Talk:Bortala
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Bortala treats the Bortala Mongol Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang, with the city of Shuanghe, as a cannabis growing area. It sits in the Northern Xinjiang growing region.
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Discussion
Why the area is on the map
- The Bortala border force (June 2016): the climate of the Bortala border area suits wild cannabis; the force organises a clearance every summer and autumn, and had cleared 108,000 plants that summer.
- The Bole reclamation-area police (June 2016): more than 100,000 wild plants cleared.
- The Bole reclamation-area police and the Haerdun border station (June 2025): more than 19,000 wild plants in the woodland of the 87th Regiment.
- A report of September 2025: about 210,000 wild plants found on a line patrol at Bole.
- Herbarium sheets from the lower Bortala (Regel, 1878) and from Bole (Liou, 1931).
Growing status
The status is Active: the police reports (2016–2025) describe wild plants growing at the time. Clearing a stand is not a sign that growing has ended.
How the border is drawn
- The border follows Bortala Mongol Autonomous Prefecture (Bole, Alashankou, Jinghe and Wenquan; OpenStreetMap relation 239457) and Shuanghe, a city of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps 5th Division that lies within it (9068337), as mapped in OpenStreetMap (read 21 October 2026). The border stops at the frontier with Kazakhstan.
- Ground above 4,000 m and land that ESA WorldCover 2021 maps as bare or sparsely vegetated, as snow and ice, or as open water is left out of the border. This takes out about 5,500 km²: Ebi Lake with the salt flats and bare desert round it, Sayram Lake, and bare ground on the Borohoro and Alatau ranges.
- Check points inside the border: Bole, Alashankou, Jinghe, Wenquan, Shuanghe, the collecting point of Liou 3403. Outside it: Yining, Kuytun, Tacheng.
- Where this border meets Northern Xinjiang or Ili Valley, the two share one line.
- Land cover: ESA WorldCover 2021 (version 200, 10 m), © ESA WorldCover project 2021 / Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021) processed by ESA WorldCover consortium, licensed CC BY 4.0. Elevation: AWS Terrain Tiles (Terrarium, SRTM-based), zoom 9.
The name
The page takes the short name of the prefecture, Bortala (博尔塔拉), which is also the river's. Regel's label of 1878 spells it Borotala. The prefecture's capital is Bole.
Accessions inside the border
- Filed under the area: Liou 3403 (1931), from river flats near a gorge at 1,600 m, which the Yangling duplicate calls wild and the Beijing catalogue places in Bole.
- Not filed under the area: Regel s.n., Bortala (1878). Its label gives the lower Bortala, the altitude and the month; the sheet is classed as of unknown status.
Sources
- Police and press reports (2016–2025): each read in full at the address cited. The 2016 border-force report is the China News Service account carried by Xinmin; the 2025 report of about 210,000 plants is a publicity piece carried on the Xin Hunan platform.
Where the sources disagree
- Bole reclamation area, June 2016. The headline of the China Drug Control report gives 10,000 plants (万株); its text gives more than 100,000. The article gives the text's figure. This clearance and the border force's 108,000 of the same weeks are given separately: the reports name different forces and do not say whether the counts overlap.