Talk:Southeastern Tibet
Discussion page of Southeastern Tibet
More actions
Talk
Discussion for: Southeastern Tibet • View • Links • Related changes
Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.
Page scope
Southeastern Tibet treats Nyingchi, in the south-east of the Tibet Autonomous Region, as a cannabis growing region. Its growing area is Kongpo.
Data verification
Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.
Discussion
Why the region is on the map
- Kingdon Ward (1926): hemp among the crops of Payi, on the Tsangpo below Sanglung, on the journey of 1924.
- Kingdon Ward (1934): hempen dress in Zayul in 1933. This is cloth; the book does not say where the hemp was grown.
- The growing area Kongpo: a wild accession (CSLZ, Cai and colleagues 2026) and a feral population (LZ, Wang and colleagues 2026), the herbarium sheet Ludlow 15714 (1947) and police notices of 2021 (Lilong) and 2026 (Baji village).
Growing status
The status is Active: the Kongpo plants were sampled for papers published in 2026 (the LZ plants were collected on 10 May 2020, the date in their NCBI sample entries); the police notices date from 2021 and 2026. They describe wild and feral plants; no source dated 2000 or later describes a field crop of hemp in the region.
How the border is drawn
- The border follows Nyingchi, a prefecture-level city of Tibet, China (Bayi District, Mainling, Gongbo'gyamda, Nang, Bomê, Mêdog and Zayü), as mapped in OpenStreetMap (relation 2734427, read 22 October 2026).
- Its southern edge runs on the frontier with India (Arunachal Pradesh) as OpenStreetMap maps it, and in the south-east on the frontier with Myanmar. Where the Eastern Himalayas border or the Kachin Hills border reaches the frontier, the two share one line. Those borders were drawn more coarsely, and where their line stops short of the frontier the narrow strip between (under 3 km wide) is ground of India or Myanmar as OpenStreetMap maps it, so it 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 25,000 km² of the 77,000 km² of the units: the high plateau and the eastern Nyainqêntanglha ranges of western Gongbo'gyamda, the ranges and glaciers north of Bomê, and high ground in Zayü and along the southern ranges of Nang and Mainling. A second stretch of valley land, of about 270 km², lies north of Bomê.
- Check points inside the border: Bayi, Mainling, Gongbo'gyamda, Bomê, Mêdog, Zayü (Zhuwagen), the collecting point of Ludlow 15714. Outside it: Lhasa, Chamdo, Tuting (India), Itanagar (India).
- Where this border meets Kongpo, the Eastern Himalayas, Kham, Yunnan, Nujiang or Dêqên, or the Kachin Hills or Putao across the frontier, 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 south edge of the region runs on the same line that the Eastern Himalayas region uses, so that the two regions do not overlap.
The name
- "South-East Tibet" is the heading of the Ludlow and Sherriff labels ("Flora of South-East Tibet") and the term Kingdon Ward uses (1926). The title is written "Southeastern Tibet".
- The administrative unit is Nyingchi (林芝, Línzhī); Chinese writing calls the south-east of Tibet 藏东南 (Zàng dōngnán).
Accessions inside the border
- Filed under the region and under Kongpo: Ludlow 15714 (1947), from dry open ground at Shoga Dzong, classed as feral.
Where the sources disagree
- Payi. Kingdon Ward puts Payi on the Tsangpo below Sanglung and contrasts its crops with those of Kongbo. The book does not tie Payi to a modern township or county.
- Zayü and Bomi in 1982. The survey of 1982 in Chamdo Prefecture (Hu Yiyang, 1984) lists Zayü and Bomi among its counties; both are now in Nyingchi. Its abstract does not say in which counties cannabis was collected, so it is used on Kham only.
Sources
- Kingdon Ward (1926, 1934): The Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges and A Plant Hunter in Tibet (cited in the reissue of 1937).
- Cai and colleagues (2026) and Wang and colleagues (2026): the Kongpo genome papers; see Talk:Kongpo.
- Police notices: China News (26 June 2021) for Lilong; the Nyingchi government website, reposting the Tibet Business Daily (30 September 2026), for Baji village.
- Herbarium sheet: Ludlow 15714 (1947).
Sources not used
- Chen and colleagues (2022) resequenced a wild accession, W270, said to come from "Xizang, SW China" at latitude 29.59° N, with no county. That latitude also runs through Lhasa, so the accession is not placed in the region.
- Zhang and colleagues (2018) give four wild populations from "Tibet, China" by latitude only (29.58–29.88° N), with no place names; they are not placed in the region either.
- The Gongbo'gyamda County police notice of September 2026 on wild plants in Zhongsha township is not cited: its page does not load.
- Bailey's crop of hemp at Nge (1913) and a police notice from Cona (2025) are in Shannan, to the west of the region.