Talk:Chumbi Valley
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Discussion
Why the area is on the map
- Wang and colleagues (2026): a population of ten plants (YD) from "Yadong County, Xigaze City, Xizang", at 2,945 m, 27.4839° N, 88.9067° E, called feral in the paper's table.
- Rohmoo Lepcha 57 (1912), a sheet from Lingmuthang in the valley.
Growing status
The status is Active: the Yadong plants were collected on 10 May 2020 (the date in their NCBI sample entries); the paper was published in 2026. The paper calls the population feral; no source names a field crop of hemp in the valley.
How the border is drawn
- The border is drawn within Yadong County, Shigatse, Tibet, China, as mapped in OpenStreetMap (relation 2744888, read 22 October 2026). It stops at the frontiers with India (Sikkim) and Bhutan as OpenStreetMap maps them. Where the Eastern Himalayas border reaches the frontier, the two share one line; where that border's coarser line stops short of it, the narrow strip between is ground of India or Bhutan as OpenStreetMap maps it and is inside neither border.
- The south-eastern corner of the border, the Doklam plateau, follows Yadong County as OpenStreetMap maps it; Bhutan also claims that ground.
- The outer edge follows the ridges round the valleys that hold land below 4,000 m (SRTM elevation): each such valley is taken whole, up to the divide round it. Valleys with no such land, where the ground is above 4,000 m or is mapped by ESA WorldCover 2021 as bare or sparse vegetation, snow and ice, or open water, are left out at the edge; land of those kinds inside the kept ground stays inside. This takes out about 3,200 km² of the 4,300 km² of the county: the high plateau north of the valley, towards Chomolhari.
- Check points inside the border: Yadong (Xia Yadong), the collecting point of Rohmoo Lepcha 57. Outside it: Gangtok (India), Paro (Bhutan).
- Where this border meets the Eastern Himalayas, the two share one line.
- Land cover: ESA WorldCover 2021 (version 200, 10 m), © ESA WorldCover project 2021 / Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021) processed by ESA WorldCover consortium, licensed CC BY 4.0. Elevation: AWS Terrain Tiles (Terrarium, SRTM-based), zoom 10.
The area has no parent region. Eastern Himalayas covers eastern India and Bhutan; its border does not cross into Tibet.
The name
"Chumbi Valley" is the name of the British travellers and of the 1912 collector's labels; the county is Yadong (亚东, Yàdōng), the Yatung of the British trade mart. The river is the Amo, which becomes the Torsa in Bhutan. The label of the 1912 sheet writes "Lingmuthang".
Accessions inside the border
Rohmoo Lepcha 57 (1912) lies inside the border but is not filed under the area. Its label gives the place, the altitude and the date but says nothing of whether the plant was cultivated, escaped or wild, so the sheet is classed as of unknown status.
Sources
- Wang and colleagues (2026), BMC Plant Biology: Table S1 of the supplement.
- Rohmoo Lepcha 57: the Edinburgh sheet E00248816 and the Kew sheet of the same collector's number 64 (August 1912), labelled "Lingmuthang, Chumbi Valley, East Himalaya".
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: the valley's position between Sikkim and Bhutan.
What other sources on the valley say
- Waddell (1905), on the British expedition of 1903–1904 and Bell (1928), on Tibetan village life, both describe the Chumbi Valley at length and name no hemp there. Waddell's "Indian hemp" grows far to the north, on the Tsangpo.
- Guo and colleagues (2022), a study of the plants used in the Yadong valley, list no cannabis.