Talk:Western Pamir
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Why the western Pamirs are a growing area
- Nikolai Vavilov's account of his 1916 expedition, in the English edition of Five Continents (1997), p. 7: in some villages hemp stood among the fields of cotton and along the fences, and "the hemp was sown to obtain hashish, thus replacing here the cultivation of poppies, forbidden by the Russian border guard". The chapter (pp. 5–16) names the area as "the western region of the Pamirs, the so-called Gorno-Badakhshan", divided into the districts of Darvaz, Rushan and Shugnan. It names no village for the hemp.
- The passage sits in his account of the lowest of three farming zones, where cotton was grown. Which valleys that zone covers is not said; the border is drawn on the whole area he names, not on a guess at the cotton villages.
- Some secondary literature quotes the same passage in Russian with a wrong reference, to a book about S. I. Vavilov; the passage is N. I. Vavilov's, as Five Continents shows.
- Ole Olufsen, Through the Unknown Pamirs (1904), p. 121, lists hemp among the flowering plants of the gardens in the valleys from Vakhan to Shugnan, on his expedition of 1898–1899, and says flowers were grown only to beautify the gardens. He describes opium, not hemp, as the drug of these valleys (pp. 120–121).
The name
The title takes Vavilov's own term for the area, "the western region of the Pamirs". Darvaz, Rushan and Shugnan were the three Bukharan districts it was divided into in 1916, and today's districts of Darvoz, Rushon and Shughnon carry the same names; each is a smaller unit than the area, so none is used as its title.
Growing status
The status is Historical, grown from 1916 (Vavilov's journey; Five Continents, pp. 5, 7). Since 2000 the Drug Control Agency and the police have reported wild cannabis found and destroyed in Shughnon and Vanj districts and near Khorog (Khovar, 2009–2015; the agency's review for 2021). Those reports describe wild plants, not plants sown or harvested, so they do not make the area Active. No source says that growing ended.
How the border is drawn
- The border follows five modern districts of Gorno-Badakhshan: Darvoz, Vanj, Rushon, Shughnon and Roshtqal'a, with Khorog, about 22,700 km² (OpenStreetMap relations 3281969, 3281956, 3281942, 3281967 and 3281930). Together they cover the valleys Vavilov names: the upper Panj and the Vanj, Bartang, Gunt and Shakhdara.
- Ishkoshim district (Garan, Ishkashim and the Tajik bank of Vakhan) is left out. Vavilov's three districts do not include it, and the only cannabis there in the sources is Olufsen's garden flower of 1898–1899.
- Murghob district, on the high plateau, is left out: Vavilov describes the plateau as a desert-like steppe of nomadic camps, outside the farming valleys.
- The infobox point (37.96, 71.90) is the centre of the drawn area.
Accessions and news
No accession or news item on the wiki comes from inside the border.
Sources
- Vavilov (1997): the chapter "In the Pamirs. Darvaz, Rushan and Shugnan (Expeditions made in 1916)", pp. 5–16, read in full in the scan held by CGSpace. The Russian text of his report, «У Памира (Дарваз, Рошан, Шугнан): агрономический этюд» (Dushanbe 1964; reprinted 1991), was not read.
- Olufsen (1911), pp. 103–104: the gardens of Kalai Vandsh in early September 1896, with poppies for opium. His crop lists for Shugnan, Roshan, Vanj and Darvaz in the same chapter do not name hemp.
- Olufsen (1904): read in the Internet Archive text; hemp appears only on p. 121.
- Khovar reports used: 17 July 2014 (Bun, Shughnon district, 3,123 plants) and 8 August 2014 (Vanj district, more than 14,000 plants). Not used: 3 September 2012 (Buni, Sokhcharv jamoat, 2,117), 23 September 2013 (Barchid, Porshnev jamoat), 3 July 2015 (near Nivodak, Khorog, 2,311) and 9 July 2019 (256,898 plants in the whole of Gorno-Badakhshan, no district named).
- Afghan bank: Soelberg and Jäger (2016) list hemp among the crops of Wakhi fields and gardens in the Afghan Wakhan in 2010. That is outside Tajikistan and is not used here.