Spread of cannabis to Southeast Asia
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The spread of cannabis to Southeast Asia is the question of when, by which routes and with whom the cannabis plant and its uses reached mainland and island Southeast Asia. No date is agreed. The ethnobotanist Marie Alexandrine Martin wrote in 1975 that cannabis "was probably introduced into Southeast Asia about the sixteenth century", while weighing "Arabian conquerors" of the 13th or 14th century against the Spanish and Portuguese of the 16th.[1]: 63–64 The common names for the plant in the region come from the Sanskrit gañjā. Several authors read them as evidence that it came from India (Spread of cannabis to South Asia).[1]: 64–65
The earliest dated writings on the plant there are of the 17th century. Formulas made up for King Narai of Ayutthaya between 1659 and 1661 contain cannabis.[2] In the 1670s an English trader on the Coromandel Coast of India wrote that gangah was brought there from Sumatra.[3]: 78 On Ambon in the late 17th century Georgius Rumphius found the plant in a few gardens, raised from Javanese seed.[4]: 209
Accounts of the arrival
Martin found that the inhabitants of the region held that "it would be the Indians who brought in the plant". A note to her chapter calls the word kali, used for the flowers or seed, "a word of Hindi origin" and holds that linguistics "argues in favor of introduction of hemp through India, either directly by the Indians, or indirectly by the Spanish and Portuguese explorers in the sixteenth century".[1]: 64–65
John Crawfurd wrote in 1820 that ganja was grown "in every part of the Indian islands in small quantities", for its juices as a narcotic and not for cordage. "The people of India, as its name proclaims, introduced this plant."[5] In his dictionary of 1856 he wrote instead that it had been brought "into a few parts of the Archipelago, where there are settlers from the Continent of India". He named the carriers: "It was not the Arabs, however, who made the people of the Archipelago acquainted with this plant, but the Tâlugus, or Telingas, as its native name Ganja demonstrates". Its use, he added, was "almost wholly confined to strangers and settlers from India, Persia, and Arabia".[6]
The Calcutta botanist David Prain held in 1893 that the plant reached "Malaya" from India after it had reached Persia, Arabia and Egypt. The Malay name gingi, in his reading, was a form of the Indian gánjá, a name that had not travelled west.[7]: 42 The pharmacologist W. G. Boorsma, after a survey of the Dutch East Indies, judged in 1918 that the cultivation of Indian hemp had been introduced there in earlier times. In his view the name gendji, which he found given across Java and Sumatra to harmless plants of other genera, was a memory of the time when the true plant and its intoxicating power had become known.[8]: 327–328, 332
Later botanists gave dates. John McPartland and Ernest Small, citing Robert Clarke and Mark Merlin, wrote in 2020 that "South Asian germplasm was carried to Southeast Asia and East Africa by the 13th century".[9]: 104 Hemp fibre is older in the region. Rita Dal Martello and colleagues report hemp among the textile fragments from Ban Don Ta Phet in central Thailand, of about 400 BC, which J. Cameron suggested was an exotic material from China.[10]: 514 C. Crévost and C. Lemarié, in their catalogue of the products of Indochina (1919–21), wrote that the Hmong, coming from China, brought textile hemp into the uplands north of the Annamite range in the 17th century.[1]: 73
Names
Across Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam the vernacular name derives from the Sanskrit gañjā: Thai kancha, Khmer kanhcha, Lao kan xa and Vietnamese can xa. Martin judged these names "quite old" except in Vietnam, where can xa had become common only a few years before she wrote. The older Vietnamese name was gai ändö, "Indian grass-cloth plant".[1]: 64 The formulas of Narai's court name the plant kancha (กัญชา).[11]: 334
In the Malay world the older name was ginji. Rumphius's Malay name for the plant is Ginji; among the Persians and throughout Hindustan it was Bangue.[4]: 209 On Sumatra the Malays called the plant ganjo and the smoked preparation bang when William Marsden wrote in 1783. In his edition of 1811 the name is ganja.[12][13] Boorsma found gendji and gindji in use on Java in the 1910s for plants that were not cannabis.[8]: 327–328
Mainland Southeast Asia
Burma
Nathaniel Wallich collected cannabis near Ava in November 1826 (Wallich 4665 H (1826)).[14] The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission was told that hemp had once been grown in Upper Burma "on a considerable scale, for it was the sole source of supply to the shops in Lower Burma".[15] British Burma prohibited the cultivation and consumption of ganja from 1873–74, after the Chief Commissioner, Ashley Eden, wrote that it "is smoked only by the natives of India".[16] In 1894 the Commission found ganja still coming into Burma by sea, "introduced from ports on the Madras coasts, amongst which Pondicherry is prominently mentioned".[17]
Thailand
Three of the formulas in the Tamra Phra Osot Phra Narai, the medical treatise of King Narai's court, contain cannabis. So do fourteen of the medical inscriptions at Wat Pho in Bangkok.[11]: 334 The Cannabis Act of B.E. 2477, published in the Royal Gazette on 5 May 1935, forbade planting cannabis or keeping its seed. It gave those already growing it a year to harvest and sell the crop.[18]: 339–342 McPartland and Small write that Central Asian landraces were brought into Thailand in the 1970s (Thai stick).[9]: 84
Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam
Clovis Thorel, the naval surgeon and botanist of the French Mekong expedition, collected a specimen in what is now Laos between 1862 and 1866.[19] In the uplands of Laos and Tonkin the Hmong and other peoples wore skirts of hemp cloth at the beginning of the 20th century. Early in the French protectorate the cultivation of fibre hemp was tried further south. The plants grew to only about 60 centimetres. Production was stopped beyond a southern limit in the north of Indochina.[1]: 73
In Cambodia in the early 1970s, Martin found small plots of cannabis around houses, with about seventy plants in the largest garden she saw. A royal kram of 30 May 1955 had halted all growing of cannabis. Retail sale was "absolutely free" in Cambodia and Laos.[1]: 66 See Cannabis in Khmer culture.
