Talk:Mergui
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Why the area is on the map
- One witness places cultivation here: H. G. Batten, Deputy Commissioner of Mergui (Commission vol. VII, Burma witness no. 11, pp. 384–385). His evidence has two parts:
- first-hand: in January 1891 he convicted a Siamese man for growing hemp in a village of the Tenasserim township; "He grew the plant to prepare the ganja" (answer 14);
- hearsay: the account of growing before the prohibition, in the Siamese-populated parts of the Tenasserim township and "the Lenya and Maliwun township", comes from Mr Leslie, Assistant Superintendent of Police, to whom Batten says he owed "most of the information" (appended letter). Batten himself had been in Mergui only since January 1890.
- The Commission's report (vol. I, paras. 136 and 138) restates Batten's evidence. It is not a second witness.
- A Karen Human Rights Group situation update (28 September 2018), written by a community member it trained and published "translated exactly as originally written, save for minor edits", reports a "marijuana clearing event [search and destruction of marijuana plants]" on 2 March 2018 in Kyweh Htein Kon village, Tanintharyi Township. It gives no quantity and names no grower. The village has not been located on a map; the report places it in the township.
- The Commissioner of the Tenasserim Division, H. R. Spearman, told the Commission that "The Shans in Mergui district are almost invariably Siamese" and that he knew nothing of cultivation by them in that district (vol. VII, p. 376). He does not say that there was none.
Growing status
The status is Active: the 2018 report records marijuana plants searched for and destroyed in Tanintharyi Township, inside the area. Destruction of a crop is not taken as the end of growing; no source read says that growing here ended.
- No first or last year is set: those fields are kept for hubs that are Historical or no longer grown.
- The colonial record ends with Batten's conviction of January 1891, the latest dated report from the 1890s. His answer to question 7, written in 1893–94, says the plant was grown "Not now, except secretly" and "to a very small extent"; his appended letter says that growing on the British side "practically ceased" under the new law and that ganja "may be said to be extinct" there.
- No source read covers the years between the 1890s and 2018, and none links the growing of 2018 to the Siamese growing of the 1890s.
One page or two across the Pakchan
Batten's account covers both banks of the frontier: the Siamese on the British side grew the plant before the prohibition, and on the Siamese side "it goes on to a certain extent", discouraged by the Raja of Renong. The page is kept to the British side, with Myanmar as its only country, because the evidence for the Siamese side names no place where the plant was grown. Renong appears only as the state whose officials discouraged it, and where the use of ganja fell after the Raja's Indian police were replaced by Siamese; "Tonka" and "Kopa" are ports of a ganja trade, not growing places, and have not been identified with present places. The Siamese side is in the article's prose, with Renong (Ranong) placed in Southern Thailand.
Plant identity
- The Commission (vol. I, para. 74) distrusted Batten's report of an abundant wild hemp and gave reasons: the plant name, the habitat, his phrase "cultivated variety", the lack of specimens. One of them, that he may have been describing "some plant" other than Cannabis, would reach his cultivation reports too if it were sound. Paras. 136 and 138 restate the cultivation and the Siamese-side growing with no such doubt. The report does not say which reading it intended.
- Batten's name for the plant, pi-san-bin, "the plant from which nets and ropes are made", is close to paik-hsan, which Mason's Burma, its People and Productions (1882–83 revision, vol. II) gives as the Burmese name of sunn hemp (Crotalaria juncea), a fibre plant; Mason gives Ben for Cannabis sativa. Elsewhere in Tenasserim, "hemp" in the gazetteers is often this fibre plant.
- The statements used on the article are the ones that name the drug or its use: the 1891 grower "grew the plant to prepare the ganja"; the Siamese crop was cut in bud, dried and smoked; Batten calls the drug seg-yauk. His wild-hemp report is given only with the Commission's doubt.
Who the "Siamese" were
The article keeps the sources' word. The 1912 gazetteer counts Siamese by language spoken. Batten's "Siamese" may have included other subjects of Siam; the sources do not say.
The Lenya and Maliwun township
Batten writes of "the Lenya and Maliwun township", in the singular. The 1912 gazetteer has no Lenya township: the Lenya river lies in the Bokpyin township, and Maliwun is a township of its own (the Victoria Point subdivision). Whether Batten meant one township or two is not settled.
How the border is drawn
- The border is the present Tanintharyi, Bokpyin and Kawthaung townships in OpenStreetMap (relations 5996845, 5996580 and 5996648), clipped to the coastline (Natural Earth 10 m land) because the township relations take in the sea. The result is about 19,000 km², the figure in the infobox, in three parts: the mainland and two large islands.
- These are the nearest present units to the Tenasserim township and the Lenya and Maliwun country of the 1890s. The 1912 gazetteer gives the three townships as 4,033, 2,605 (with islands) and 989 square miles, about 19,700 km² in all.
- The proxy is larger than the area Batten describes: he speaks of "parts of" the Tenasserim township, those populated by Siamese. Mergui town and the Mergui and Palaw townships, where Batten has Burmans growing "a little hemp" for curries, are left out.
- OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia now show a Bokepyin District beside the Bokpyin township, so the district level is unsettled; no district is set in the infobox.
- The border is not drawn from accession or news points. The map point is the town of Tanintharyi, headquarters of the Tenasserim township.
Sources
- Hemp Drugs Commission, 1894. Vol. VII, Batten's evidence and appended letter (pp. 384–385) and Spearman's (pp. 375–376), read line by line in the OCR text; vol. I, paras. 73–75 and 136–138, read in the Wellcome Collection's OCR text.
- Karen Human Rights Group, 2018. The Tanintharyi Township situation update (November 2017 to March 2018), read in full on the KHRG site.
- Burma Gazetteer, Mergui District, vol. A (G. P. Andrew, 1912): boundaries and rivers (pp. 1–2), people (p. 7) and the township notes (pp. 29–32), read in the OCR text. Its two figures for the languages of the Tenasserim township disagree: p. 7 gives 43 per cent Burmese, 40 Siamese and 16 Karen, p. 30 gives 43 Burmese, 40 Karen and 16 Siamese. Neither figure is used on the article.
- Searched, no statement on hemp or ganja: the 1912 gazetteer itself (its excise and smuggling passages concern liquor and opium), and the Burma Gazetteer, Mergui District, vol. B (1913).