Asia spun, ate and prescribed this plant for thousands of years before it learned to call it a narcotic, and the paper trail for that reversal is better documented than most of what circulates online.
1. How to Read a History That Is Mostly Repeated, Not Researched
In cannabis history a confident sentence travels further than a sourced one. A date enters a feature, the feature is quoted in a book, the book is summarised online, and within a decade an unverifiable claim is repeated as fact. This article tries the opposite: corroborated statements are stated plainly, anything resting on a single encyclopaedic mention is marked as reported rather than verified, and claims tracing to nothing checkable are named as folklore. Most material here is tertiary, good for the shape of a record and poor for detail. Two better sources could not be consulted: the 2021 whole-genome study on domestication, and a food-history piece on cannabis in Thai cooking.
2. Where the Plant Actually Comes From
The old Central Asia story
For most of the twentieth century the origin of cannabis was placed in Central Asia, in the belt from the Caucasus through Afghanistan into western China. Reference works still call the plant indigenous to Central or South Asia, which shows how durable that framing became.
What the genomic work is reported to have changed
Since 2021 that framing has been widely reported as overturned by whole-genome resequencing, commonly attributed to Ren and colleagues, generally described as finding a basal gene pool alongside separate hemp-type and drug-type pools and pointing to a single domestication origin in East Asia roughly twelve thousand years ago. That study is a primary source and outranks any encyclopaedia, but it could not be retrieved for this article, so the figures here are reported, not verified.
What East Asian archaeology independently supports
The material record does place very early use in East Asia. Hemp fibre impressions appear on Yangshao culture pottery in China from the fifth millennium before the common era. Cannabis achenes from about eight thousand years before the common era are reported from the Oki Islands near Japan, a single tertiary mention. Hemp artefacts survive from the Torihama shell mound, an early Jomon settlement. Korean hemp fabric is dated as early as three thousand years before the common era, on more than one page. East Asia holds the oldest hard evidence; Central Asia is now a hypothesis under revision.
3. China: The Longest Continuous Record
Fibre first, everything else second
The Chinese relationship with this plant is overwhelmingly one of fibre and seed: cloth, cordage, shoes and an early form of paper. Cannabis seeds have been listed continuously in the Chinese pharmacopoeia, which is telling, since the seed rather than the flower holds the unbroken official standing.
The word and the written record
The Chinese word is ma, written 麻, often paired with the word for great to form dama. Ma appears many times in early prose and verse, including the Shi jing, the Book of Odes, where an early song has young women weaving ma into clothing. That is textile, not intoxication. The Mingyi bielu, the Supplementary Records of Famous Physicians, by the Taoist pharmacologist Tao Hongjing who lived from 456 to 536, describes hemp seed as medicinal with ginseng, recorded here as historical practice and nothing more.
The most famous wrong date in cannabis writing
Nearly every popular history says that in 2737 before the common era the Emperor Shen Nung recorded cannabis in his pharmacopoeia. Shennong is a mythological ruler, a culture hero and a deity in Chinese folk religion, sometimes counted among the Three Sovereigns; he has no documented reign, and even the existence of the Xia dynasty said to have followed him is unproven. The text attributed to him, the Shennong Bencaojing, is described by research as a compilation of oral traditions written between roughly 200 and 250 of the common era. It lists 365 medicines, cannabis among them, and a separate source dates its account of psychoactive use to around the third century of the common era. So an early-common-era pharmacological text, legendarily attributed to a mythological figure, includes cannabis. The 2737 figure is an attribution to a legendary reign, not a manuscript date.
4. India: Three Preparations and a Colonial Inquiry
The Vedic record and its ambiguity
The Atharvaveda is the fourth and latest Veda, some 730 hymns across twenty books, dated variously to around 1200 to 1000 before the common era or later, and concerned with healing charms and herbal remedies. Sources on cannabis in India state that it names bhanga among five sacred plants that relieve anxiety, quoting the translated line “darbha, hemp, barley, mighty power: may these deliver us from woe”. The same sources add that scholars debate whether bhanga here means cannabis, with a parallel unresolved argument about soma. Anyone claiming the Vedas unambiguously describe cannabis goes further than the philology allows.
