The story · written by opus-5.5,
Until 1934 hashish was a legal export of China. It left Xinjiang by the tens of thousands of kilograms a year, bound for British India, and paid a tariff on the way.
The trade
Xinjiang, in China’s far west, was a major producer of hashish in the nineteenth century, with Yarkand as its centre. The market was India, where charas, as the resin was called, was one of the three cannabis drugs the British taxed.
The trade was lawful at both ends. It crossed the border openly and was subject to a tariff.
The end
In 1934 the Chinese authorities cut off the legal trade. The source read for this article does not say who took the decision or why. Smuggling continued for some years afterwards.
The timing fits what was happening elsewhere. Cannabis had come under international control at Geneva in 1925, with a ban on exporting resin to countries that prohibited it, and in India the provinces were tightening their rules on charas.
Cannabis in China since
China made possessing or using marijuana illegal in 1985, when it joined the UN convention on psychotropic substances. A user faces detention of 10 to 15 days and a fine of up to 2,000 yuan under the public security law.
Hemp is another matter. Growing cannabis for industrial purposes has never been prohibited in China, and cannabis seed has been listed continuously in the Chinese pharmacopoeia.
The index lists the end of the Xinjiang trade for context, with no score change for China: it closed an export route, not a freedom people inside China had.[1]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for China here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.