Hindu Kush Himalaya
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The Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH), also called the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, is a mountain region of eight countries that extends from the Hindu Kush valleys of Afghanistan to the hill and mountain systems of Myanmar. The region covers more than 4.2 million km² and holds the headwaters of ten major river basins. About 240 million people lived in its mountains and hills in 2017; about 1.9 billion lived in the ten basins.[1]: 3–4 The term is the working frame of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), an international centre in Nepal whose regional member countries are the eight countries of the region.[2]
The north-eastern Tibetan Plateau, within the region, is where a 2019 synthesis of fossil pollen studies placed the centre of origin of Cannabis.[3] Charas is made by hand-rubbing in India and Nepal; in Kashmir and Afghanistan the resin is sieved.[4]
Extent
The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment of 2019, the first report of the Hindu Kush Himalayan Monitoring and Assessment Programme, sets out the areas it counts as part of the region country by country:[1]: 4, 6–7
| Country | Areas included |
|---|---|
| Afghanistan | All provinces except Kandahar, Helmand, Nimroz, Farah and Herat |
| Bangladesh | The Chittagong hills |
| Bhutan | The whole country |
| China | All of Tibet and Qinghai; parts of Yunnan, Sichuan and Gansu; four prefectures of Xinjiang |
| India | Eleven states: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir (the Indian-administered area), Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, Tripura and Uttarakhand; and the Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts of West Bengal |
| Myanmar | Chin, Shan, Rakhine and Kachin states |
| Nepal | The whole country |
| Pakistan | Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; 24 of the 32 districts of Balochistan; Azad Jammu and Kashmir; Gilgit-Baltistan; the Federally Administered Tribal Areas |
Between the Hindu Kush in the west and the hills of Myanmar in the east lie the Pamir and Karakoram ranges, the Tibetan Plateau and the high Himalayas of India, Nepal and Pakistan.[1]: 4 The ten river basins whose headwaters are in the region include those of the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra and Mekong.[1]: 5 With the Tien Shan, the region holds the largest area of permanent ice outside the polar regions, which is why it is sometimes called the "Third Pole".[1]: 3
ICIMOD was inaugurated on 5 December 1983. The government of Nepal and UNESCO had signed the agreement that gave it its legal basis in 1981. Its statute names Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan as its regional member countries.[2]
Climate and elevation
Rainfall in the region decreases from east to west. The Indian summer monsoon supplies most of it and weakens as it moves north-west from the eastern Himalaya towards the Hindu Kush; winter storms also bring moisture from the Arabian Sea.[5]: 133 These winter systems, the western disturbances, travel east from the Mediterranean along the subtropical westerly jet stream. The mountains block the jet, so winter snowfall is concentrated on the western side of the region. The winter conditions favour wheat and other winter crops.[6]: 61, 63 In summer the same barrier keeps the upper-level westerlies north of 30° N, which lets the moist monsoon circulation reach north into the Indian subcontinent.[6]: 62
The altitudinal zonation of the region runs from tropical conditions below 500 m at the foot of the hills to ice and snow above 6,000 m, with a rain shadow over the Tibetan Plateau.[5]: 133, 135 Farmland covers 5% of the region's area. Most of its people are subsistence farmers, with smaller landholdings than farmers in the lowlands. The assessment counts the region among the most productive and intensively cultivated mountain regions in the world, with high levels of agrobiodiversity; many food plants and animals were domesticated there.[5]: 133, 135
Cannabis
Origin and feral plants
John McPartland, William Hegman and Tengwen Long mapped 155 fossil pollen studies from across Asia and in 2019 placed the centre of origin of Cannabis on the north-eastern Tibetan Plateau, near Qinghai Lake. They found Cannabis pollen in India by 32,600 years ago.[3]
A study that resequenced the genomes of 110 accessions, published in 2021, concluded that Cannabis sativa was first domesticated in East Asia in the early Neolithic.[7] One of its four genetic groups, which the authors called drug-type feral, was made up of 11 feral plants from India and Pakistan south of the Himalayas, three from southern China and one drug cultivar from India. Their tree suggested that this group, from both sides of the Himalayan range, was substantially differentiated from modern European and American drug cultivars, which had been selected intensively for high THC content.[7]
