Ma

Má, 麻, is the Chinese word for hemp and among the oldest names for the plant recorded anywhere. For most of Chinese history it meant cloth, rope, oil and medicine. The same character also means numb, a meaning that later scholars have connected with the plant’s intoxicating uses.

The character and its compounds

Written	Read	Meaning
麻	má	Hemp; also numb, tingling
大麻	dàmá	“Great hemp”: the hemp plant, cannabis
麻木	mámù	Numb
麻醉	mázuì	Anaesthetic, narcotic
麻蕡, 麻花, 麻勃	máfén, máhuā, mábó	Names for hemp inflorescences and fruiting parts; historical identifications vary
大麻	taima (Japanese)	Hemp; borrowed from the Chinese

In Hui-Lin Li’s 1975 account, má broadened to name other fibre plants. The compound dàmá, “great hemp”, distinguished cannabis within that wider vocabulary. It was not simply a way to avoid the meaning numb.

The botanist Li Hui-lin proposed a further interpretation. The stupefying effect of the plant, he argued, was “commonly known from extremely early times”, and the secondary meanings of the word come from the fruits and leaves, “which were used as infusions for medicinal purposes”.

In the classics

Hemp has been grown in China since the Neolithic. Cords of it were pressed into the wet clay of Yangshao pots to make their pattern. The Book of Odes mentions má many times; one early song has young women weaving it into clothing.

The classics speak of it as fibre, clothing and food, and say nothing of intoxication. The exceptions are the medical writers and the Taoists, who record that the flowers taken in quantity make a person “see demons” (see hemp in the Taoist censer). Archaeology fills the gap: braziers from a 2,500-year-old cemetery in the Pamirs held the residue of cannabis rich in THC, burned at burials.

Li also traces the character to a representation of fibres hanging beneath a roof. His chapter distinguishes hemp’s place in ordinary material life from hypotheses about ancient intoxication. The linguistic interpretation does not by itself prove when people first used cannabis for its effects.

Hemp cloth also carried ritual meaning. Li points to mourning garments prescribed in the Book of Rites, connecting a common textile with duties to deceased parents. His account describes a historical Chinese custom, not evidence that every present-day mourning garment is cannabis fibre. He also discusses hemp rags and fishing nets as materials in early papermaking. These uses help explain why a word for the plant could remain central even where intoxicating preparations were uncommon.

Trade

In the nineteenth century Xinjiang was a large producer of hashish, with Yarkand as its centre, and exported it legally to British India, where it was sold as charas. The Chinese authorities ended the trade in 1934.

The law

Year	Measure
1985	China joins the UN drug conventions and classes cannabis as a narcotic
1998	Yunnan sets out to make the province “cannabis free”
2010, 2017	Yunnan, then Heilongjiang, license industrial hemp

The two meanings of the word have become two legal categories. Smoking dàmá brings ten to fifteen days of detention and a fine. Growing má for fibre has never been prohibited, and the seeds have been listed in the Chinese pharmacopoeia without a break.

In Japan

Japanese took the compound as taima, and with it the plant’s standing as an everyday crop. The same two characters name the paper talisman that the Ise shrine sends to households, the Jingū taima, which began as a purification wand (see hemp in Shinto). Japan’s Cannabis Control Act of 1948 is in Japanese the Taima Control Act. It put growing under licence, yet in 1950 some 25,000 farms still raised hemp; by 2016 there were 37.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}