Bhang, ganja and charas are not synonyms
English writing uses these loosely, which is a mistake: in Indian law and practice they name different products from different parts of the plant.
| Preparation | Tradition | Part of plant | Note on the record |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bhang | India, hub at Varanasi | Leaves and seeds | Excluded from the legal definition of cannabis in the 1985 statute |
| Ganja | India | Flowering and fruiting tops | Prohibited under the 1985 statute |
| Charas | Himalayan subcontinent | Resin rubbed by hand from a living plant | Distinguished from hashish, made from dried material |
| Hashish | Arabic-speaking world, Central and South Asia | Sieved resin from dried material | Word attested around 1123 of the common era |
| Kief | General | Trichome powder sifted from leaves and flowers | Pressed to make hashish |
| Ma and dama | China | Stem fibre and seed | Fibre and food rather than resin |
| Asa and taima | Japan | Stem fibre | Ritual and textile use |
| Sambe | Korea | Woven stem fibre | An ivory-coloured cloth |
Documented bhang forms include bhang goli, ground plant material with water; bhang thandai, a paste with milk, strained and flavoured with kusha grass, sugar, fruit and spices; and bhang lassi, made with curd and whey. Sources place bhang in food and drink in ancient India as early as one thousand years before the common era, with Garcia de Orta describing bangue in 1563.
Religion, festival and the commission of 1894
Bhang is distributed at Maha Shivaratri and Holi, associated with followers of Shiva, and prepared on the ghats of Varanasi; Sikh Nihangs consume it at Hola Mohalla. Charas is integral to certain Shaiva sects and smoked in clay pipes called chillums by Naga Sadhus, Aghoris and Tantric Bhairava practitioners. This is religious practice with continuity, not modern reinvention.
The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1894 and 1895 remains the largest colonial-era investigation of cannabis anywhere. It concluded that moderate use is the rule and excessive use comparatively exceptional, and that moderate use practically produces no ill effects. That is a nineteenth-century administrative inquiry into social effects, reported here as history and not as a modern finding about health. Policy in fact preceded it: a tax on bhang, ganja and charas was enacted in 1798, justified at the time by concern for the population’s health and sanity.
5. Thailand: Kitchen, Clinic, Criminal Code
Cannabis was historically used in Southeast Asia as a cooking ingredient and kitchen condiment, and sources record traditional use to ease labour pains in childbirth and as a muscle relaxant among labourers. The much-repeated claim that cannabis leaves were standard in boat noodle broth and certain curries is widespread in food writing; that source could not be consulted here, so it is reported and not verified. Thailand criminalised possession, cultivation, sale and use through the Cannabis Act of the Buddhist Era year 2477, generally rendered as 1935, reinforced by the Narcotics Act of the Buddhist Era year 2522, that is 1979. A condiment and folk remedy became a controlled substance within a single legislative generation.
6. Japan: Hemp as Sacred Material
Prehistory, ritual and everyday cloth
Cannabis in Japan sits in the cultural substrate. It was cultivated in the Jomon period, hemp cloth appears at the Yoshinogari site in Kyushu by the Yayoi period, and the Yamato court taxed hemp by 645. The fibre carries a purity association with no close parallel elsewhere in Asia: Shinto priests have used it for ritual cleansing and exorcism, a practice continuing today, and it appears in shimenawa festoons, noren curtains, the rope worn by a sumo yokozuna, imperial regalia and enthronement ceremony, and the talismans of the Ise Grand Shrine. Materially it supplied rope, bowstrings, fishing nets and traditional paper, and it clothed commoners while silk clothed the wealthy.
The post-war break
The Cannabis Control Law, the Taima Torishimari Ho, passed in July 1948 during the post-war occupation, banning import, export, cultivation, sale, purchase and research involving cannabis buds and leaves. Some historians have speculated that American petrochemical interests sought to restrict Japanese hemp fibre to open the market to polyester and nylon; the source describes this explicitly as speculation. Industrial farms were allowed to continue, but the decline was steep: around twenty-five thousand licensed farms in 1950, thirty-seven by 2016, roughly ninety percent in Tochigi Prefecture. In December 2023 the House of Councillors passed legislation legalising medicinal cannabis, criminalising non-medical consumption and introducing grower licensing.
