Talk:Gilgit
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Why Gilgit is a growing area
- E. F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, p. 316 (new edition of 1896, read on the page image), crossed "fields of rice, millet, maize and Indian hemp" in the Gilgit oasis. The preface dates his arrival in Kashmir to the spring of 1891, and p. 315 has him march into Gilgit on 17 August. His is the one 19th-century statement read that hemp was grown at Gilgit.
- Qureshi and colleagues (2007) record cannabis at Gilgit under the local names thoonch and thounch, with uses of the whole plant and the seed.
- Salim and colleagues (2019), Table 2, record the whole plant in direct use at Kargha. Kargha is taken here to be the Kargah valley west of the town.
- Herbarium sheets name places inside the area: Quaid-i-Azam University (ISL0015799, "Baseen", 29 May 1977; ISL0015804 and ISL0015807, "Iutiol Nallah", 27 May 1977) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (PE 2004750 and 2004751, "Gilgit", 2012). "Baseen" is read as Basin and "Iutiol Nallah" as the Jutial nala. None of the sheets says whether the plant was wild or sown.
Growing status
- The status is Active. The two sheets of 2012 record plants collected at Gilgit after 2000, and the survey of 2017–2018 records the plant in use at Kargha. Neither says the plants were sown.
- Knight's year, 1891, is the earliest record of hemp grown here. The infobox does not show first and last years for an Active area, so 1891 is in the prose only.
How the border is drawn
- The border is Gilgit Tehsil in OpenStreetMap (relation 16568065), fetched 20 October 2026, less the part north of the Gilgit river that lies inside the Karakoram border. About 730 km², the figure in the infobox.
- Knight's oasis is on the river's right bank, the south side, below the Jutial plateau. The Karakoram Conference (1938) made the Gilgit river the southern limit of the range, so the area stops at the river and does not overlap the Karakoram region.
- Juglot, the Sai valley and Danyor are in other tehsils and are left out. No source read places cannabis there.
- The border is a proxy and was not drawn from accession or specimen points. The map point (35.92, 74.31) is Gilgit town.
- The area has no growing region. It lies outside the Karakoram, east of the Hindu Raj and north of Nanga Parbat, and no region is drawn there.
Sources
- Knight: the Cornell copy of the new edition (London: Longmans, Green, 1896), pp. 314–316 and the preface, read on the page images. The first edition is of 1893; its pagination was not checked.
- Qureshi, Ghafar and Ghufran (2007): read in full in the journal's PDF. The journal's landing page for article 817 shows a different paper (on Brassica and soil salinity); the PDF link cited is the one that serves this study.
- Salim and colleagues (2019): Table 2 and the methods read in full.
- GBIF: the five occurrence records were read through the GBIF interface on 20 October 2026.
- Not used: a Himalayan Uplands Plant database sheet (Gartner, 1974) with the locality "Thunch; Gilgit", where Thunch is probably the plant's local name; and two Quaid-i-Azam University sheets from "Pattan" (county Gilgit), probably Pattan in Kohistan.
What the sources do not cover
- Frederic Drew's Jummoo and Kashmir Territories (1875) lists the crops of Gilgit without hemp: wheat, barley, naked barley, rice "in Gilgit village only", maize, millet, buckwheat, pulse, rape and cotton. Durand (1899) and Schomberg (1935) do not mention hemp at Gilgit.
- No source read describes cannabis fields or growers at Gilgit since Knight.