Talk:Tian Shan (growing region)
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Page scope
Tian Shan (growing region) is a Growing Region: a named cultivation region that sits above Growing Areas and below the regional complex and gene pool. It covers the Kyrgyz and Kazakh parts of the Tian Shan, and its growing areas are Chu Valley, Issyk-Kul, Jalal-Abad, Naryn and Talas. The mountain range itself is the subject of Tian Shan; the Chinese, Uzbek and Tajik parts of the range are not part of this region.
Data verification
Check the main page for the sources behind each statement. Discuss the boundary, the provinces 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 the Tian Shan as a place where cannabis is grown or gathered. The sources report cannabis by province, by district or by valley, and the region groups the places they name inside the range. Where "Tian Shan" appears in a source it describes where the plant grows wild: McPartland and Small (2020, p. 102) and the Flora of the USSR (1936).
- The European Union Drugs Agency's country overview (March 2014) lists five Kyrgyz regions, Issyk-Kul, Jalal-Abad, Talas, Chui and Naryn, with about 10,000 hectares of wild hemp that local people use for marijuana and hashish. These are the five provinces the region takes in.
- The UNODC survey of 1998–1999 (Illicit drug trends in Central Asia, 2008, p. 23) reports wild growth and cultivation by province. Zelichenko's account of the same mapping names the districts, and says where the plants were gathered most.
- Botoeva (2016, p. 70) writes that people in Talas, Jalal-Abad and Naryn began to grow cannabis on their own plots as well as gather it wild.
- On the Kazakh side the Chu valley has its own sources (see Talk:Chu Valley). For the mountains of Almaty Region, the UNODC survey of 1999 gives 2,410.3 hectares for the whole of Almaty Region, and Finratings.kz reports six hectares destroyed at Kyzylshekara, Raiymbek district, in July 2025.
The name
The page is titled Tian Shan (growing region). The bare title Tian Shan is kept for the article on the mountain range, which other pages already link. Tien Shan is an older spelling of the same name.
Growing status
The status is Active. The sources report wild stands, gathering and eradication raids in the region's provinces from the late 1990s to 2026, and sowing on private plots in Talas, Jalal-Abad and Naryn. No source says that growing in the region has ended.
How the border is drawn
- The border is a proxy. In Kyrgyzstan it joins five whole provinces: Chüy, Talas, Issyk-Kul, Naryn and Jalal-Abad (OpenStreetMap relations 178026, 178023, 178025, 1251542 and 178024), with Bishkek city (8493930). These are the five regions the European Union Drugs Agency names. Osh and Batken provinces are left out. They lie mostly in the Alay and Turkestan ranges and the Fergana Valley, and the one figure read for them is 15.8 hectares for Osh in 1998–1999.
- In Kazakhstan it takes in the six districts of Jambyl Region that make up the Chu Valley growing area (Bayzak, Turar Ryskulov, Shu, Jambyl, Merki and Qorday). It also takes the ground at or above 1,000 metres in Almaty Region (relation 215718), measured on AWS Terrain Tiles at zoom 9: the northern slopes of the ranges along the Kyrgyz border, east to the Chinese border. The lowland of Almaty Region, the city of Almaty and its own mountain district round Medeu, and Moyynkum district of Jambyl Region are outside. Moyynkum has its own page, Moyynkum.
- The union is one shape of about 224,000 km², the figure in the infobox. Whole provinces are a coarse proxy: most of the land in them is high mountain, pasture or farmland with no cannabis, and the figures in the sources run from tens to a few thousand hectares a province.
- The infobox point (42.35, 75.19) is the centre of the shape.
- The border is not drawn from accession or news points.
Accessions
Several herbarium sheets lie inside the border: Regel's sheet of 1877 and the Gubanov (1956) and Popova (1950) sheets from Issyk-Kul, Il'in's sheet from Talas (1930), Frolova's from Kant (1969), two sheets from Akyrtobe (1931 and 1934) and Krasnoborov's from near Almaty (1988). None of their labels records cultivation, so none is attached to the region.
Sources
- EUDA (2014), Kyrgyzstan country overview: read in full. The page says that it reproduces the national report and is not the official opinion of the European Union; it gives no year for the 10,000-hectare figure.
- Zelichenko (2003), История афганской наркоэкспансии 1990-х: the online text on Lib.ru has no page numbers. The chapter on the UN mapping project and the passages on Soviet hemp were read. "Uch-Terek" district is printed as given. Botoeva's thesis cites the work as a 2003 book published in Bishkek.
- UNODC (2008): the cannabis section, pp. 23–28, was read. The Kazakh figure of 1999 is for Almaty Region as it then was, before it was divided in 2022, and is not split by district.
- Botoeva (2016): pp. 70, 76, 132–136, 147 and 247–248 were used. On pp. 247–248 the statement about Talas and Jalal-Abad rests on an interview with Zelichenko in 2014 and on newspaper reports.
- RFE/RL (2014): the two-thirds figure is put to unnamed "international experts" and is given on the page as theirs.
- Kaktus.media (12 July 2024): the interior ministry's figures are given for Issyk-Kul and Naryn together. The headline total (85 tonnes) differs from the sum of the provincial figures (82.8 tonnes); the page gives the provincial figures only.