Talk:Karategin
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Why Karategin is a growing area
- Ole Olufsen's The Emir of Bokhara and his Country (1911, p. 129) lists hemp among the crops of Karategin's irrigated land: "millet, lucerne, hemp, tobacco, melons, turnips and cabbage". He passed through the province in September 1896, on the journey that took him from Khorog (25 August 1896, p. 70) through Roshan, Vanj and Darvaz to Garm. He does not say what the hemp was used for.
- A. Semenov's article of 1899 in Этнографическое обозрение (book XLII, no. 3, p. 106) says that among the mountain Tajiks hemp and sesame were sown "only for the oil" (изъ-за масла). The article speaks of the mountain Tajiks as a whole; the only districts it names are Karategin and Darvaz. The article page gives the sentence at that scale.
- The Brockhaus and Efron entry (1895) lists wheat, barley, lucerne, apples, apricots and a little grape, and no hemp. Nikolai Vavilov, who collected crops at Garm in 1916 (Five Continents, 1997, pp. 9 and 14), names wheat, barley, rye and crown flax there and no hemp. Neither silence is read as evidence that hemp was not grown.
The name
Karategin is the form used by Olufsen and Vavilov, Каратегин by the Brockhaus and Efron dictionary. The valley is now usually called the Rasht valley, and Rasht Valley redirects here. The town is Garm (Gharm); Olufsen also writes "Harm".
Growing status
The status is Historical. The one dated report of cultivation is Olufsen's of 1896, so the infobox gives "from 1896" with no closing year. No report of cannabis grown, gathered or destroyed in Lakhsh, Rasht, Tojikobod, Nurobod or Roghun districts since 2000 has been found in Russian, Tajik or English sources (the Kuknor reports of the Drug Control Agency, Khovar, Asia-Plus and Radio Ozodi name places in Sughd and Gorno-Badakhshan, not here). No source says that growing ended.
How the border is drawn
- The border follows five modern districts: Lakhsh, Rasht, Tojikobod, Nurobod and Roghun, about 12,000 km² (OpenStreetMap relations 3281957, 3281968, 3281931, 3281949 and 3281937).
- They are chosen to match the bekdom as the two older sources bound it. Olufsen (p. 128) runs Karategin along the Surkhab from the Karamuk mountain knot in the east to the Ab-i-Garm, about 60 km south-west of Garm, in the west; the Ab-i-Garm (Obigarm) lies in Roghun district. The Brockhaus and Efron entry bounds it by the Hisar and Alai ranges in the north and the range of Peter the Great in the south, with Darvaz beyond it, and gives about 9,500 square versts (about 10,800 km²).
- Sangvor (Tavildara) district, on the Khingou south of the range of Peter the Great, is left out: the dictionary puts all but the lowest part of the Khingou in Darvaz. The English Wikipedia article Rasht Valley counts Tavildara (Sangvor) among the valley's districts.
- The infobox point (39.14, 70.80) is the centre of the drawn area.
Accessions and news
No accession or news item on the wiki comes from inside the border.
Sources
- Olufsen (1911): read in the Internet Archive text: the chapter "My journey in Shugnan, Roshan, Darvas and Karategin" (from p. 68) for its crop passages, and the geography of the Surkhab (pp. 41–43). The book's index lists hemp on pp. 129, 217 and 496; only p. 129 is in this chapter (p. 217 is the Khiva oasis, p. 496 Bukhara). In Vanj (p. 104) he saw opium poppies in the gardens.
- Semenov (1899): read in the Internet Archive text of the volume; the article runs pp. 99–107. The OCR prints кувджута for кунжута (sesame).
- W. R. Rickmers, The Duab of Turkestan (1913, pp. 57–58), writes that hemp was cultivated "for a narcotic, that is to say, hashish or bhang". The passage is in his chapter on the Zarafshan and speaks of the country in general, so it is not used for Karategin. His chapters on Garm and Darvaz do not mention hemp.
- Not read: V. I. Lipsky, Горная Бухара; A. A. Semenov, Этнографические очерки Зарафшанских гор, Каратегина и Дарваза (1903), which a search snippet shows giving local names for hemp; N. A. Kislyakov and A. K. Pisarchik, Таджики Каратегина и Дарваза (1966 and 1970 volumes).