Talk:Nujiang

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Page scope

Nujiang treats the Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture, the valley of the upper Salween in north-western Yunnan, as a cannabis growing area. It sits in the Yunnan 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

Kingdon Ward (1913), from his journey of 1911: "Barley, maize, and hemp are grown" at Saung-ta, and the Lutzu weave their clothes of hemp.
Kingdon Ward (1923), from his journey begun in 1913: hemp skirts, gabardines and fibre among the Lutzu and the Lisu.
Rock (1947), translating the Yün-nan Pei-cheng-chih: the Lu-tzu paid 15 lengths of hemp cloth in tribute in 1730.
The Gudeng border police notice (September 2015): about 1,200 plants on a hillside, judged wild after enquiry.
The Fugong court case (2022, published 2024): wild cannabis leaves picked in the county's mountains.

Growing status

The status is Active: the Gudeng clearance dates from 2015 and the Fugong leaf-picking from 2022. Both describe wild plants. The hemp fields and cloth in the article date from 1911 to 1914, and the tribute from 1730.

How the border is drawn

The border follows Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture of Yunnan, China (Lushui city and Fugong, Gongshan and Lanping counties), as mapped in OpenStreetMap (relation 2729768, read 22 October 2026), and lies inside the Yunnan border. On the west it stops at the frontier with Myanmar, on the line the Kachin Hills border uses.
The elevation and land-cover rules used for other hubs (the ridges round the valleys that hold land below 4,000 m, with the high ground of valleys that have none left out at the edge) take out less than 0.5% of the prefecture, so the border is the prefecture's own line.
Check points inside the border: Lushui (Liuku), Fugong, Gongshan, Lanping. Outside it: Shangri-La, Dali, Myitkyina (Myanmar).
Where this border meets Yunnan, Dêqên, Southeastern Tibet or Lijiang, or the Kachin Hills or Putao across the 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 10.

The name

The page takes the name of the prefecture and of the river, Nujiang (怒江), the Chinese name of the upper Salween. "Salween valley", Kingdon Ward's name for the ground, was the other title open to the page.
The article uses today's names for the peoples: Nu and Lisu. "Lutzu" is Kingdon Ward's word and "Lu-tzu" Rock's; Rock writes that they call themselves Nu and A-nu.

Kham and Yunnan

The Salween valley north of the provincial border is Tibetan country that Kingdon Ward reached on both journeys. Nujiang is filed under Yunnan, which takes in the whole province, and the Kham growing region is drawn up to the Yunnan border, so the two regions do not overlap.

Accessions inside the border

No herbarium sheet or seed lot on the wiki was collected inside the border.

News items filed under the area and the region: the Fugong court case (reported 26 June 2024).

Sources

Kingdon Ward (1913), The Land of the Blue Poppy, and (1923), The Mystery Rivers of Tibet. He writes "hemp" without naming the plant; the article keeps his word. Neither book places Saung-ta or Cho-la so that they can be matched to modern villages. Saung-ta lay in the arid stretch of the valley on his road from Cho-la to Men-kong, in south-eastern Tibet, and may lie north of the provincial border. In 1923 he distinguishes the "black" Lutzu of that arid stretch from those of the "Chinese Salween"; the article uses only what he says of the Lutzu lower down.
Rock (1947) gives the Yün-nan Pei-cheng-chih in his own translation, in a note, without the Chinese text.
The Gudeng notice (2015) is a report of the Legal Daily, reposted by the national narcotics-control site. It names the station but no village.
The Fugong case is one of the typical cases published by the Yunnan High People's Court in June 2024, as carried by the Yunnan Daily site.

Sources not used

Kingdon Ward (1913) also notes hemp in meagre quantities near the Lo-ma-ti ferry, and among the crops of a small valley he calls King-chou; neither place is identified closely enough to be placed.