Talk:Khotan
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Discussion
Why the area is on the map
- Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894), Vol. I, ch. VII, para. 293: the Joint Commissioner in Ladakh (1881) named Khotan among the places that produced the charas of the Ladakh road.
- Johnson (1867, p. 6): the charas plant "met with in almost every field" of the country of Khotan.
- Forsyth (1871, p. 14) and Bellew (1875, pp. 221–222): hemp in the fields of Sanju, grown for its resin.
- Hu, Zhang and Hao (2015): large plantings at Hotan in the 1950s and 1960s; Guma (Pishan) among the main producing counties of máyān at present.
- China News Service (6 February 2009): the Hotan border police detachment uprooted more than 30,000 cannabis plants and dealt with 13 cases of growing and selling máyān from 2008.
Growing status
The status is Active: the border police uprooted more than 30,000 plants in Hotan Prefecture in 2008–09, and Hu, Zhang and Hao (2015) name Guma (Pishan) among the main producing counties at present. No source read says that growing in the area has ended.
How the border is drawn
- The border is a proxy, drawn on Hotan Prefecture (OpenStreetMap relation 2748339): Hotan City and the counties of Hotan, Qaraqash (Karakax), Lop, Chira, Keriya, Minfeng and Pishan. The 2009 report gives its figures for the prefecture, the unit the border takes.
- The counties of He'an and Hekang, which lie in the area under the China–India boundary dispute, and the rest of the disputed area are left out, as they are from Southern Xinjiang; no source places cultivation there. The result is about 210,000 km², the figure in the infobox, most of it desert and mountain.
- Sanju and Guma are in Pishan County and so inside the border. The nineteenth-century sources do not say whether Sanju belonged to the Khotan or the Yarkand government of their day; the border follows today's units.
- The border is not drawn from accession or news points. Check points: Hotan, Karakax, Lop, Chira, Keriya, Minfeng, Guma and Sanju inside; Aksai Chin, Kargilik and Yarkand outside.
The name
The page takes the name the nineteenth-century sources use, Khotan. Hotan, the official romanisation, redirects here. The Chinese name is Hetian (和田); Ilchí is the old name of the capital.
Johnson's "country of Khotan"
Johnson's statement that the charas plant was found "in almost every field" refers to the whole country of Khotan north of the Kunlun as he describes it on p. 5, which then included seven districts of Yarkand that had submitted to the khan of Khotan. It does not name places, and the article gives it as a statement about the country.
Accessions inside the border
Trofimov s.n., Hotan (1940) lies in the area but is not filed under it: the label says the plant was found in sown fields, but its collector determined it as the wild variety, var. spontanea. No news item recorded on the wiki falls inside the border.
Sources
- Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894), Vol. I, ch. VII: read on the page images.
- Johnson (1867), Forsyth (1871), Bellew (1875) and Forsyth (ed., 1875): the scans on Wikimedia Commons; the pages cited were read on the page images.
- Hu, Zhang and Hao (2015) and China News Service (2009): read in full.
Where the sources disagree
- How much hemp Khotan grew. Johnson (1867, p. 6) found the charas plant in almost every field of the country; the route notes in the report of the 1873–74 embassy (Forsyth 1875, p. 450) say hemp was "very little grown in this province". The second statement comes in a list of rope prices and may refer to hemp grown for fibre. The article gives both.
Sources not used
- Zhou (2015) reports that in 1993, in a village of Pishina township in Pishan County with some sixty people, all but the women and children commonly smoked máyān. That is use, not growing.
- A report of 494 plants grown in a courtyard in Hotan County survives only as a search snippet; the page has been deleted.