Talk:Ili Valley
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Discussion
Why the area is on the map
- Liu and colleagues (2022): a field study of the wild cannabis of the Ili valley, with plots in woodland, a maize field, a wheat field and a roadside at Queerpan village, Qapqal County, sampled in July 2019.
- Police and border-police reports of wild stands cleared in Huocheng and Horgos (2022), Zhaosu (2022, 2024, 2025), Tekes (2022), Qapqal (2024), Yining City (2025, 2026) and Gongliu (2026), and on a river bank by the Xiaomazha border station (2023).
Growing status
The status is Active: the field study (2019) and the police reports (2022–2026) describe plants growing at the time. Clearing a stand is not a sign that growing has ended.
How the border is drawn
- The border follows the counties and county-level cities of Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture that lie in the Ili valley, as mapped in OpenStreetMap (read 21 October 2026): Yining City (relation 2751497), Yining County (2751498), Huocheng County (2751490), Horgos (7027706), Qapqal Xibe Autonomous County (2751494), Nilka County (2751493), Xinyuan County (2751496), Gongliu County (2751489), Tekes County (2751495) and Zhaosu County (2751499), with Kokdala and the farms of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps 4th Division (7027725).
- Kuytun, a city under the prefecture that lies outside the valley, is left out. The border stops at the frontier with Kazakhstan.
- Ground above 4,000 m and land that ESA WorldCover 2021 maps as bare or sparsely vegetated, as snow and ice, or as open water is left out of the border. This takes out about 1,600 km², mostly glaciers, bare rock and high ground on the Tian Shan crests south of Zhaosu and Tekes and on the Borohoro range, and open water on the Ili and its reservoirs.
- Check points inside the border: Yining, Qapqal, Huocheng, Zhaosu, Tekes, Gongliu, Nilka, Xinyuan. Outside it: Kuytun, Bole, Almaty, Zharkent (Kazakhstan).
- Where this border meets Northern Xinjiang, Bortala or the Tian Shan growing region across the Kazakh frontier, 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 9.
The name
The page takes the name the field study uses, the Ili valley (伊犁河谷, Yīlí hégǔ). The prefecture is the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture; Kuldja (Ghulja) is the older name of its capital, Yining.
The Kazakh part of the river
The Ili flows on into Kazakhstan, where its lower course has its own record of wild cannabis. This page is drawn to the frontier and does not take in the Kazakh reach; whether the two belong to one growing area is not settled by the sources read here.
Accessions inside the border
Larionov 65 (1876), from the environs of Kuldja, lies in the area but is not filed under it: its label gives the river, the place and the date, and the sheet is classed as of unknown status. The news item of June 2023 on the Qiaokuer border police station of the Ili border detachment is filed under Northern Xinjiang only, as the station could not be placed in a county.
Sources
- Liu and colleagues (2022): read in full in the mirror of the paper on fibercrops.com; the bibliographic details were checked against the journal's own record.
- Police and press reports (2022–2026): each read in full at the address cited.
Where the sources disagree
- Zhaosu, June 2025. The headline of the report gives more than 4,000 plants; its text gives more than 4,200. The article gives the figure in the text.
- Qapqal, 2024. Two reports of the same days describe different stands: more than 3,000 plants at the edge of a resident's field (Hainuke border station, reported 4 September) and more than 20,000 by field roads (30 August). Neither refers to the other; the article gives them as two clearances.