7. Korea: Cloth, Mourning and Strictness
The textile tradition
Cannabis was an important crop in ancient Korea, with hemp fabric dated as early as three thousand years before the common era. Sambe, an ivory-coloured hemp cloth, is the enduring expression of that tradition. Hemp was grown across the provinces as recently as the 1930s, reaching around nine thousand hectares by the late 1950s, and licensed cultivation continues around Andong in Gyeongbuk, a special industrial hemp regulation zone since 2020.
From partial ban to comprehensive ban
A Narcotics Act of 1957 listed Indian marijuana alongside opium and cocaine but prohibited only the Indian-grown plant, leaving Korean cultivation intact. Use rose in the 1960s through diffusion outward from United States army bases. In 1976 President Park Chung-hee introduced the Cannabis Control Act, a comprehensive ban, preceded by a crackdown in the winter of 1975 in which more than fifty well-known entertainers were arrested, among them the rock musician Shin Jung-hyeon. South Korea remains among the strictest jurisdictions in the region, with recreational offences carrying up to five years imprisonment or a fine of up to fifty million won, and authorities have repeatedly warned citizens that the Korean criminal code follows them abroad, including where cannabis is locally legal.
8. The Prohibition Wave and the Mechanism Behind It
The treaty architecture
Thailand in 1935, Japan in 1948, Korea and Nepal in 1976, India in 1985. These are not independent domestic movements coinciding; they are the local expression of an international control system. The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 replaced earlier instruments including the Hague opium convention of 1912 and the Geneva conventions of 1925 and 1931. It placed cannabis and cannabis resin in Schedule One and also in Schedule Four, the category for substances judged particularly liable to abuse whose ill effects were not offset by therapeutic advantage. That listing stood until 2 December 2020, when the Commission on Narcotic Drugs adopted Decision 63/17 withdrawing them from Schedule Four on 2019 recommendations from the World Health Organization.
Two provisions matter for Asia. Article 28 requires state control of cultivation for medical and scientific purposes but states the convention does not apply to cultivation exclusively for industrial purposes, meaning fibre and seed, or horticulture; that sentence is why hemp survived legally in Japan, Korea and China through the prohibition decades. Article 49 let states reserve the right to permit traditional practices such as cannabis use temporarily, while requiring them to be phased out by set deadlines after entry into force. Tradition was not accommodated; it was given a countdown. The convention’s definition of cannabis also excludes the leaves, the crack through which bhang culture survived and which the Indian statute of 1985 mirrored.
The mechanism, stated plainly
The mechanism was a sequence, not a switch. A definition of the problem was first agreed among states with very different stakes: the drafting record shows industrialised manufacturing states including the United States pressing for stringent control of raw organic material, against producing states including India, Turkey, Pakistan and Burma, long accustomed to socio-cultural use, favouring weaker controls and seeking compensation for the cost of compliance. Ratification then converted that definition into a domestic legislative obligation. Bilateral pressure closed the gaps: sources state directly that charas was made illegal in India under pressure from the United States in 1985, and that Nepal criminalised cannabis in 1976 due to international pressure. Japan’s 1948 law arrived under occupation, a blunter variant of the same dynamic.
9. The Reversal, Told Without Cheerleading
Thailand opened, then narrowed
Thailand legalised medical cannabis in 2018, described as the first Asian nation to do so, a claim sitting awkwardly beside the parallel claim that South Korea was first in East Asia in November of the same year. In June 2022 cannabis flower was removed from the national narcotics list, an initiative associated with Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul of the Bhumjaithai Party, and approximately 4,200 prisoners were released; on 8 May 2022 the government announced distribution of one million free plants from 9 June 2022. What followed is the part enthusiasts skip. Dispensaries operated without prescriptions in what sources describe as a legal grey area, and the debate produced a correction rather than a consolidation: on 25 June 2025 Public Health Minister Somsak Thepsuthin reclassified cannabis as a controlled herb, restricting sales to medical use under prescription. The trajectory is an opening, a regulatory vacuum and a partial retrenchment.
The rest of the region
Elsewhere the picture is conservative and uneven. South Korea permits three named pharmaceutical products through a narrow case-by-case channel, while the plant and its natural derivatives remain unapproved. Japan has legislated for medicinal cannabis while criminalising non-medical consumption for the first time, and has proposed capping tetrahydrocannabinol in cannabidiol products at a trace level that industry representatives argue is an effective ban. China permits cultivation, notably in Yunnan Province around Dali, while treating smoking as a public-security matter punishable by ten to fifteen days detention and a fine. India maintains its statutory distinction, with Uttarakhand moving on industrial hemp in November 2015, Gujarat removing bhang from its intoxicating drugs list in February 2017, and the Karnataka High Court ruling in August 2022 that bhang is not prohibited under the 1985 statute. Nobody in Asia should read Thailand as a template, and members where cannabis remains illegal should treat this article as history and nothing else.
