1.
After many years in Yunnan, we have slowly begun to resemble Yunnan people. Many of the measures that come to mind involve wild mushrooms.
Summer brings long light, heat and rain. After several cycles of muggy afternoons broken by downpours, people enter the forest, where mushrooms are growing wildly. The mushroom market becomes the liveliest corner of town, revealing what appears and disappears as summer advances.
The first this year were xiangxun, a wild shiitake that grows on rotting wood. In June they were the only wild mushrooms at market. Everyone who saw our bag congratulated us: these were the most fragrant, and twenty-five yuan a jin was fair—earlier they had cost thirty-five.
Two sun-darkened Lisu sisters had piled the fresh mushrooms before them. They had left at six and crossed several mountains. They told us to make soup or dry them, then pointed towards a village still higher up. When I added one sister on WeChat, she remembered another outsider who had bought mushrooms from her years ago and since left Shaxi. Through them, we knew the season had begun.
2.
At first we ate mushrooms in restaurants, then bought them at market; last year we began gathering them ourselves. After xiangxun came red jianshouqing, a blue-staining bolete that appears abundantly one year and sparsely the next, usually among oaks. Raw it is poisonous: it may cause vomiting, numbness, hallucinations and even organ failure. After the first plate each year our hands and feet seem to float in cloud.
Our first outing produced nothing, so I bought an overgrown specimen larger than my palm. Its flesh had aged, and after a day it darkened and grew sticky; a fly lay twisted on the cap. Luo Bo later said that should have warned me. While washing it, the cap fell apart like a rotten sponge. I sliced it, watched the flesh bloom blue like ink, then fried it hard with garlic, green pepper and plenty of rapeseed oil. It became a grey, bubbling paste.
Our friend Li Fang ate eagerly and soon began laughing for no reason. The first bite sent a shiver through me, as if lightning illuminated my mind. With closed eyes I saw a vast forest, a tree spreading above me and tiny white flowers in its broken light. Li Fang later said the road home felt like cloud; she had a viscous dream, nausea and bright purple netting behind her eyelids. Time distorted for me through repeated nightmares. Luo Bo developed a mild fever. It was a very long night.
3.
Mushrooms seem to appear from nowhere after rain. Some seek open light, some damp shade, some decaying wood; learning which among them can be eaten is our homework. What we see is only the fruiting body. Beneath the humus, mycelium joins tree roots in exchange: minerals and water for the carbohydrates the trees produce.
Gathering is unlike farming. Nature sows and waters; our work is not to damage the habitat and to cover exposed mycelium again with soil and leaves. Hearing that Niushaxian was full of boletes, I rose at six, afraid everyone else would beat me there.
The mountain road crosses Huacong Mountain between Niujie and Shaxi. Westward lie the Shaxi basin, Heihui River and Shibao Mountain; eastward, Haixihai Reservoir and Niujie’s hot springs. High meadows called the Great and Little Sheep Pastures hold flocks like clouds. Solar panels have covered much of the former, scales of an eerie new tissue replacing grass; the smaller pasture remains close to sky and cloud, far from everywhere else.
Dozens of plants occupy a square metre. Fern-filled hollows rise through scrub, pine and oak. Gatherers crawl beneath sharp leaves. Local people whistle to one another and comb the slope in lines while outsiders hesitate. Hearing them, I felt defeated before beginning. A child shouted that he had found one; another person’s success was worse than my own failure.
Mushroom hunting resembles buying gold: profit belongs to those who know the patches, weather and habits. People like me arrive only when everyone says the market is booming—just as it begins to ebb. Thoughts scatter on the mountain; every patch of soil promises a large bolete. Friends who had already abandoned the search messaged to ask whether I still had nothing. At an opening in the forest, ridges ran into the blue, rain-washed sky and mist turned between them like a dragon. Fine weather would last all day.
5.
Green russulas make soup but break easily; egg-yolk mushrooms, milkcaps and osmanthus mushrooms are beautiful and mild. Termite mushrooms are tender and fruit-sweet when steamed; Yunnan people rank them second only to ganbajun. Tiger-paw mushrooms fried and dipped resemble meat—astonishing at first, then rich and dry. Egg-yolk mushrooms glow like bulbs in dark forest. Luo Bo loves the milky fragrance of osmanthus mushrooms and chanterelles. Tough trumpet mushrooms are often fried with cured pork, though some people say they are sour and upset the stomach.
The local trio is cured pork, garlic and green pepper, cooked over fierce heat. Matsutake can be eaten raw, in soup or fried in butter; to me, a fresh unblemished one is the summit—dense, squeaking under the knife, filling the mouth and nose with an almost celestial aroma. Yet locals seldom praise it, perhaps because it is expensive. Jianshouqing grows more delicious with each bite, while good boletes are soft, slippery and savoury, with thick netted stems and honest, endearing faces. These are personal judgements; a Yunnan reader may well say I understand nothing.
We haunt the market, asking the names of unfamiliar species. A seller may answer, ‘I know it in Bai, not in Chinese,’ then forget us while debating with her neighbour. My need to name things is a habit: only by naming the unfamiliar do I feel secure. Local names—eagle, tiger paw, osmanthus, green head, blue-staining—hold shape and scent, while scientific names can feel detached from life.
Bai gatherers may not name a mushroom in standard Chinese, yet can descend with baskets of boletes. I know many names but cannot reliably join them to living things. It makes education without experience seem absurd. Living among concepts, we lose touch with body and place. A local does not declare a mushroom poisonous; she says, ‘We don’t eat this one.’ If it is edible, it is ‘the most delicious’; better still, ‘my child loves it and tells me never to sell it.’ Their language reveals a directness obscured by names, categories and judgement.
