Talk:Dêqên

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Discussion for: Dêqên • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Dêqên treats the Dêqên (Diqing) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, in north-western Yunnan, as a cannabis growing area. It sits in the Yunnan growing region.

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

Kingdon Ward (1913), from his journeys of 1911: "Quantities of hemp are grown" at Mo-ting, above the Yangtze, and crops of cotton, tobacco and hemp on the irrigated fan where the valley below Tung-chu-ling opens on the river.
The two police notices from Xiaruo, in Dêqên County: more than 30 plants in September 2025 and more than 10 by a roadside in September 2026, both identified as wild cannabis.
Geng and colleagues (2016), from fieldwork at Baidi in 2013 and 2014: hemp seed, samei, among the wild plants the Naxi use for oil and fat.
Five herbarium sheets from the Deqin country and the Mekong, received or collected between 1903 and 1937.

Growing status

The status is Active: the police notices date from 2025 and 2026 and the Baidi fieldwork from 2013 and 2014. Both notices describe wild plants, and Geng and colleagues list hemp among wild edibles; neither source describes a field. The hemp fields in the article are Kingdon Ward's, of 1911.

How the border is drawn

The border follows Dêqên (Diqing) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Yunnan, China (Shangri-La city and Dêqên and Weixi counties), as mapped in OpenStreetMap (relation 2729695, read 22 October 2026), and lies inside the Yunnan border.
The outer edge follows the ridges round the valleys that hold land below 4,000 m (SRTM elevation): each such valley is taken whole, up to the divide round it. Valleys with no such land, where the ground is above 4,000 m or is mapped by ESA WorldCover 2021 as bare or sparse vegetation, snow and ice, or open water, are left out at the edge; land of those kinds inside the kept ground stays inside. Nearly every valley of the prefecture holds land below 4,000 m, so this takes out only about 180 km² of the 23,000 km² of the unit: high ground on the Tibet border north of Dêqên town and on the Sichuan border north of Shangri-La.
Check points inside the border: Shangri-La, Dêqên town, Weixi, Benzilan, the collecting point of Wang 69367, Wang 70262 and Yu 10078, the collecting point of Yu 7817, the collecting point of Soulié 1224. Outside it: Lijiang, Gongshan, Batang.
Where this border meets Yunnan, Kham, Lijiang, Nujiang, Liangshan or Southeastern Tibet, 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 10.

The name

The page takes the prefecture's own name in romanised Tibetan, Dêqên. In Chinese the prefecture is Diqing (迪庆), and one of its counties is Deqin (德钦).
The older names belong to the town that is now the county seat: A-tun-tze or Atuntze on the herbarium labels of the 1930s, A-tun-tzu in Rock, A-tun-tsi in Kingdon Ward.
Deqin and Diqing were the other titles open to the page. Deqin is the name of one county only; Diqing is the Chinese name of the prefecture.

Kham and Yunnan

Kingdon Ward counts the country round A-tun-tsi as part of Kham. Dêqên is filed under Yunnan, which takes in the whole province, and the Kham growing region is drawn up to the Yunnan border, so the two regions do not overlap.

Accessions inside the border

Filed under the area and the region: Wang 69367 (1935) (mountain slope), Yu 10078 (1937) (grassy slope, casual) and Yu 7817 (1937) (side of a field, Common), classed as feral.
Not filed under the area: Wang 70262 (1935) and Soulié 1224 (by 1903), classed as of unknown status. Neither label says where the plant grew beyond the place name.

Sources

Kingdon Ward (1913), The Land of the Blue Poppy, on his travels of 1911. He writes "hemp" without naming the plant; the article keeps his word. Mo-ting is not matched to a modern village in the book, which places it only as a day's march up the Yangtze from Ngoug-chi.
Rock (1947) quotes the Yün-nan T'ung-chih in his own translation, without the Chinese text of the passage.
The Xiaruo notices. The 2025 notice is on the Dêqên County government site; the 2026 notice is a repost on Sohu by the Diqing narcotics-control account, from material of the Dêqên police. Neither names a village.
Geng and colleagues (2016) and the Shangri-La government's account of Naxi hemp spinning (2021) describe Baidi village, in Sanba township of Shangri-La.
Herbarium sheets: the labels on the digitised sheets.

Sources not used

Kingdon Ward's passages on the hemp crops and cloth of the Salween valley belong to Nujiang.