New collecting craze goes viral in China. It involves mushrooms, with Yunnan the hotspot
Mushroom foraging is taking over Chinese social media, with young fungi fans posting their finds and competition for the rarest kinds fierce
Move over, Pokémon Go. A new collecting craze is taking over Chinese social media, with the most coveted finds not digital critters but… mushrooms.
Morels, black tiger palm mushrooms, milk-caps, blackening brittlegill, termite mushrooms and matsutake are just some of the species for which young fungi fans have been foraging across the country, before posting their finds on platforms like Xiaohongshu, China’s answer to Instagram.
Competition is high to collect the rarest species. Those foraging in Yunnan province might have an edge in the race: according to internet users, it is one of the three Chinese provinces that boast ideal weather for mushrooms, the other two being Sichuan and Zhejiang.
Yunnan province is often referred to as the “kingdom of the plants”. It is home to 900 varieties of mushrooms – including 36 per cent of the world’s edible fungi types – as well as 90 per cent of the country’s fungi production, according to Chinese media.
“The rainy season in Yunnan is between June and September,” one user wrote on Xiaohongshu, adding that this is when mushrooms there grow in large quantities.
