Talk:Yarkand
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Why the area is on the map
- Bellew, in the report of the 1873–74 embassy (Forsyth 1875, p. 78): Indian hemp "Grown largely in the Yarkand division", with the collection of the resin, its adulteration, its price and its tax.
- Forsyth (1871, p. 28): hemp "grown on the borders of every field in Yarkund".
- Aitchison (1874, pp. 51–52): the ruler's ban on field cultivation, single rows round other crops; charas from Postgraum and Kurgilik.
- Johnson (1867, p. 15), told at Ilchí: Baltis from Skardu settled at Yarkand to grow the charas plant.
- Indian Hemp Drugs Commission: Ramsay (1888; Vol. I, ch. VII), charas produced chiefly in the vicinity of Yarkand; Lachman Das (Vol. V, witness 86), the sowing and harvest at Yarkand at second hand.
- Chopra and Chopra (1957): the best charas from plants grown in Yarkand, wild and cultivated.
- Hu, Zhang and Hao (2015): Shache (Yarkand), Makit and Kargilik among the main producing counties of máyān at present; Makit and Shache máyān the best known in earlier centuries; large plantings at Makit in the 1950s and 1960s.
- Yecheng County narcotics control office (June 2024): 24 plants grown in a courtyard in Kargilik County, uprooted.
Growing status
The status is Active. Hu, Zhang and Hao (2015) describe Shache, Makit and Kargilik as main producing counties at present, and in June 2024 the police of Kargilik County uprooted plants grown in a courtyard. The 2024 growers said they wanted the seed to eat; the article reports that and does not present the case as charas production. No source read says that growing in the area has ended. The announcement of 1909 that charas cultivation in Yarkand had ended was denied the next year (Kreutzmann 2026), and the Chinese intention reported in 1936 to prohibit cultivation is a statement of intent, not of an end.
How the border is drawn
- The border is a proxy, drawn on four counties of Kashgar Prefecture: Yarkant (Shache), Poskam (Zepu), Kargilik (Yecheng) and Makit (OpenStreetMap relations 2748433, 2748429, 2748424 and 2748426). They are the counties of the Yarkand River oasis that the sources name: Shache, Makit and Kargilik in Hu, Zhang and Hao, Kurgilik in Aitchison. Poskam lies between Yarkand and Kargilik. Aitchison's Postgraum has not been identified on a map, and the border does not depend on it.
- The union is clipped to the border of Southern Xinjiang, so the area under the China–India boundary dispute, which reaches into Kargilik County, is left out. The result is about 34,300 km², the figure in the infobox.
- Maralbexi (Bachu) County, which Hu, Zhang and Hao also name for the 1950s–60s and for 2015, lies downstream on the Yarkand River. No source read ties it to the Yarkand oasis, so it is left in the region and out of this area.
- Sanju and Guma (Pishan County) lie in Hotan Prefecture and are treated on Khotan.
- The border is not drawn from accession or news points. Check points: the towns of Yarkand, Poskam, Kargilik and Makit inside; Kashgar, Yengisar, Hanerik, Maralbexi, Guma, Sanju and Hotan outside.
The name
The page takes the name the nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources use for the tract, Yarkand. Yarkant (the county's romanised Uyghur name) redirects here. The Chinese name of the county seat is Shache (莎车), the form Hu, Zhang and Hao use.
Accessions inside the border
EBC 71830 (s.d.), an undated seed sample from Yarkand with no collector, lies in the area but is not filed under it: its catalogue entry does not document cultivation. The 1871 Henderson specimen that McPartland and Small figure is not held as an accession on the wiki. No news item recorded on the wiki falls inside the border.
Sources
- Forsyth (ed., 1875), Report of a Mission to Yarkund in 1873: the scan on Wikimedia Commons (no text layer), read through an OCR copy; every passage used was read on the page image. Chapter II, "General description of Káshghar", is Bellew's except for sections the chapter's own note gives to Chapman.
- Forsyth (1871), Aitchison (1874), Bellew (1875) and Johnson (1867): the scans on Wikimedia Commons; the pages cited were read.
- Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894): Vol. I, ch. VI–VII and XIV; Vol. III, Punjab memorandum; Vol. V, witness 86 (p. 505), read on the page image.
- Kreutzmann (2026), Chopra and Chopra (1957), United Nations Secretariat (1953) and Hu, Zhang and Hao (2015): read in full.
- Yecheng County narcotics control office (2024): the post on the Xinjiang narcotics control account, read in full.
Where the sources disagree
- From whom Lachman Das learnt the method. In his own evidence (Vol. V, p. 505) he says he learnt it at Ladakh "from Yarkand merchants"; the Commission's report, quoting him (Vol. I, ch. VI, para. 245), says "from Ladakh merchants". The article follows his evidence.
- Cultivation under Yakub Beg. Forsyth (1871) found hemp on the borders of every field; Aitchison (1874) wrote that field cultivation had been prohibited and only single rows were grown round other crops; Bellew, in the report of 1875, wrote of hemp grown largely in the Yarkand division and taxed. The article gives each.
- The best charas. Aitchison placed it at Karmak near Yangi Hissar (see Kashgar); the Chopras at Yarkand. Each is given as its source's.
Sources not used
- Kuropatkin (1882), Kashgaria, names hashish from Yarkand as an important export to Kashmir and the Punjab; the article's trade paragraph already carries the point from earlier sources.
- Vavilov (1931), quoted by McPartland and Small, on hemp thickets in the vacant lots of Yarkand: the supplement in which they quote it was not read for this page.
- Other witnesses before the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (Vol. V, pp. 508, 516) repeat the Yarkand method at second hand; they add nothing to Lachman Das.