• DOI:10.1007/BF02862859
• Corpus ID: 19866569

An archaeological and historical account of cannabis in China

@article{Li2008AnAA,
  title={An archaeological and historical account of cannabis in China},
  author={Hui-lin Li},
  journal={Economic Botany},
  year={2008},
  volume={28},
  pages={437-448}
}

• Hui-lin Li
• Published 1 October 1973
• Biology
• Economic Botany

Although Cannabis is generally believed to be of Asiatic origin, within this vast geographical area, there is no general agreement as to where the domestication really came about. Alphonse de Candolle (1884), the first authority on the origin of cultivated plants, ascribed a very extensive range to the plant. He asserted that "the species has been found wild, beyond a doubt, to the south of the Caspian Sea, near the Irtysch, in the desert of Kirghiz, beyond Lake Baikal in Dahuria (government of Irlkutsch). Authors mention it throughout southern and central Russia and to the south of the Caucasus, but its wild nature is here less certain, seeing that these are populous countries, and that the seeds of the hemp are easily diffused from gardens. The antiquity of the cultivation of hemp in China leads me to believe that its area extends further to the east, although this has not yet been proved by botanists. " Later workers, mostly working on field collections, either have accepted this very general and extensive area, or favor specific regions, such as the Himalayas, central Asia, India, Pakistan or China (Vavilov, 1926; Zhukovskii, 1962). It is a difficult problem to differentiate truly wild plants from spontaneous, escaped or semicultivated plants. There still remains much to be done to clarify the systematics of Cannabis. Moreover, in the case of Cannabis, which has been associated with man for so long, botanical studies alone are inadequate to ascertain the origin of cultivation. As one author states (Schultes, 1972), "It would seem that historical and ethnobotanical evidence