Talk:Gyalrong

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Discussion for: Gyalrong • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

Gyalrong treats the Gyalrong valleys of the upper Dadu, in western Sichuan, as a cannabis growing area: Danba County of Garzê and the counties of Jinchuan, Xiaojin and Barkam of Ngawa. It sits in the Kham growing region.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Why the area is on the map

• Hosie (1905), the consular report of his journey of 1904: "hemp (Cannabis sativa, L.)" among the crops in the valley below Mao-niu (14 October), "plots of tobacco and hemp" at the Tibetan villages of Pien-ku and Yo-tsa (16 October) and hemp near Sheng-ko-tsung (17 October).
• Wilson (1913), on his journey of 1908: "A little flax and Hemp (Cannabis)" at Kuan-chai, the village of the Wokje chieftain, with the seed oil in general use for lamps.
• Bishop (1899): "a little hemp" among the crops of the Somo territory; clothes sewn with hempen thread.
• Li and colleagues (2026): CZ22, a landrace of hemp achenes collected at Xiaojin in 2020 and held in the National Gene Bank of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Growing status

The status is Active: the Xiaojin landrace was collected in 2020 and Li and colleagues call it a landrace. The travellers of the 1890s to 1908 are the area's history. The Li paper studies the achenes, the medicinal seed 火麻仁 (huǒmárén); it gives each landrace's county but says nothing of how or by whom the crop is grown there.

How the border is drawn

• The border follows four counties of western Sichuan, China, as mapped in OpenStreetMap (read 22 October 2026): Danba County of Garzê Prefecture (relation 2785520) and Jinchuan (2785347), Xiaojin (2116633) and Barkam (2785344) of Ngawa Prefecture. It lies inside the Kham border.
• 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 720 km² of the 22,000 km² of the units, high ground on the ranges west of Jinchuan and Danba.
• Check points inside the border: Danba, Jinchuan, Xiaojin, Barkam. Outside it: Kangding, Chengdu.
• Where this border meets Kham, 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 name

Gyalrong is the Tibetan name of the country and its people; the Chinese form is 嘉绒 (Jiāróng). Wilson writes "Chiarung" and names Somo, Damba and Wokje among the more important of its states. Bishop calls the people of Somo "Man-tze"; the page uses that name only in her words. Somo lies in today's Barkam; Wokje's seat, Kuan-chai, is on the road from Monkong Ting (Xiaojin) towards Kuan Hsien; Romi Chango is Zhanggu, the seat of Danba.

Accessions inside the border

No accession lies inside the border.

Where the sources disagree

• Which hemp. Hosie names Cannabis sativa below Mao-niu and Wilson names Cannabis at Kuan-chai; at Pien-ku, Yo-tsa and Sheng-ko-tsung Hosie writes only "hemp"; so does Bishop at Somo. The article keeps each writer's word.
• Mao-niu. Hosie puts Mao-niu in the valley that runs north to Romi Chango, the northern boundary of the state of Chala; the report does not settle whether the farms below it lie in Danba or in Kangding.
• Wo-lung-kuan. The hemp Hosie saw still standing on 24 October 1904 was east of the range, below Wo-lung-kuan (Wolong, in Wenchuan County). That valley lies outside the border; the article includes it with the rest of the journey.

Sources

• Hosie (1905): the Parliamentary Paper Cd. 2586, the report of his journey from Chengtu to the Tibetan frontier and back in August to October 1904.
• Wilson (1913): A Naturalist in Western China, volume I, chapters XIII and XIV.
• Bishop (1899): The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, the chapter on the Somo territory.
• Li and colleagues (2026), Journal of Pharmaceutical Analysis: the main text and Table S1 of the supplement, which gives the origin of each landrace by county.

Sources not used

• Baoxing. Wang and colleagues (2026) sampled a feral population (BX) in Baoxing County of Ya'an at 2,950 m; Chu 3393 (1936) is a sheet from Baoxing, of unknown status. Baoxing (Moupin) is the next valley east, outside the border.