Talk:Dry Zone

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Dry Zone treats the dry central plains of Myanmar, in Sagaing, Mandalay and Magway regions, as a cannabis growing region: the small and mostly hidden cultivation that officials reported to the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in 1893–94, the memories of growing under the Burmese kings recorded at the same time, and the cannabis grown in Ayadaw Township since 2022–23. Its growing areas are Ayadaw (active), Kyaukse (historical) and Madaya (no longer grown). The colonial history of hemp drugs in Burma as a whole belongs to Cannabis in colonial Burma.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Why the region is mapped

• 1890s. Witnesses before the Hemp Drugs Commission (Vol. VII, Burma witnesses) place ganja grown under the prohibition in the districts of Mandalay (Burne: Madaya and Pyinulwin townships, 1891), Kyaukse (Bridges, Parrott, Peile), Meiktila (Bridges, Adamson) and Sagaing (Eyre, Prendergast). The Commission's report (Vol. I, para. 137) names Thayetmyo, Meiktila, Kyaukse and Mandalay as perhaps the districts where it was most prevalent.
• Under the Burmese kings. Township officers whose statements Bridges forwarded recall growers at Yamethin, Yindaw, Lewe and Pindale. Lewis, who ran the excise at Thayetmyo before 1873, says ganja "was extensively grown across our old border".
• Since 2000. The Irrawaddy (4 December 2025) reports villages in Ayadaw Township and on its border with Myinmu growing cannabis since 2022–23. The April 2019 raid on a company plantation in the Myotha Industrial Park, Mandalay Region, is a single event and is not treated as a growing area.
• No source read calls the Dry Zone a cannabis region in so many words. The region is the frame that joins the places these sources name on the dry plains of the middle Ayeyarwady.

Growing status

The status is Active: the Ayadaw report gives cultivation from 2022–23 to 2025. The colonial tracts keep their own statuses on their area pages: Kyaukse Historical, Madaya No longer grown.

Places named in the article that have no growing area

• Meiktila. Two witnesses (Bridges: a Burman fined five rupees for growing plants at Meiktila; Adamson: secret cultivation in gardens) and the Commission's list of districts.
• Sagaing. Two witnesses (Eyre and Prendergast, the district's Deputy Commissioner and police superintendent).
• Yamethin, Yindaw, Lewe and Pindale. Statements by township officers, all forwarded by Bridges, about growing before the annexation.
• Thayetmyo. Parrott saw plants there, and Lewis describes cultivation across the old frontier; neither names a place below the district.

These stay in the region's prose for now.

How the border is drawn

• Khin Thein Oo's rainfall study (2016) bounds the Dry Zone at the 40-inch isohyet and counts 62 townships in it (27 in Mandalay Region, 16 in lower Sagaing, 19 in Magway), about 19,000 square miles (49,000 km²), the figure in the infobox. The isohyet is not mapped in OpenStreetMap, so the border is drawn on whole townships.
• The townships are, first, the 54 that the Myanmar Information Management Unit's map of the Dry Zone (map MIMU1314v01, 12 October 2026) labels by name inside its Dry Zone boundary, and the five townships of Mandalay city, which the map labels as Mandalay. To these are added Madaya, Singu and Sintgaing, which Khin Thein Oo's study names in its rainfall zones of the Dry Zone, and Amarapura and Patheingyi, round Mandalay city, where the study reports rain-gauge readings. That is 64 OpenStreetMap township relations. Tatkon Township, in Nay Pyi Taw, is on the map and is included.
• Because whole townships are used, the drawn border covers about 84,800 km², much more than the zone inside the isohyet. Townships at the edges, such as Kanbalu, Pauk, Seikphyu, Ngape and Tatkon, reach well beyond it.
• Lewe Township (now in Nay Pyi Taw), named in the article for the 1893 statements, is not on the map's list and lies outside the border. Pyin Oo Lwin Township, on the Shan plateau, is outside too; it is named in the article because the 1891 cultivation in Mandalay district reached into it.
• The map point (21.30, 95.60) is a central point of the zone. The border is not drawn from accession or news points.

Wallich 4665 H (1826)

Nathaniel Wallich's sheet of November 1826 comes from Tong Dong near Ava (Inwa), which lies inside the border. It is not placed in the region, because neither its label nor any source read says the plant was cultivated there.

Where the sources disagree

• Growing under the Burmese kings. The Kinwun Mingyi never heard of hemp cultivated anywhere in Burma under Burmese rule; U Pe Si recalled a little on the southern border of Upper Burma, and Bridges's township officers recall growers by name of place. The article gives both views.
• How much Upper Burma grew before 1873. The Commission (Vol. I, para. 136) infers from Lewis that Upper Burma grew the plant on a considerable scale as the supply of Lower Burma's shops; the Government of India told London in 1892 that cultivation in Burma "had never been extensive". The article gives the Commission's inference as the Commission's.
• The 2019 raid. The Irrawaddy puts the plantation in "Myinchan District" and counts over 300,000 plants; the Associated Press report counts about 349,300. Other outlets put it in Ngazun (Ngunzun, Nganzun) Township or Myingyan District. The article gives the Associated Press count and names only the industrial park and the region.
• Khin Thein Oo's rainfall figures. The study's abstract gives the zone's mean annual rainfall as 30.58 inches and names Sintgaing as the township with the most variable rainfall; its body gives 31.73 inches and names Madaya. The article uses neither figure.

Sources

• Hemp Drugs Commission, 1894. Vol. VII (Burma witnesses, pp. 375–408) read in the OCR text, with the passages used checked line by line; Vol. I, paras. 136–138 and 692–695, read in the Wellcome Collection's OCR text.
• Khin Thein Oo (2016). Read in full in the PDF held by the Myanmar Education Research and Learning Portal.
• Press. The Irrawaddy (4 December 2025; 24 April 2019) and the Associated Press report carried by Voice of America (21 May 2019), each read in full.
• Gazetteers. Scott and Hardiman's Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States (Part I, vols. I–II, 1900; Part II, vols. I–III, 1901) and the Burma Gazetteer volumes for Mandalay (A, 1928), Yamethin (A, 1934), Pakokku (A, 1913), Thayetmyo (A, 1911), Kyaukse (B, 1913) and the Lower Chindwin (B, 1925) were searched in their OCR texts for hemp, ganja, cannabis and the Burmese names. None reports cannabis grown in the region's districts. The Mandalay volume of 1928 gives the excise department's seizures in the district in 1924–25, among them 1,351 tolas of ganja, with no word on where it came from. These works are not cited.
• Plants called hemp that are not cannabis. Scott and Hardiman's entry for Sagaing district lists among its crops "brown hemp, paiksan", grown a little among cotton, and the Yamethin gazetteer of 1934 lists "pikesan (Indian hemp)" among the district's weeds. Both names point to kenaf (Hibiscus cannabinus), not cannabis, and neither is used.
• Not yet read. The Burma Gazetteer A volumes for Kyaukse, Sagaing, Meiktila, Myingyan, Shwebo, the Lower Chindwin, Magwe and Minbu; reports of cannabis-field destruction in the state press (The Global New Light of Myanmar); recent studies of drug cultivation in Myanmar. Any of these may add places or dates.