6.
Like many pursuits, mushroom gathering has beginner’s luck. On our first attempt last year we camped during the Torch Festival at a place Luo Bo named Rolling Gully—a sunny place without signal or interruption. Only two herders passed each day, their black and white flocks dividing around camp like water. We inspected their baskets: boletes, red jianshouqing, tiger paw, trumpets and coral fungi nested with moss, leaves and pine needles like miniature forests.
Rain softened the festival. In nearby Shilong village a pine torch burned in the square as people danced and threw resinous splinters into the flames. Li Fang suggested searching, so we entered the mountain barefoot beneath waterproof jackets; after four wet days, feet had learned pine needles and stone.
Without signal, the body returns to the forest’s rhythm. Severed roots seem to reconnect with grasses, tree roots and luminous underground mycelium. Old concerns die; the day is newly born. Beneath the humus lies an ecosystem of roots, white threads, millipedes, larvae, beetles, worms and woodlice. Human beings may be only one differentiation within nature’s incalculable will. The longer one stays, the more one feels invited to release the small self and enter this connected flow.
A glass bottle full of dead dung beetles interrupted that vision. Drawn by reflected light, they had entered and could not climb out; focused sunlight baked them, reducing their moisture to black-grey liquid—an artificial hell made by one human object.
Upstream in the forest, Luo Bo complained that she alone had found no bolete. Then we uncovered an enormous one pushing a dome through the needles. She tapped its cap to release its last spores, pulled it out with soil attached, and covered the hollow. It smelled faintly pink and floral. More appeared as we stared: a whole patch camouflaged in the earth.
At camp Luo Bo built a strong fire, I cleaned the basket and Li Fang prepared vegetables. Sliced boletes roasted in oil over charcoal tasted richly of animal liver. Moon rose behind the mountain; a weasel barked, sparks died in darkness and pine smoke flowed through the valley. Around the fire, the boundary of self seemed to disappear into a limitless community of life. Milton’s golden compass in Paradise Lost came to mind, circling the world and declaring its bounds.
7.
Before gathering begins in Mapingguan, villagers hold the Opening of the Mountain Festival—the only festival we know devoted to mushrooms. Though part of Shaxi, the village above 3,000 metres is another world: snowy winters, old forest hung with lichen, fallen trunks across valleys, tall oaks and dense rhododendrons.
Families live by bees, potatoes, morels and matsutake. Unregulated gathering once damaged patches, so in 2010 the collective restored and managed the forest, contracting sections to households and returning income as dividends. Matsutake multiplied. Small first growth is left in the soil, and coloured flags and black sheeting close the forest while it matures. This is a dramatic change for a community that once sold mushrooms on strings for two yuan a jin and whose villagers felt too ashamed of muddy feet to enter town shops.
Sihe once guided visitors, but now there are too many mushrooms and tourists are too slow. Everything must be gathered before noon. She showed baskets overflowing and described running downhill to feed pigs, returning, and carrying load after load until she never wanted to hear the word matsutake again.
Rain and mist covered the festival meadow. Sihe and her father lit a fire and told hunting stories while our shoes dried. A straight young pine replaced last year’s ritual tree. Offerings for vegetarian and meat-eating deities included chicken, pork, fish, matsutake, fruit and coloured fritters. Paper clothes and money were burned first for higher gods, then smaller ones for lesser spirits. We knelt as prayers in Bai asked the mountain god for good weather and abundance. Water poured on a hot tile rose as clean vapour.
Mapingguan’s local guardian, Sihe said, is especially responsive. A newborn is named and registered with the guardian before the police; journeys and new vehicles are reported too. Riders once dismounted at the temple, and stories tell of those who refused being thrown and killed. Dates, hours and auspicious directions are carefully calculated.
Afterwards the offerings became soup and barbecue. Children ran barefoot with flowers. Sihe gave us small raw matsutake, tasting of rain, needles and moss. Her father once hunted muntjac, boar and bear, then sought forgiveness at Zhihui Nunnery; hunting is now banned. Villagers do not photograph its Guanyin because an image made for worship should not become an object on a phone.
After Shaxi commercialised, conservation architect Huang Yinwu began restoring Mapingguan, hoping villagers could use what was rebuilt without being scattered by outsiders—a way of life, not merely architecture. ‘Others have money, but we have what is valuable,’ Sihe said confidently. I envied work organised around village, clan and family: tending nature and being sustained by it. Why, despite education and a supposedly open life, could I not find her continuing satisfaction?
8.
The first flush of mushrooms ended, with perhaps ten days until the next. Unable to gather, I ordered jianshouqing fried rice at the snack market. Bright red caps went into the wok. Hearing of my hallucinations, the cook insisted I must have mistaken the species or failed to cook it through: first fry it in oil, always with garlic and green pepper. I admitted the mushroom had sat for a day, was unusually large and had been cut unevenly.
Her steaming plate came with pickled radish and vegetables. The thin, pale-brown pieces were crisp and slippery, nothing like my grey paste, fragrant with rice and green chilli. Looking up, I told her I had gone an entire week without eating jianshouqing.
Notes and sources: DK, Mushrooms & Toadstools, Thomas Læssøe; the Vimalakirti Sutra, trans. Kumarajiva; Wei An, Things on the Earth; Atsushi Nakajima, Record of Wujing; Yuan Liaofan, Four Lessons; John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VII.
Words | Gu Rui
Photographs | Gu Rui, Luo Bo and Li Fang
Editor | Luo Bo