Resin
Two methods of collecting cannabis resin are used in the region. In India and Nepal the flowering tops are rubbed back and forth between the palms and fingers until resin builds up on the skin and is collected in a ball, called charas. In Kashmir and Afghanistan the resin is sieved, as hashish; in Afghanistan the sieved resin, called chars, is heated and kneaded repeatedly before it is pressed and rolled by hand.[4]
In the reports that member states made to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for 2010–2015, Afghanistan was the most frequently named source of cannabis resin after Morocco, with India and Pakistan among the lesser sources. For the Parvati Valley of Himachal Pradesh, a former superintendent of India's Narcotics Control Bureau put the area under cannabis at about 2,100 ha in 2013, a figure the geographer Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy calls a guesstimate. Chouvy wrote in 2019 that landraces were increasingly at risk of replacement by modern commercial hybrids, as was already happening in Morocco and, to a lesser extent, in India.[4]
Trade across the passes
Until the 1930s charas grown in the oases of southern Xinjiang crossed the Karakoram and the Himalaya into Kashmir and British India. Indian traders carried it. Charas and silk yarn were the two main goods Xinjiang exported to British India.[8]: 77–80 The route through Leh to Srinagar was long and physically hard, but it was cheaper and safer than the shorter routes, with lower tolls. It also lay nearer Yarkand.[8]: 78 In 1936 the export duty rose from 20 to 200 rupees a pony load, after which the export of charas nearly collapsed. In January that year the head of the Kashgar administration prohibited the sale and export of opium, charas and wine. The officially sanctioned trade then ended.[8]: 80, 82–83
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Sharma, E.; Molden, D.; Rahman, A.; Khatiwada, Y.R.; Zhang, L.; Singh, S.P.; Yao, T.; Wester, P. (2019). "Introduction to the Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment". In Wester, P.; Mishra, A.; Mukherji, A.; Shrestha, A.B. (eds.). The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment. Cham: Springer. pp. 1–16. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-92288-1_1.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development. "History and governance". ICIMOD. Retrieved 16 October 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 McPartland, J.M.; Hegman, W.; Long, T. (2019). "Cannabis in Asia: its center of origin and early cultivation, based on a synthesis of subfossil pollen and archaeobotanical studies". Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. 28 (6): 691–702. doi:10.1007/s00334-019-00731-8.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Chouvy, Pierre-Arnaud (2019). "Cannabis cultivation in the world: heritages, trends and challenges". EchoGéo. 48. doi:10.4000/echogeo.17591.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Xu, J.; Badola, R.; Chettri, N.; Chaudhary, R.P.; Zomer, R.; Pokhrel, B.; Hussain, S.A.; Pradhan, S.; Pradhan, R. (2019). "Sustaining biodiversity and ecosystem services in the Hindu Kush Himalaya". In Wester, P.; Mishra, A.; Mukherji, A.; Shrestha, A.B. (eds.). The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment. Cham: Springer. pp. 127–165. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-92288-1_5.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Krishnan, R.; Shrestha, A.B.; Ren, G.; Rajbhandari, R.; Saeed, S.; Sanjay, J.; Syed, M.A.; Vellore, R.; Xu, Y.; You, Q.; Ren, Y. (2019). "Unravelling climate change in the Hindu Kush Himalaya: rapid warming in the mountains and increasing extremes". In Wester, P.; Mishra, A.; Mukherji, A.; Shrestha, A.B. (eds.). The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment. Cham: Springer. pp. 57–97. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-92288-1_3.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Ren, G.; Zhang, X.; Li, Y.; Ridout, K.; Serrano-Serrano, M.L.; Yang, Y.; Liu, A.; Ravikanth, G.; Nawaz, M.A.; Mumtaz, A.S.; Salamin, N.; Fumagalli, L. (2021). "Large-scale whole-genome resequencing unravels the domestication history of Cannabis sativa". Science Advances. 7 (29) eabg2286. doi:10.1126/sciadv.abg2286.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Kreutzmann, Hermann (2026). "Hashish and opium trade along the roads to Kashgar and Yarkand". In Mirsultan, Aysima; Moll-Murata, Christine (eds.). Transactions in Xinjiang: Cultural, Socio-Economic, and Historical Sources on the Chinese Western Regions (1750–1976). Fachinformationsdienst (FID) Asien. pp. 77–85. doi:10.48796/20260409-006.