growing populations in the Kyirong Gully region; these plants, they write, share the genetic background of JL.[1] In a pangenome of cannabis, Ryan Lynch and colleagues included JL, "the single available wild Tibetan assembly"; they found it divergent from all the domesticated and feral lines they compared.[6]
Wang Baishi and colleagues sampled 30 plants, which they call feral, of a population from the "Jilong Valley, Jilong County" in a study of 271 accessions from China. In the authors' tree the Jilong population falls in one group with the populations from Yadong (Chumbi Valley) and Nyingchi (Kongpo).[3]
Appellations
No appellation pages exist for this growing area yet.
Accessions
No accessions documented yet.
Recent news
No news items are recorded for this growing area yet.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Hu, Jinyuan; Wang, Zishi; Xu, He; Wang, Zhenlong; Li, Ning; Feng, Rui; Yin, Jianyu; Liu, Fangru; Wang, Baishi (2025). "Transcriptomic analysis of wild Cannabis sativa: insights into tissue- and stage-specific expression and secondary metabolic regulation". BMC Genomics. 26 (1) 528. doi:10.1186/s12864-025-11697-5.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Gao, Shan; Wang, Baishi; Xie, Shanshan; Xu, Xiaoyu; Zhang, Jin; Pei, Li; Yu, Yongyi; Yang, Weifei; Zhang, Ying (2020). "A high-quality reference genome of wild Cannabis sativa". Horticulture Research. 7 (1) 73. doi:10.1038/s41438-020-0295-3.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Wang, Baishi; Gao, Shan; Wang, Xue; Yun, Quanzheng; Nie, Hao; Li, Ning; Li, Yonggang; Feng, Deri; Li, Linsen; Li, Tianye; Lu, Xu; Liu, Jingjing; Wei, Xuge; Mu, Yanhong; Wu, Qiqi; Hu, Jinyuan; Liu, Fangru; Feng, Rui; Yin, Jianyu; Zhang, Qikun; Zhang, Ying; Ren, Fu (7 September 2026). "Genomic variation in 271 diverse accessions of Cannabis sativa L. in China". BMC Plant Biology. doi:10.1186/s12870-026-09909-5.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Guo, Chang-An; Ding, Xiaoyong; Hu, Huabin; Zhang, Yu; Yang, Huizhao; Wang, Yuhua (2022). "An ethnobotanical study on wild plants used by Tibetan people in Gyirong Valley, Tibet, China". Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine. 18 (1) 67. doi:10.1186/s13002-022-00565-1.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Guo, Chang-An; Ding, Xiaoyong; Hu, Huabin; Zhang, Yu; Bianba, Ciren; Bian, Ba; Wang, Yuhua (2023). "A comparison of traditional plant knowledge between Daman people and Tibetans in Gyirong River Valley, Tibet, China". Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine. 19 (1) 14. doi:10.1186/s13002-023-00583-7.
- ↑ Lynch, R.C.; Padgitt-Cobb, L.K.; Garfinkel, A.R.; Knaus, B.J.; Hartwick, N.T.; et al. (2025). "Domesticated cannabinoid synthases amid a wild mosaic cannabis pangenome". Nature. 643 (8073): 1001–1010. doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09065-0. PMC 12286863.