Talk:Yarkand charas trade
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Page scope
Yarkand charas trade covers the overland trade in charas from the oases of southern Xinjiang over the Karakoram to Leh, and from Leh through Kulu or Kashmir to the Punjab, from the 1860s to its end in the 1930s and 1940s. Cultivation in the oases is covered on Yarkand, Kashgar, Khotan and Southern Xinjiang; the drug itself, and the routes into India from Afghanistan, on Charas.
Data verification
Check the main page for the sources behind each statement. Discuss the routes, the traders, the figures and the end of the trade here.
Discussion
Title
The title follows the name the sources give the commodity. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, the Kashmir State memorandum and the Punjab witnesses speak of "Yarkand charas", and the United Nations Secretariat placed the centre of the trade at Yarkand. The Punjab trade returns called the whole traffic through Kulu the "Ladakh" trade, but that heading took in every good crossing the Rohtang pass, so it is used in the article only as the name of a statistical heading.
Sources read
- J. E. T. Aitchison's Hand-book of the Trade Products of Leh (1874), read on the Wikimedia Commons scan, including the annual trade reports of Henry Cayley (1867–1870), R. B. Shaw (1871, 1873) and Aitchison (1872) printed as its appendices, and the text of the treaty of 2 May 1870 (pp. 393–396).
- The correspondence of Douglas Forsyth's mission of 1870 (Appendix I, p. 37, read on the page image) and H. W. Bellew's Kashmir and Kashghar (1875).
- The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission's report: vol. I, chs. VII and XIV; vol. III, the Punjab and Kashmir State memoranda; vol. V, the evidence of the Punjab witnesses who spoke of the trade.
- The Kangra district gazetteer of 1897 (pp. 44, 100, 106, read on page images), the history of the Punjab excise system published at Lahore in 1931, Janet Rizvi's article in The Himalayan Journal (1995), the United Nations Secretariat's study of 1953 and Hermann Kreutzmann's chapter of 2026.
Where the sources disagree
- The duty cut of 1928. The Government of India's annual report for 1928, as quoted by the United Nations Secretariat, gives the reduction as from Rs 60 to Rs 20 a seer. Kreutzmann, citing the Kashgar trade report, gives it as from Rs 60 to Rs 20 a maund. A maund is 40 seers, so the two cannot both be right; the article gives both, each with its source.
- The end of the export. The Secretariat dates the Xinjiang prohibition to 1934; Kreutzmann dates the decisive measures (the export duty of Rs 200 a pony load and the Kashgar proclamation) to 1936. The article gives both.
- The value of the charas of 1872. Aitchison's report for 1872 gives Rs 53,425 (p. 358); Shaw's report for 1873 repeats the figure as Rs 53,524 (p. 377). The table uses Aitchison's.
- Volume. Jawala Bhagat's figure of "about 18 or 20 thousand pony loads" a year is far above the official counts of 3,000 to 5,000 maunds a year entering the Punjab in the early 1890s, at two packages of 60 seers to a load. The article gives his figure as his.
- When the trade began. The only date for the first imports is Bhagat Hira Nand's recollection of 1852. Moorcroft's list of goods reaching Leh from Yarkand in the 1820s includes "drugs" without naming them, so the article does not carry the trade back beyond the earliest dated report.
Not used
- R. H. Davies's Report on the Trade and Resources of the Countries on the North-Western Boundary of British India (1862) and the Punjab District Gazetteer for Kangra of 1917 are cited on Kullu Valley, Kullu District and Charas, but could not be re-read for this page, so their figures for the Kulu route and the bonded warehouse at Kulu stay on those pages.
- I. C. and R. N. Chopra's dating of the end of imports to about 1934–35 is on Charas and Southern Xinjiang and was not re-read for this page.
- The Government of India's resolution of 21 March 1895 on the Commission's report is cited on Charas for the bonded-warehouse duty that followed; it was not re-read for this page.
Images reserved in the article
Two images have places in the article but are not yet uploaded. Their file links are kept hidden in the page source and can be restored once the files exist:
File:Yarkand-charas-trade-routes-map.jpg(The road), a map to be drawn: the western Himalaya and Karakoram with Yarkand, the Karakoram Pass, Leh, Kargil, Srinagar, Rawalpindi, the Rohtang Pass, Kulu (Sultanpur), Hoshiarpur and Amritsar marked; one line from Yarkand over the Karakoram Pass to Leh, and two from Leh to the plains, one by Kargil and Srinagar to Rawalpindi, the other over the Taglang, Lachalung, Baralacha and Rohtang passes and down the Kulu valley to Hoshiarpur. No modern borders.File:Karakoram-Pass.jpg(Yarkand to Leh): a freely licensed photograph of the Karakoram Pass. The Wikimedia Commons category "Karakoram Pass" has candidates.