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Sagaing treats Sagaing district, across the Ayeyarwady from Mandalay, as a historical cannabis growing area of the Dry Zone: the ganja that the district's officials reported to the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in 1893–94. The present district as an administrative unit belongs to Sagaing District, and the region to Sagaing Region; the town has no page yet.
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Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.
Discussion
Why the area is on the map
- Two witnesses in the Commission's Vol. VII, both officers of Sagaing district, report Burmans growing ganja there: C. M. Prendergast, District Superintendent of Police (answer 51, p. 394: "Ganja to a small extent was grown in the district by Burmans"), and Major G. S. Eyre, Deputy Commissioner (answer 14, p. 385: "A case occurred of Burmans growing ganja for sale to natives of India").
- Prendergast's answer names the district. Eyre's answer 14 does not: it follows his answer 2, given "for this province". He wrote as the district's Deputy Commissioner, and the article gives his words as his.
- Whether Eyre's case and Prendergast's account describe the same growers is not settled by the evidence; neither gives a date or a place within the district.
- The Commission's report does not name Sagaing in its list of districts where the cultivation was most prevalent (Vol. I, para. 137).
"Natives"
Prendergast wrote that the ganja was grown "for sale to natives", having opened the same answer with "Natives of India are consumers of ganja". The article quotes his words. Eyre's "natives of India" is explicit, and the lead's "to sell to Indians" rests on both.
Growing status
The status is Historical. The evidence dates from 1893–94; no later source read reports cannabis grown in Sagaing district, and none says that growing there ended. No first or last year is set: neither witness dates the growing.
How the border is drawn
- The border is Sagaing District in OpenStreetMap less Myinmu Township: Sagaing and Myaung townships, about 1,700 km², the figure in the infobox. Myinmu Township belongs to the Ayadaw area, which rests on growing there since 2022–23, and is left to it, so the area is in two parts. Where it meets Ayadaw and Madaya it follows their lines, and it stays inside the line of the Dry Zone.
- The witnesses speak of Sagaing "district" in the 1890s. How far that district's boundary matches the present one has not been checked against a source; the present district is the nearest unit.
- The border is not drawn from accession or news points.
Sources
- Hemp Drugs Commission, 1894. Vol. VII read in the OCR text, with each Sagaing passage checked line by line: Eyre (pp. 385–386) and Prendergast (p. 394). Two other Sagaing passages say nothing of growing: A. G. Mayne, District Superintendent of Police, Pegu (p. 393), recalls two crimes by sepoys of the military police at Sagaing in about 1888; P. N. Mookerjee, Civil Surgeon, Sagaing (p. 397), writes that Burmans in Upper Burma do not use the drugs. Vol. I, paras. 136–138 and 692–695, read in the Wellcome Collection's OCR text.
- Gazetteers. Scott and Hardiman's Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States (Part I, vols. I–II; Part II, vols. I–III) was searched in its OCR text and says nothing of cannabis growing in the Dry Zone districts. Its "brown hemp" (paiksan) for Sagaing is a name for kenaf, not cannabis, and is not used. It is not cited, and it says nothing about whether the growing of the 1890s went on.
- Not yet read. The Burma Gazetteer A volume for Sagaing, not found online.