Talk:Madaya

Talk

Discussion for: Madaya • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

Madaya treats Madaya Township, north of Mandalay, as a cannabis growing area of the Dry Zone that is no longer grown: the hemp the Deputy Commissioner of Mandalay found there in 1891 and had stopped.

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

K. G. Burne, Deputy Commissioner of Mandalay, wrote for the Hemp Drugs Commission (Vol. VII, pp. 381–382) that the hemp plant "was found cultivated to a small extent in some parts of the Madaya and Pyniulwin townships of this district in 1891", that measures were at once taken, and that there was "at the present time no hemp grown at all". In his oral evidence he described the plants in gardens, compounds and yards round houses, his orders and the prosecutions that followed. The Commission's report (Vol. I, para. 74) repeats that the Deputy Commissioner of Mandalay had come across cultivation; that is the same witness, not a second one.

Growing status

The status is No longer grown, with the last year 1891 and the reason Banned. Burne's own evidence says the growing was stopped by his orders under the excise law extended to Upper Burma in 1888, and that his officers found none afterwards. No later source read reports cannabis grown in Madaya; the status rests on Burne's statement, not on the absence of later reports. No first year is set: Burne says only that the plant was found in 1891, and that Burmese officials told him it had been grown under the kings.

Pyinulwin

Burne names two townships, Madaya and "Pyniulwin" (Pyin Oo Lwin). The page treats the Madaya part. Pyin Oo Lwin Township lies on the Shan plateau, outside the Dry Zone, and is not part of the border. Burne's rainfall (30 to 50 inches) and elevation (about 300 to 3,600 feet) are for all the places in the district where the plant was grown, and so include Pyin Oo Lwin; the article gives them for the district.

How the border is drawn

• The border is Madaya Township in OpenStreetMap (relation 5996696), about 1,100 km², the figure in the infobox. The coordinates are those of Madaya town. Burne gives no village.
• No district is given. Madaya Township's district changed when the districts of Mandalay Region were redrawn in 2022 (the English Wikipedia now places it in Aungmyethazan District), so the page leaves the district out.
• The border is not drawn from accession or news points.

Sources

• Hemp Drugs Commission, 1894. Burne's written answers and oral evidence (Vol. VII, pp. 381–382) read in the OCR text, line by line; the two columns of p. 382 are interleaved in the OCR and were read in order.
• Khin Thein Oo's rainfall study of the Dry Zone (2016), read in full.
• Gazetteers. Scott and Hardiman's entries for Madaya and for Mandalay district (Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States, Part II, vol. II, 1901) and the Burma Gazetteer for Mandalay district (A, 1928) were searched in their OCR texts. None mentions hemp grown in the district. The 1928 volume gives the excise department's seizures in the district in 1924–25, among them 1,351 tolas of ganja, without saying where it came from. They are not cited.