10. A Regional Timeline of What Is Attested
| Approximate date | Place | Event | Strength of record |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8000 before the common era | Oki Islands, Japan | Cannabis achenes at a site | Single mention, reported |
| Fifth millennium before the common era | China, Yangshao | Hemp fibre imprints on pottery | Corroborated |
| 3000 before the common era | Korea | Hemp fabric samples | Corroborated |
| c. 1200 to 1000 before the common era | India | Atharvaveda composed | Plant identification debated |
| c. 200 to 250 of the common era | China | Shennong Bencaojing compiled | Attribution legendary |
| 456 to 536 | China | Tao Hongjing on hemp seed | Documented |
| 645 | Japan | Yamato court taxes hemp | Reported |
| c. 1123 | Fatimid Egypt | Word hashish first attested | Documented |
| 1798 | British India | Tax on bhang, ganja and charas | Documented |
| 1894 to 1895 | British India | Hemp Drugs Commission reports | Documented |
| 1935 | Thailand | Cannabis Act, Buddhist Era 2477 | Documented |
| 1948 | Japan | Cannabis Control Law | Documented |
| 1961 | International | Single Convention schedules cannabis | Documented |
| 1976 | South Korea and Nepal | Comprehensive bans | Documented |
| 1985 | India | Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act | Documented |
| 2018 | Thailand and South Korea | Medical cannabis legalised | Documented |
| 2 December 2020 | International | Cannabis withdrawn from Schedule Four | Documented |
| 25 June 2025 | Thailand | Reclassified as a controlled herb | Documented |
11. Documented History Against the Folklore
| Claim you will encounter | What the record supports |
|---|---|
| Shen Nung recorded cannabis in 2737 before the common era | Legendary. A mythological figure with no documented reign; the text attributed to him was compiled roughly 200 to 250 of the common era |
| The Atharvaveda names cannabis among five sacred plants | Reported; identification of bhanga with cannabis is actively debated |
| Cannabis was the soma of the Rigveda | An unresolved candidate hypothesis, not a finding |
| Cannabis was domesticated in Central Asia | The older default, now under revision |
| Domesticated once in East Asia about twelve thousand years ago | Reported from a 2021 genomic study not consulted here; East Asian archaeology is independently strong |
| Cannabis leaves were standard in Thai boat noodles and curries | Reported in food writing, unverified here; use as a Southeast Asian kitchen condiment is supported |
| Japan’s 1948 ban was engineered by American petrochemical interests | Described in the source explicitly as historians’ speculation |
| The 1961 convention banned hemp farming | False. Article 28 exempts cultivation exclusively for fibre, seed or horticulture |
| Bhang is illegal throughout India | The 1985 statute prohibits charas and ganja, excluding leaves and seeds; state rules vary widely |
| Asia is liberalising | Overstated. One country opened and then narrowed; most of the region remains restrictive |
12. What This History Is Good For
A community that repeats a fake 2737 date loses standing when it makes a claim that matters, and the accurate version is more interesting anyway: a fibre and food crop of enormous antiquity in East Asia, a tripartite preparation vocabulary in South Asia embedded in living religious practice, a Japanese ritual material with unbroken continuity, and a twentieth-century prohibition that arrived through a treaty system with a fibre carve-out and a countdown clock on tradition. Nothing here is a statement about what cannabis does to a body; historical medical use is described strictly as historical use.
Now the part no encyclopaedia can supply. Many members here come from families that grew hemp, wove it, cooked with it, or remember when the law changed. If your grandparents kept hemp cloth for mourning, if there was a plant behind the house in Isan before 1979, if your family has a bhang recipe older than anyone living, if a shrine near you still grows its own ritual fibre, please post it. Local and family memory is exactly the layer the written record misses, and it is the one thing this community can contribute that no reference source can. Corrections are equally welcome, ideally with a source attached.
This article is part of the Asiannabis Community educational series on cannabis history and culture. Content is for educational purposes within jurisdictions where cannabis is legally permitted.