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Yuanping treats Yuanping, a county-level city of Xinzhou in northern Shanxi, the Guo County (崞县) of older sources, as a historical hemp growing area: the mountain-valley hemp of the Kwohsien district whose seed was collected in 1908.
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Record source conflicts, dating problems and other reports bearing on the area here. Keep narrative content on the article.
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Why Yuanping is a growing area
- The United States Department of Agriculture's inventory of plant introductions for April to June 1908 (published 1909) prints F. N. Meyer's notes on two lots of hemp from the "Kwohsien district" of Shansi. Number 932a, from Tongchor, 4 March 1908: "Grown in mountain valleys; considered to be the best variety of hemp of the Shansi Province, and sold in all of the towns and cities for string and rope manufacture". Number 931a, from Soolungko, 3 March 1908: "Found growing in mountain valleys and considered a good hemp. Chinese name Shan ma tse." The notes name a kind of hemp, its use and the district it came from.
Kwohsien and Guo County
- Kwohsien reads as Kwo hsien, "Kwo county", the older romanised form of 崞县 (Guō Xiàn). Guo County kept that name from 606 until 1958, with its seat at Guoyang (崞阳) from the Ming; in 1958 it took the name Yuanping and moved its seat to the town of Yuanping.
- Meyer used the same name for the district in his bulletin of 1911 on the fruit and nut orchards of China, in a caption on the pears of the "Kwohsien district, Shansi".
How the border is drawn
- The notes name the district, not the valleys. The line follows the county-level city of Yuanping, on the ground of the old Guo County, as OpenStreetMap maps it (relation 3008568): about 2,600 km², the figure in the infobox.
- The infobox point (38.83, 112.67) is the centre of the border, not a field.
Growing status
The status is Historical. The notes date from 1908 and say nothing of later growing; the infobox gives 1908 as both the first and the last year a source records hemp grown there.
The Qing county gazetteer
- The Qianlong gazetteer of Guo County (崞县志, 1757 edition), juan 7, has a poem on the warm spring at Fushou Shan in which the country people have water enough in winter for retting 麻 (野人冬月足沤麻), and a rhapsody on the county whose farmers work at "mulberry and 麻" (农务桑麻). The word 麻 in these lines is not specific to hemp.
Sources
- USDA inventory no. 15 (1909). The department received lot 932a on 20 April 1908 and numbered it plant introduction 22690. Lot 931a came by way of the Plant Introduction Garden at Chico, California, and was received on 6 July 1908 as plant introduction 23298.
- Xinzhou Daily (2021). A piece by the newspaper's new-media centre on Yuanping, with a short table of the county's names and seats.