Talk:Northeast China

Talk

Discussion for: Northeast China • View • Links • Related changes

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

Page scope

Northeast China is a Growing Region: a named region that sits above Growing Areas and below the regional complex and gene pool. It covers Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning and four units of eastern Inner Mongolia (Hulunbuir, Hinggan League, Tongliao and Chifeng), inside China's borders. Its growing area is Heilongjiang. The Russian side of the Amur and Ussuri, and Mongolia, are not part of it.

Data verification

Check the main page for the sources behind each statement. Discuss the boundary, the units the region takes in, and the accessions and news items that belong to it here.

Discussion

Why the region is on the map

No source read names "Northeast China" as a place where cannabis grows. The region groups the places that the sources name.
Early 20th century: Dewey (1913, pp. 294 and 297) names Manchuria as a land growing hemp for fibre and for oil-seed, with two kinds. The seed inventories of the United States Department of Agriculture record hemp seed from Wu-lu-kai and Wu-li-pu (received 1907), Mukden (1910) and Anda (1922 crop of 1921–22).
Since 2000: Zhang et al. (2018) collected wild populations in Inner Mongolia, Jilin and Liaoning in 2011–2016. Police reports describe wild stands at Hunchun (2020 and 2025) and Zhenlai (2025) in Jilin, and at Manzhouli (2021) and in Hongshan District of Chifeng (2025) in Inner Mongolia. Wang, Dong and Mu (2022) list cannabis as an invasive member of Heilongjiang's wild flora.
Industrial hemp grown in Heilongjiang under the province's rules is described on the page. It is not what puts the region on the map.

The name

The sources of 1907–1922 call the region Manchuria, and the infobox gives that as a historical name. The page uses Northeast China, the modern name for the three provinces: in older usage Manchuria can also take in land on the Russian side of the Amur and Ussuri, which is outside this region. Manchuria is not set up as a redirect to this page for that reason.

Growing status

The status is Active. Wild stands are reported in Jilin and eastern Inner Mongolia in 2020, 2021 and 2025, wild populations were sampled in 2011–2016, and industrial hemp was grown in Heilongjiang in 2020 and is planned there for 2026. No source says that growing in the region has ended.

How the border is drawn

The border is a proxy built from whole administrative units: the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning (OpenStreetMap relations 199073, 198590 and 912942) and, in Inner Mongolia, Hulunbuir (161769), Hinggan League (2753442), Tongliao (2753408) and Chifeng (2753364).
The four Inner Mongolian units are taken in because the wild-stand reports from Manzhouli (Hulunbuir) and Chifeng lie there and because Zhang et al. sampled wild populations in Inner Mongolia at 42–50° N; the study gives latitudes, not places. Xilin Gol and the rest of Inner Mongolia are left out. A Xilin Gol sheet of 1990 calls the plant "common" in steppe, but no later report from there was read.
The OpenStreetMap relation for Liaoning takes in coastal sea. The shape is cut to the land (Natural Earth 10 m land), so the sea is not counted.
The union is about 1,240,000 km², the figure in the infobox. Whole provinces are a coarse proxy: the reports name single stands of a few thousand plants.
The infobox point (46.37, 124.41) is the centre of the shape.
The border is not drawn from accession or news points.

Accessions

Several herbarium sheets were gathered inside the border: Kung 730 (Tieling, 1930), Dorsett 5857 (Jinzhou, 1930), Sato 8107 and 8108 (Lüshun, 1936), Sato 8593 (1941), Makino s.n. (Jinzhou, 1941), Kung 2091 (Jingpo Lake, 1931), Anon. s.n. (Harbin, 1924) and EBC 43406 and 43439 (Manchuria, by 1910). They are not attached to the region. Pokrovsky 56 (Hailar, 1918) is.

Where the sources disagree

Meyer's note on the Wu-lu-kai sample (inventory no. 13, p. 136) calls a fibre hemp shem-ma. Dewey (1913, p. 297) uses shem-ma for the short oil-seed kind and hsien-ma for the fibre kind. The page gives Meyer's description without the name.
Meyer's note on the Wu-li-pu sample is printed with the date 27 December 1907, but the inventory says the seed was received on 21 June 1907. The page gives only the date of receipt.

Sources

Dewey (1913): read in the Google-digitised copy of the Yearbook hosted by Vote Hemp; pp. 294, 297 and 299 used. Plate XLII, fig. 1, shows Manchurian oil-seed hemp.
Seed inventories (Bureau of Plant Industry, inventories no. 13, 23 and 72): read in the scans at GRIN; the title pages give the bulletin numbers, years and the ranges of introduction numbers.
Zhang et al. (2018): the methods and Table 1 were read. The Inner Mongolian wild rows lie at 42.26–50.21° N; the two Heilongjiang rows (50.25 and 48.01° N) are coded as landraces.
Balant et al. (2025): p. 7 of the published PDF. The genetic group is a grouping of samples, not a range.
Police reports: each read in Chinese. The Chifeng report covers two district police forces; the roadside stand is in its paragraph on Hongshan District. The Hunchun report of June 2025 was also carried by the Jilin channel of China News Service on 30 June. The Zhenlai and Chifeng reports call the plants 野生工业大麻, "wild industrial hemp".
Heilongjiang agriculture department (2021, 2026): the 2021 plan gives the 2020 area and the 2025 target; the 2026 guidance gives the registration rule and the main districts.

Not used

Flora of China (eFloras) and Komarov's Flora Manshuriae could not be read.
Two iNaturalist observations at Daqing (2024 and 2025) are observer records with no habitat; they are not cited.
A republished 2016 article on the China Hemp Valley site names "the Northeast" among China's wild-cannabis areas, at region level only.
No police report of wild stands in Heilongjiang was found.