Talk:Xining

Talk

Discussion for: Xining • View • Links • Related changes

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

Page scope

Xining treats the farming valleys round Xining, in north-eastern Qinghai, with Guide County on the Yellow River, as a cannabis growing area. It has no growing region above it. A page on the city itself would be titled Xining (city).

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

Pelliot 440 (1908), Si-Ning-Fou: the field label reads Chanvre cultivé (cultivated hemp).
Wang and colleagues (2026): feral populations at Huangzhong (10 plants) and Guide (6 plants).
Rockhill (1894), at Kuei-te (Guide), 27 February 1892: hemp among the principal crops, on what he was told.
Chen and colleagues (2022): a Qinghai landrace, C466, at 36.50° N.
Herbarium sheets from moist grassland south of Sining (1923) and from Shangwuchuang (1930).

Growing status

The status is Active: the genomic study of Wang and colleagues was published in 2026 and Chen and colleagues' in 2022. Neither paper prints a collection date for its Qinghai material. The plants of Wang and colleagues are classed as feral; Chen's C466 is a landrace, with no place given below the province.

How the border is drawn

The border follows Xining (relation 2707990) and Haidong (2707988), prefecture-level cities of Qinghai, China, with Guide County of Hainan Prefecture (4478884), as mapped in OpenStreetMap (read 22 October 2026).
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 units, so the border is the units' own line. A detached piece of Haidong of about 2 km² is left out.
Check points inside the border: Xining, the collecting point of Pelliot 440, the collecting point of Hao 825 and 827, Ping'an, Ledu, Guide. Outside it: Qinghai Lake, Lanzhou.

The name

The page takes the name of the city at the centre of the valleys, Xining (西宁), spelled Sining or Si-Ning-Fou in the older sources. A page on the city would be Xining (city).
Huangshui valley was the other title open to the page; none of the sources uses it.
Amdo is the Tibetan name of the wider country, as Rockhill gives it. It covers far more than these valleys, and none of the sources names it as hemp country; the lead gives the name without a link.

Guide and Huangzhong in the 2026 table

Wang and colleagues print the Guide population's origin as "Guide County, Xining City, Qinghai Province". Guide County belongs to the Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, not to Xining; its coordinates (36.04° N, 101.43° E) fall in Guide. The article quotes the table as printed, and the border takes in Guide County. The table places Huangzhong "County" in Xining; Huangzhong is now a district of Xining.

Accessions inside the border

Filed under the area: Pelliot 440 (1908), classed as a landrace (Chanvre cultivé), and Ching 681 (1923), from moist grassland, classed as feral.
Not filed under the area: Hao 825 (1930) and Hao 827 (1930), classed as of unknown status. Their labels give the place, the altitude and the height of the plant, but not where it grew.

Sources

Wang and colleagues (2026), BMC Plant Biology, Table S1 of the supplementary material: populations QH (Huangzhong) and GD (Guide).
Chen and colleagues (2022), BMC Plant Biology, Table 1: accessions are given by province and latitude only.
Rockhill (1894), diary entry of 27 February 1892 at Kuei-te. He writes "hemp" without naming the plant, and says he could not confirm what he was told; the article gives it as hearsay.
Rockhill (1891), on the name Amdo.
Herbarium sheets: the labels on the digitised sheets.