China’s Ma: The First Cannabis Story

Long before modern cannabis culture, China had already built one of humanity’s oldest relationships with the plant through food, fiber, paper, medicine & ritual.

Ancient Roots

Cannabis is part of one of China’s oldest plant relationships.

Pollen evidence points toward the region around Qinghai Lake & the Tibetan Plateau as a deep origin zone, while genetic research places East Asia near the center of cannabis domestication.

The plant’s history in China stretches back thousands of years before modern distinctions between hemp, medicine & intoxicating cannabis.

Hemp as Food

In early China, hemp was counted among the essential crops in some versions of the “Five Grains.”

Its seeds were eaten, its oil had practical value & the plant belonged to everyday life.

Cannabis was not yet defined primarily by intoxication. It was an agricultural resource.

Ma 麻

Cannabis was known as ma, 麻, an ancient Chinese term commonly associated with hemp.

Ma could become rope, cloth, shoes, fishing nets, bowstrings, seed food & oil.

Later, hemp fiber would also become connected to one of civilization’s most consequential technologies: paper.

Thousands of Years of Cultivation

Evidence of hemp fiber in Chinese textiles reaches back more than 5,000 years.

Later agricultural texts also recognized that cannabis plants could be male or female. Farmers sometimes removed males as part of crop management.

That practice reflected agricultural knowledge, not the modern pursuit of seedless sinsemilla flower.

Hemp Becomes Paper

By roughly 140–86 BCE, some of the earliest known Chinese paper appears to have incorporated hemp waste or hemp fiber.

That connected cannabis to the development of paper and, by extension, to record keeping, government, literature & the wider transmission of information.

Hemp was no longer only feeding and clothing people. It was helping carry words.

Cannabis on China’s Western Frontier

The strongest archaeological evidence for psychoactive cannabis use comes not from China’s central heartland, but from western regions such as Xinjiang & the Pamir frontier.

These areas connected Chinese societies with Central Asian, Iranian & steppe cultures.

The evidence suggests that cannabis there could have meanings very different from the fiber and food crops common farther east.

Tombs, Medicine & Burial Ritual

At Yanghai near Turpan, a tomb dating to roughly 2,700 years ago contained a substantial cannabis cache beside a high-status man.

Researchers have interpreted the material as potentially connected to medicine, ritual or intoxication, although its exact purpose cannot be known with certainty.

At nearby Jiayi, archaeologists found 13 nearly whole cannabis plants arranged over a corpse like a shroud.

Whatever the precise meaning, the burial shows that cannabis could carry ceremonial significance as well as practical value.

Jirzankal & Ancient Cannabis Smoke

Around 500 BCE, wooden braziers used in funeral rituals at Jirzankal Cemetery in the Pamirs contained heated stones and burned cannabis residue.

The evidence is among the clearest archaeological indications that ancient people were deliberately inhaling smoke from psychoactive cannabis.

Here, cannabis was not simply being woven, eaten or pressed into oil. It was being burned in a ritual setting.

Hemp in Chinese Medicine

Chinese medical traditions kept hemp seed in regular use, particularly as a laxative.

Other references describe cannabis flowers in connection with visions, altered states & relief from pain.

The seed remained an ordinary medicinal ingredient. The flower carried a more powerful and less everyday reputation.

Legacy

Ancient China did not have one cannabis culture.

It had a broad hemp civilization in the east, where ma became food, fiber, textiles, oil & paper, while western frontier communities left some of the strongest evidence for cannabis used in burial and psychoactive ritual.

Across thousands of years, the same plant clothed people, fed them, carried their words on paper & entered their tombs.

That is what makes China’s relationship with ma one of the first great cannabis stories.

- NUGGNOTES

SOURCES:

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* Tsien, Tsuen-Hsuin. Paper and Printing. Cambridge UP, 1985. Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, pt. 1.

* Russo, Ethan B., et al. “Phytochemical and Genetic Analyses of Ancient Cannabis from Central Asia.” Journal of Experimental Botany, vol. 59, no. 15, 2008, pp. 4171–4182. doi:10.1093/jxb/ern260.

* Jiang, Hongen, et al. “Ancient Cannabis Burial Shroud in a Central Eurasian Cemetery.” Economic Botany, vol. 70, no. 3, 2016, pp. 213–221. doi:10.1007/s12231-016-9351-1.

* Ren, Meng, et al. “The Origins of Cannabis Smoking: Chemical Residue Evidence from the First Millennium BCE in the Pamirs.” Science Advances, vol. 5, no. 6, 2019, eaaw1391. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaw1391.