Island Southeast Asia
Sumatra and Aceh
Thomas Bowrey wrote in the 1670s that gangah came to the Coromandel Coast from Sumatra and sold at five times the price of the local bangha.[3]: 78 William Dampier, at Aceh in 1688, described "a sort of Herb or Plant called Ganga, or Bang", which he had seen only once, at a distance. He knew it was "much esteemed here, and in other places too whither it is transported".[20] Crawfurd took Dampier's for the earliest account of the plant in the Archipelago. Bowrey's editor, Richard Carnac Temple, found Bowrey's "at least nine years earlier". Bowrey was living at Aceh when Dampier visited.[6][3]: 79
Marsden wrote in 1783 that the Malays of Sumatra grew it "in quantities" for smoking and never used it for rope.[12] In Boorsma's survey, cultivation on the west coast of Sumatra "zou blijkbaar door Klingaleezen ingevoerd zijn" (had apparently been introduced by Klings). On the east coast some Klings and Bengalis grew it. In Aceh it was planted here and there.[8]: 327 He concluded that on Sumatra and in Aceh it was grown and used mainly by foreigners, very little by the local population.[8]: 331 The Governor of Aceh forbade its planting, possession, transport and sale by an ordinance of 1924.[21]
Java and the Moluccas
Rumphius found the plant more common "in the upper lands of India" than in the eastern islands, where it was seen only here and there in gardens. On Ambon it was raised from Javanese seed. Seed from the Ambon plants, he wrote, would not keep the plant going beyond two generations.[4]: 209 In 1892 Boorsma wrote that hemp had formerly been grown near Batavia on Java and that the crop had since "spoorloos verdwenen" (disappeared without trace). Indian hemp, he added, appears to have been exported to Europe from Bantam in the 17th century.[22]: 796
New Guinea
Rumphius described a third kind of the plant on Ambon, the Ginji Papoua, short in the stem with small, crowded leaves, brought from the Papuan and Sula Islands.[4]: 211 The Papuan Islands of the period were the Raja Ampat Islands off the western tip of New Guinea.[23]: 33 E. D. Merrill and C. B. Robinson took it to be "apparently merely a variant of the common hemp".[24] For the mainland of Papua New Guinea, David McDonald wrote in 2004 that the date of introduction is not known.[25] Young expatriates "probably" brought it in during the mid to late 1960s.[26]: 227
The Philippines
In the Spanish dictionaries of the islands cáñamo, "hemp", glossed the local cordage fibres, among them abacá.[27] In a memorial of 1765 the royal fiscal Francisco Leandro de Viana reported that in Cagayan the seed of hemp and flax "has been sown, and is yielding very well".[28] A Paris herbarium sheet of cannabis collected in the Philippines by J. Barthe, undated in the catalogue, carries the label "Cultiva en huertas" or "Cultivo en huertas" (grown in gardens) and the word "Ganja".[29] A collector "Barthe (J.?)" worked in the Philippines in 1857.[30]
Across the Indian Ocean
Austronesian-speaking people from island Southeast Asia settled Madagascar. Whether they brought cannabis with them is argued from pollen found in the lakes of the island's highlands; Philippe Beaujard wrote in 2011 that there is "as yet, no evidence linking early human presence to Austronesian speakers" (Spread of cannabis to Africa).[31]: 182
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Martin, Marie Alexandrine (1975). "Ethnobotanical Aspects of Cannabis in Southeast Asia". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 63–76. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.63.
- ↑ ตำราพระโอสถพระนารายณ์ [King Narai's medical treatise] (PDF) (cremation volume) (in ไทย) (7th printing ed.). Bangkok: Fine Arts Department. 1965. Retrieved 29 October 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Bowrey, Thomas (1905). Temple, Richard Carnac (ed.). A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679. Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, Second Series. Vol. 12. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Rumphius, G.E. (1747). Herbarium Amboinense (in Latina). Vol. V. Amsterdam: Franciscus Changuion, Hermannus Uytwerf. pp. 208–211, t. LXXVII.
- ↑ Crawfurd, John (1820). History of the Indian Archipelago (PDF). Vol. 1. Edinburgh. pp. 442–443 – via Wikimedia Commons.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Crawfurd, John (1856). A Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands & Adjacent Countries (PDF). London: Bradbury & Evans. s.v. "Hemp", p. 148 – via Wikimedia Commons.
