Talk:Yunnan

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Discussion for: Yunnan • View • Links • Related changes

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

Page scope

Yunnan treats Yunnan Province as a cannabis growing region. It is a growing-region page; a page on the province as an administrative unit would be Yunnan Province. The region's growing areas are Dêqên, Lijiang and Nujiang.

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

Local hemp: the survey of 23 principal varieties from 17 counties (published 1993); Yunma No. 1 selected from a Yunnan local variety (2001); a report of 2019 that hemp was grown in Yunnan before licensing began and that seed is still eaten in parts of the province.
Herbarium sheets labelled as cultivated: Forrest 4761 (Dali, 1906), Henry 11209 (Mengzi and Feng Chen Lin; the Edinburgh sheet bought in 1898) and Chang 0104 (Songming, 1940).
Hemp among the Yi (Mile; Xiaoliangshan), Naxi (Baidi), Miao (Changning) and Hmong (Wenshan).
Wild stands: the wild populations sampled in 2011–2016 (Zhang and colleagues), sheets from woods, slopes and field edges (1933–1941), wild-picked leaves in Fugong (2022) and the clearances at Nuoliang and Zhenkang in Lincang (2026).
Licensed industrial hemp since 2010 is described on the page, but it is not what puts the region on the map: the licensed bases grow bred cultivars, and some of them, as at Douwen village in Shizong County, were set up where no hemp had been grown.
Its growing areas: Dêqên (hemp fields above the Yangtze in 1911; wild plants cleared at Xiaruo in 2025 and 2026), Lijiang and Nujiang (hemp fields and cloth on the Salween in 1911–1914; wild plants cleared at Gudeng in 2015).

Growing status

The status is Active: the Yi of Xiaoliangshan were surveyed in 2019–2021, the Naxi spinners of Baidi were described in 2021, and the police reports of wild stands date from 2022 and 2026.

Growing areas in the north-west

Dêqên and Nujiang, in the north-west of the province, are areas under Yunnan. Travellers counted Dêqên as part of Kham; the Kham growing region is drawn up to the Yunnan border, so the two regions do not overlap.

How the border is drawn

The border follows Yunnan Province, China, as mapped in OpenStreetMap (relation 913094, read 21 October 2026), and stops at China's frontiers with Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam.
Ground above 4,000 m and land that ESA WorldCover 2021 maps as bare or sparsely vegetated, as snow and ice, or as open water is left out at the outer edge of the border only: land of those kinds that the kept ground encloses is inside, pieces less than 5 km apart are joined, and pieces under 25 km² with no accession in them are left out. About 382,800 km² of the 383,130 km² of the units are inside the line. The summit ground of Kawagebo, in the Meili range on the Tibet border, is out; the Baima, Haba and Yulong massifs, which kept valleys surround, are inside, as are Dian, Erhai, Fuxian and Lugu, smaller than 500 km². Along stretches of the outline that no neighbouring border runs beside, the line is simplified to about 3 km of detail.
In the north-west the region takes in its growing areas Dêqên and Nujiang whole, and there its line is theirs: round Dêqên the outer edge follows the ridges round the valleys that hold land below 4,000 m, each valley taken whole up to the divide round it.
Check points inside the border: Kunming, Lijiang, Dali, Deqin, Lincang, Zhenkang, Jinghong, Mengzi, Fugong. Outside it: Chengdu, Myitkyina, Lao Cai.
Where this border meets Lijiang, Dêqên or Nujiang, or Kham, Southeastern Tibet, Liangshan or Weining across the provincial line, or the Kachin Hills, Shan Hills, Putao, Northern Laos, Muang Sing or Northwest Vietnam 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 name

The page takes the bare name of the province, as the growing region drawn on it. A page on the administrative unit would be titled Yunnan Province.

Accessions inside the border

Filed under the region: Forrest 4761 (1906), Henry 11209 (s.d.) and Chang 0104 (1940), whose labels say the plant was cultivated; Tsiang 11842 (1933), Wang 69367 (1935), Yu 7817 (1937), Yu 10078 (1937), Wang 83330 (1939) and Chien 152 (1941), from woods, slopes, field edges and a meadow, classed as feral; and Rock 10802 (1923–1924), which is also filed under Lijiang. Wang 69367 (1935), Yu 7817 (1937) and Yu 10078 (1937) are also filed under Dêqên.
Not filed under the region: Liou 20810 (1946), Maire 1828 (by 1906), Maire 342 (s.d.), Maire s.n., Dongchuan (s.d.), Soulié 1224 (by 1903) and Wang 70262 (1935), classed as of unknown status; and the seed listings ACE-CHN-YUN-0120130001 and VIB-CHN-YUN-0100000001, which give no collector, place of collection or date.
News items filed under the region: the Fugong court case (reported 26 June 2024), also filed under Nujiang. The Lincang seed seizure of February 2026 is a trafficking case, not a record of growing, and is not filed under the region.

Sources

The 1993 variety survey, the Yunma No. 1 report, the Xu 2024 report, the Order 156 regulation and the 2026 licensing notice: read for the China page; the passages used here were re-read.
Addi and colleagues (2022), Geng and colleagues (2016) and Shen and colleagues (2017): open access.
Herbarium sheets: each label is transcribed from the digitised sheet.
Press reports (2019–2026): at the addresses cited. The Lincang reports are reposts on gmw.cn of the Legal Daily and of the Lincang drug-control office.
Sources for the growing areas: Kingdon Ward (1913, 1923), Rock (1947), the Xiaruo and Gudeng police notices and the other sources of Dêqên, Lijiang and Nujiang are set out on Talk:Dêqên, Talk:Lijiang and Talk:Nujiang.

Where the sources disagree

Licensed area. The narcotics bureau's figure of more than 220,000 mu licensed from 2010 to 2014 is a total over five years; the figure of 90,000 mu in 2020 is one year's planting. The two are given separately.

Other reports

Reports of company bases and licence trading (2019–2022) other than the figures cited: they describe investment, not growing.
A police report from Weixi County (July 2026) calls the plants in a resident's garden wild cannabis; the article keeps the report's word.