Talk:Gyirong Valley
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Gyirong Valley treats the Gyirong valley, in Gyirong County of Shigatse on the south slope of the Himalayas, as a cannabis growing area. It has no growing region above it.
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
- Guo and colleagues (2022): cannabis among the plants used by the Tibetans of Gyirong Town; bark for tools, the plant fed to cattle (fieldwork 2019–2021).
- Guo and colleagues (2023): the Daman of Daman village use the bark to make rope.
- Gao and colleagues (2020): the wild-type plant JL, from the Kyirong Gully, sequenced for a reference genome.
- Hu and colleagues (2025): wild-growing populations in the Kyirong Gully region, sampled at three stages of growth.
- Lynch and colleagues (2025): JL is the one wild Tibetan genome in their pangenome of cannabis.
- Wang and colleagues (2026): a population of 30 plants from the "Jilong Valley, Jilong County", called feral in the paper's table.
Growing status
The status is Active: the two ethnobotanical surveys were made in 2019–2021, the Jilong plants were collected on 10 May 2020 (the date in their NCBI sample entries); the genome papers date from 2020 to 2026. They describe wild or feral plants and their use; neither survey says that cannabis is sown in the valley. The ethnobotanical paper of 2022 is a study of wild plants; its table does not say whether the cannabis it lists is wild or cultivated.
How the border is drawn
- The border is drawn within Gyirong County, Shigatse, Tibet, China, as mapped in OpenStreetMap (relation 2744880, read 22 October 2026), and keeps the valley of the Gyirong river round Gyirong town. It stops at the frontier with Nepal as OpenStreetMap maps it. Where the Central Himalayas border reaches the frontier, the two share one line; where that border's coarser line stops short of it, the narrow strip between is Nepalese ground as OpenStreetMap maps it and is inside neither 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. This takes out about 8,300 km² of the 9,000 km² of the county: the high plateau round Zongga, the county seat, and Paiku Co, and the glaciers of the Ganesh Himal on the frontier. A second, smaller valley in the west of the county (about 230 km²) also holds land below 4,000 m; it is a separate valley, not the Gyirong valley, and is left out.
- Check points inside the border: Gyirong town. Outside it: Syabrubesi (Nepal), Kathmandu (Nepal).
- Where this border meets the Central Himalayas, 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 area has no parent region. Central Himalayas covers the hills of Nepal; its border does not cross into Tibet.
The name
The valley is Kyirong in Tibetan and in Gao and colleagues ("Kyirong Gully"); 吉隆 (Jílóng) in Chinese, written "Jilong" by Wang and colleagues; and Gyirong in Guo and colleagues and in the county's name. 吉隆沟 (Jílóng gōu) is the "Gyirong gully".
Accessions inside the border
No accession lies inside the border.
Where the sources disagree
- Wild or feral. Gao and colleagues call JL "wild-type" and Hu and colleagues sample "wild-growing" populations; Wang and colleagues call their Jilong plants feral. The article keeps each paper's word.
- Where the Jilong population grew. Wang and colleagues print 28.8523° N, 85.2819° E and an altitude of 1,800 m. Guo and colleagues put Daman village, in Gyirong Town, at 28.41° N and 2,880 m. The printed coordinates lie well north of Gyirong Town and the printed altitude is below Daman village; the two values do not describe one place; the article gives neither.
- The gully's extent. Gao and colleagues print the extent of the Kyirong Gully in latitude as "28°28′–28°66′ N"; a minute value of 66 is not possible, so the printed range cannot be read as it stands.
Sources
- Guo and colleagues (2022, 2023), Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine: the plant lists (Table 2 in each) and the study-area descriptions. The local names are given with the tone numbers the papers print.
- Gao and colleagues (2020), Horticulture Research: the methods section on sampling, which gives the gully's extent and altitude but no collection date.
- Hu and colleagues (2025), BMC Genomics; Lynch and colleagues (2025), Nature.
- Wang and colleagues (2026), BMC Plant Biology: Table S1 of the supplement.
Sources not used
- Nyalam. A notice of the Nyalam County police (30 June 2023) reports more than 600 wild plants cleared in the mountain forest of Zhangmu town, many of them on cliff edges. Zhangmu is in the next valley to the east, outside this area.