Yarkand

Yarkand
Yarkant; Shache (莎车)
ActiveRecorded as grown here since 2000
⛶
Hierarchy
Growing Region	Southern Xinjiang
Geography
Country	China
Province/State	Xinjiang
Coordinates	38.42, 77.24
Landscape
Area	34,300 km²
Terrain	Oasis farmland on the south-western rim of the Tarim Basin; approximately the counties of Yarkant, Poskam, Kargilik and Makit
Climate
Climate Type	Arid
Growing history
Earlier names	Yarkund; Yarkend
Documentation
Appellations	0
Accessions	0
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Yarkand is a cannabis growing area of the oasis round the town of Yarkand, on the south-western rim of the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang, China. It is part of the Southern Xinjiang growing region, and is drawn on four counties: Yarkant (Shache), Poskam, Kargilik and Makit. The United Nations Secretariat wrote in 1953 that the resin charas imported into India had come from Sinkiang, now Xinjiang, and that the centre of the trade was at Yarkand. H. W. Bellew wrote in 1875 that Indian hemp was "grown largely in the Yarkand division",^: 78 and the psychiatrists Hu Hongxing, Zhang Guanbai and Hao Wei listed Shache, Makit and Kargilik in 2015 among the main producing counties of Xinjiang's cannabis smoking-mixture.

Cultivation in the nineteenth century

W. H. Johnson, a surveyor who travelled to Ilchí, the capital of Khotan, reported in 1867 that Baltis from Skardu had settled at Yarkand in large numbers as farmers to grow the charas plant, "which they have brought to great perfection". He did not visit Yarkand himself.^: 15 Douglas Forsyth, who led a British mission to Yarkand in 1870, wrote that charas was the most important export from Yarkand to India that year, extracted from "a very fine quality of hemp which is grown on the borders of every field in Yarkund", and that it gave the importer a profit of 50 to 200 per cent.^: 28 J. E. T. Aitchison wrote in 1874 that the ruler had since forbidden the plant to be grown in regular fields, so that it was raised only in single rows round the fields of other crops, to escape notice. Besides Karmak, near Yangi Hissar, he named Postgraum and Kurgilik (Kargilik) as places that produced charas; Kurgilik had the worst name for the quality of its charas and for adulteration.^: 51–52

Bellew, who travelled with the British embassy to Kashgar in 1873–74, described the crop in the mission's report. The resin was collected in October and packed for export, mainly to India, in bags of raw hide; the stalks gave a very coarse fibre that the farmers used only for rope. The resin sold for export was usually pounded up with green leaves, and in the Yarkand bazaar the producer weighed out sixteen jing and took payment for about twelve. The government took a tax of two tanga a chárak on the drug. Bellew wrote that hemp resin, generally called bang, was consumed by all classes, smoked with tobacco or eaten as a confection.^: 78

Lachman Das, a merchant who traded to Ladakh, told the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission that he had learnt there from Yarkand merchants that the plant was sown in the month of Baisakh on waste land and round the fields of other crops, stood for seven months, and was reaped in Kattak when the flowers were ripe; the farmers dried it on their roofs and threshed it by night indoors, and sifted the powder that fell before selling it to traders. The Commission's report quotes Captain Ramsay, Joint Commissioner at Leh, who reported in 1888 that charas was produced chiefly in the vicinity of Yarkand, and that since Russia was said to have prohibited cultivation in its own territories the supply came almost entirely from Yarkand.

Twentieth century

Hermann Kreutzmann writes that the end of charas cultivation in Yarkand was announced in 1909 and denied the following year.^: 82 The government of India's annual report for 1936 said that the Chinese authorities had announced their intention to prohibit the cultivation of charas in Yarkand and its export from there. I. C. and R. N. Chopra wrote in 1957 that the highest yield and the best quality of charas came from plants grown in Yarkand, where the plant grew wild in quantity at 3,000 to 5,000 feet (900 to 1,500 m) and was also cultivated.

Hu, Zhang and Hao write that when cannabis spread through Xinjiang the smoking-mixture máyān (麻烟, "hemp smoke") of Makit and of Shache was the best known, and that in the 1950s and 1960s cannabis was still planted in large quantities at Makit, among other places.

Since 2000

In the account Hu, Zhang and Hao published in 2015, Xinjiang remained the source of China's cannabis, and Shache, Makit and Kargilik were among the main producing counties of máyān in the south. In June 2024 the police of Kargilik County found 24 cannabis plants growing in a courtyard and uprooted them. The county's narcotics control office reported that the couple who grew them had wanted the seed, to eat after the autumn harvest, and had not known that the plant was banned.

Trade

Main article: Charas

Bellew called "the hemp resin, or bang, of Yarkand" the principal export towards Kashmir and the Punjab.^: 7 Aitchison counted 9,134 maunds of charas, valued at Rs 4,32,368, brought into Leh from Yarkand in six years.^: 51 The Punjab excise administration reported to the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in 1893 that about 4,000 maunds of charas, most of it from Yarkand, crossed the province's northern and western frontiers each year.^{: 46, 48}

Herbarium and seed collections

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew holds an undated sample of seed from Yarkand, EBC 71830 (s.d.). J. M. McPartland and Ernest Small figure a specimen collected at Yarkand by Henderson in 1871 as their var. afghanica, a Central Asian domesticate grown for sieved hashish and sometimes for seed oil.^{: 92, 99}

Appellations

No appellation pages exist for this growing area yet.

Accessions

No accessions documented yet.

Recent news

No news items are recorded for this growing area yet.

See also

• Southern Xinjiang
• Kashgar
• Khotan
• Charas
• Xinjiang