Talk:Kham

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Page scope

Kham treats Kham, the Tibetan country of western Sichuan and eastern Tibet, as a cannabis growing region: the Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and Chamdo, with the Ngawa counties of Jinchuan, Xiaojin and Barkam. Its growing area is Gyalrong. The Kham of north-western Yunnan is covered by Dêqên, under Yunnan.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Why the region is on the map

Rockhill (1891), on his journey of 1889: "a good deal of hemp" near Hua-lin-p'ing, below Lu-ting. Hua-lin-p'ing is Hualinping, in Xinglong town of Luding County.
Rockhill (1894): "patches of hemp" at Ma-kai-chung, in the valley that runs down to the Yalong at Ho-k'ou (29 September 1892).
Hosie (1905), the consular report of his journey of August to October 1904: hemp at Hua-lin-p'ing and in the gorge above Ho-k'ou; hemp he names Cannabis sativa in the valley north of Mao-niu.
Kingdon Ward (1923): standing crops of hemp in the irrigated fields of the Wi valley (1913).
Hu Yiyang (1984), the survey of 1982 in Chamdo Prefecture: cannabis, including cultivated cannabis, was among the material collected.
Police notices of 2024 from Daocheng (Jiga), Zogang (Xiba village) and Markam (Suoduoxi): wild plants cleared, with no sign of planting.
The growing area Gyalrong: hemp called Cannabis by Hosie (1904) and Wilson (1908); a landrace collected at Xiaojin in 2020.

Growing status

The status is Active. The 2024 police notices from Daocheng, Zogang and Markam report wild plants; the Xiaojin landrace of Gyalrong was collected in 2020. The travellers' accounts (1889–1913) and the 1982 survey describe hemp grown in fields; no source dated 2000 or later describes a field crop in the region outside Gyalrong.

How the border is drawn

The border follows modern administrative units of Sichuan and Tibet, China, as mapped in OpenStreetMap (read 22 October 2026): Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (relation 2049312) and Chamdo, a prefecture-level city of Tibet (2734866), with three counties of Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture: Jinchuan (2785347), Xiaojin (2116633) and Barkam (2785344).
The rest of Ngawa is left out. The border stops at the Yunnan provincial line, and on the west it meets Nyingchi, which is drawn as Southeastern Tibet.
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 110,000 km² of the 280,000 km² of the units: the high grassland plateau of northern Garzê round Shiqu and Sêrxü, the plateau and ranges of northern and western Chamdo round Dêngqên, Riwoqê, Lhorong and Banbar, and the high ground of the Shaluli Mountains and of the ranges between the Jinsha and the Mekong. Four separate stretches of valley land remain, the largest holding nearly all of it.
Check points inside the border: Kangding, Danba, Batang, Dêgê, Garzê, Daofu, Chamdo, Barkam, Jinchuan, Xiaojin, the collecting point of Fang 3525, Soulié 844 and Cunningham 145, the collecting point of Liu 1046. Outside it: Chengdu, Shangri-La, Bayi, Lhasa, Xining.
Where this border meets Liangshan, Gyalrong, Yunnan, Dêqên or Southeastern Tibet, 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

Kham is the Tibetan name of the country. Kingdon Ward writes both "Kham" (1913) and "Kam" (1923). Teichman's book of 1922 and Kingdon Ward's of 1923 call the country "Eastern Tibet"; on this page those words appear only as theirs.
The Chinese administrative names are Garzê (甘孜) and Chamdo (昌都). The travellers' place names are given in their own spelling with the modern name where it is certain: Ta-chien-lu, Tatsienlu or Tatsienlou is Kangding; Lu-ting is Luding.

Kham and Yunnan

Kham also takes in the Tibetan country of north-western Yunnan, round Deqin. That part of Kham is the growing area Dêqên, under the Yunnan region, which takes in the whole province; this region is drawn up to the provincial border of Yunnan, so the two regions do not overlap.

Accessions inside the border

Filed under the region: Fang 3525 (1928) (grassy slope, Kangding) and Liu 1046 (1934) (beside a field, Kangding), both classed as feral.
Not filed: Soulié 844 (1893) and Cunningham 145 (1923), from Ta-chien-lu. Their labels give the place and the year but say nothing of where the plant grew; both are classed as of unknown status.
Chu 3393 (1936), from Baoxing County in Ya'an, lies east of the border and is not filed here (see Talk:Gyalrong).

Where the sources disagree

The 1982 survey. The abstract counts nine counties but names eight. Two of them, Zayü and Bomi, were then in Chamdo Prefecture and are now in Nyingchi, in Southeastern Tibet. The abstract breaks off in the middle of its sentence on cannabis, so it does not say in which counties the cannabis was collected or how much of it was cultivated. The journal's website shows only the abstract.
Which hemp. Rockhill and Kingdon Ward write "hemp" without naming the plant; so does Hosie at Hua-lin-p'ing and Ho-k'ou. Hosie and Wilson name Cannabis in the Gyalrong valleys. In Sichuan the English "hemp" of the period can also mean Abutilon or ramie; the article keeps each writer's word.
The Wi valley. Kingdon Ward's chapter puts the Wi valley on the Yü-chu, named for the monastery of Drayü on its bank; the book does not tie the valley to a modern county.

Sources

Travellers and consuls: Rockhill (1891, 1894), Hosie (1905, the consular report Cd. 2586 on his journey of 1904), Kingdon Ward (1913, 1923), Teichman (1922), Wilson (1913).
Hu Yiyang (1984): the abstract of the 1982 survey, on the journal's website.
Police notices (2024): the Garzê media centre's notice for Daocheng, the Tibet political and legal affairs website for Zogang and the Chamdo police website for Markam. The Markam notice is cited for its date, place, count and the absence of planting.
Herbarium sheets: the four Kangding sheets, each on its own accession page.

What the travel books do not say

Several long accounts of Kham name no hemp crop. Teichman (1922) travelled through Batang, Derge, Kanze, Chamdo and Jyekundo on the journeys he made for the frontier peace negotiations of 1918. Gill (1880), Cooper (1871) and Shelton (1921), all at Batang, mention hemp only in rope, bags or sandals; the "ta-ma" in Gill is the Tibetan name of a rhododendron. The hemp in the travel books of this region grows in the valleys of the Dadu, the Yalong and the rivers of Chamdo; none of them reports it on the high grassland.

Sources not used

A Beijing News report of 23 November 2020 says that researchers of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences helped villagers in Garzê plant industrial hemp under a poverty-relief pairing. It names no county and no local variety; industrial hemp from bred seed is not what puts the region on the map.
Hosie (1905) also names hemp (Cannabis sativa) at 8,000 feet below the So-i-ling, on the road from O-mei towards Ning-yuan; that valley is outside Kham.