- ↑ Prain, D. (1893). Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 Boorsma, W.G. (1918). "Over het voorkomen en het gebruik van Indische hennep in Ned.-Indië". Teysmannia (in Nederlands) (VI): 324–334.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 McPartland, J.M.; Small, E. (2020). "A classification of endangered high-THC cannabis (Cannabis sativa subsp. indica) domesticates and their wild relatives". PhytoKeys. 144: 81–112. doi:10.3897/phytokeys.144.46700.
- ↑ Dal Martello, Rita; Min, Rui; Stevens, Chris J.; Qin, Ling; Fuller, Dorian Q. (2024). "Morphometric approaches to Cannabis evolution and differentiation from archaeological sites: interpreting the archaeobotanical evidence from bronze age Haimenkou, Yunnan". Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. 33 (4): 503–518. doi:10.1007/s00334-023-00966-6.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Chokevivat, Vichai (2019). "กัญชา เป็นยาวิเศษ จริงหรือ" [Cannabis: is it really a magic medicine?]. Journal of Thai Traditional & Alternative Medicine (in ไทย). 17 (2): 324–340.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Marsden, William (1783). The History of Sumatra, Containing an Account of the Government, Laws, Customs, and Manners of the Native Inhabitants, with a Description of the Natural Productions, and a Relation of the Ancient Political State of that Island. London: Printed for the author. p. 76 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Marsden, William (1811). The History of Sumatra, Containing an Account of the Government, Laws, Customs, and Manners of the Native Inhabitants, with a Description of the Natural Productions, and a Relation of the Ancient Political State of that Island (3rd ed.). London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown. p. 91 – via Project Gutenberg.
- ↑ McPartland, J.M.; Small, E. (2020). "A classification of endangered high-THC cannabis (Cannabis sativa subsp. indica) domesticates and their wild relatives". PhytoKeys. 144. Supplementary file 1, p. 78. doi:10.3897/phytokeys.144.46700.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. IV, "Extent of cultivation, and its tendency to increase or decrease", paras. 136–138, pp. 52–54 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Papers Relating to the Consumption of Ganja and Other Drugs in India (Return to an Address of the House of Commons, dated 21 February 1893). London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office. 1893 – via Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. VII, "Trade and movement of the hemp drugs", para. 327, p. 122 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ "พระราชบัญญัติกัญชา พุทธศักราช ๒๔๗๗" [Cannabis Act, B.E. 2477] (PDF). Royal Gazette (in ไทย). 52 (ก): 339–343. 5 May 1935. Retrieved 12 October 2026.
- ↑ "Occurrence 731718321: Cannabis sativa L." GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 23 September 2026.
- ↑ Dampier, William (1699). Voyages and Descriptions (PDF). Vol. II. London. p. 126 – via Wikimedia Commons.
- ↑ "Een gandja-verordening in Atjeh". De Sumatra Post (in Nederlands). 26 November 1924 – via Delpher.
- ↑ Boorsma, W.G. (1892). "Eenige bijzonderheden omtrent cannabis sativa, var. indica". Teysmannia (in Nederlands). III: 792–799.
- ↑ Swadling, Pamela (2019) [1996]. Plumes from Paradise: Trade Cycles in Outer Southeast Asia and Their Impact on New Guinea and Nearby Islands until 1920. With contributions by Roy Wagner and Billai Laba. Sydney: Sydney University Press. ISBN 9781743325445.
- ↑ Merrill, E.D.; Robinson, C.B. (1917). An Interpretation of Rumphius's Herbarium Amboinense. Publication (Philippines Bureau of Science), no. 9. Manila: Bureau of Printing. p. 199.
- ↑ McDonald, David (2004). "Cannabis in Papua New Guinea". Pacific Health Dialog. 11 (1): 96–101. PMID 18181450.
- ↑ Bourke, R. Michael; Harwood, Tracy, eds. (2009). Food and Agriculture in Papua New Guinea. Canberra: ANU Press. doi:10.22459/FAPNG.08.2009. ISBN 9781921536601.
- ↑ Noceda, J. de; Sanlúcar, P. de (1754). Vocabulario de la lengua tagala, trabaxado por varios sugetos doctos, y graves, y ultimamente añadido, corregido, y coordinado (PDF) (in español). Manila: Imprenta de la Compañía de Jesús. pp. 1, 18. Retrieved 3 October 2026 – via Wikimedia Commons.
- ↑ Viana, F.L. de (1907). "Memorial of 1765". In Blair, E.H.; Robertson, J.A. (eds.). The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898. Vol. 48. Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company. p. 298. Retrieved 4 October 2026 – via Project Gutenberg.
- ↑ "Occurrence 731718299: Cannabis sativa L." GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 3 October 2026.
- ↑ "Index of Botanists: Barthe (J.?)". Harvard University Herbaria & Libraries. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ Beaujard, Philippe (2011). "The first migrants to Madagascar and their introduction of plants: linguistic and ethnological evidence". Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa. 46 (2): 169–189. doi:10.1080/0067270X.2011.580142.