In the 1990s, a translator working in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, received an unusual assignment from a local hotel: to find out how Japanese liked to prepare and eat matsutake mushrooms.

During a recent visit by a group of Japanese businessmen, the hotel chef had cooked the matsutake they had ordered like he would termite mushrooms, a fungus native to the region, by shredding them and stewing them with chicken. After one bite, the guests stopped eating and laid down their chopsticks in grave disappointment. The translator, surnamed Liu, was tasked with asking the tour group’s Japanese chef to show the hotel’s cooking staff how to prepare the mushrooms.

It didn’t take much convincing. The Japanese chef had evidently come prepared, and what followed was nothing less than a total culture shock for the hotel’s cook. Pulling out a gleaming set of knives and grillware, the chef started making two separate dishes: matsutake sashimi and charcoal-grilled matsutake. This duo of cold and hot, the Japanese chef explained, was necessary to produce “ultimate freshness,” Liu recalls. Yet when Liu tried the dishes, he didn’t sense any particular freshness of flavor and was shocked that anyone would consume the mushrooms raw.

I first heard Liu’s story during a recent talk in Yunnan, China’s mushroom mecca and home to more than 40% of the world’s edible fungus species. As a Yunnan native who has spent years studying the trade and culture of wild mushrooms, I saw in this brief episode the clash of two culinary cultures — Yunnanese and Japanese — and the way international trade shapes discourse around food.

The matsutake was not a major part of Yunnan cuisine. They were historically cultivated and sold in Japan, but shrinking local production forced the Japanese to look for sites elsewhere beginning in the second half of the 20th century, including Yunnan. Customs data shows that Japan accounts for about 90% of the province’s total matsutake exports. This reliance leaves gatherers vulnerable to sudden shifts in Japanese demand: In 2006 and 2007, there were reports of excess pesticide residue in shipments from a number of matsutake sites in China, leading to a sharp decline in exports. Then in 2010, as mushrooms from around the world flooded the Japanese market, prices for Yunnanese produce again plummeted.

Another challenge for Yunnanese gatherers is the Japanese grading and pricing system. Anthropologists studying the Tsukiji fish market in Japan have identified the concept of kata as key in discussions of seafood in the Japanese culinary context. Kata refers to the static, physical form of an object: for instance, the appearance of a flawless piece of silver salmon or a batch of lobster perfectly matched in color, weight, and claw size. But it can also refer to a dynamic process that produces a particular, desired result, such as the smooth and precise movements of a sushi chef slicing slivers of tuna or the attention to detail in plating uni (sea urchin roe). In other words, kata demands perfection not simply in the object itself but also in the environment, the people, and the techniques used to handle the object.

This concept is fundamental to Japanese food culture and a standard by which the quality of food is judged. Matsutake mushrooms are no exception. Chinese matsutake exporters emphasize that the Japanese demand perfection in their matsutake mushrooms, just as they do in their sushi fish. Other factors that make up a matsutake’s kata include a pollution-free environment, mature cold-chain transportation technology, and a simple cooking method. Japanese consumers and importers prefer matsutake with whole caps, which they consider to be more representative of the original flavor of the mushroom.

However, this form-based grading system and “raw” consumption patterns are an awkward fit with the local food culture in Yunnan. To date, there is still no way to artificially cultivate matsutake mushrooms, which grow independently and inherently have imperfections like worms, damaged skins, and opened caps. Before cold-chain logistics made it possible for intact matsutake to reach distant tables, any mushroom, regardless of aesthetics, was seen as a gift from the mountains and forests. Even wormy mushrooms could find buyers.

Yunnan natives also rarely consume raw mushrooms, as wild mushrooms that have not been properly treated can be poisonous. Instead, locals believe that each kind of mushroom has its own way of cooking that best brings forth its unique flavor. The freshness and tenderness that comes from the first bite of a well-cooked mushroom is inseparable from how Yunnanese imagine “good” matsutake. Although raw matsutake mushrooms have a unique crispness, few locals appreciate the complexity of their flavor. Moreover, they do not regard matsutake as necessarily superior to other mushrooms, and many locals believe that matsutake soup and stir-fried matsutake do not taste any better than termite mushroom, dried beef mushroom, or green head mushrooms. Yunnannese often joke about giving away matsutake mushrooms to the world while keeping the other three for themselves.

That has started to change, however, as the influence of Japanese cuisine turned matsutake into a “high-end” ingredient in China. Yunnan’s exports of matsutake reached a historic low in 2022. That left a backlog of supply with nowhere to go but the domestic market and further fueled the mushroom’s popularity here.

But just because more Chinese are eating matsutake, doesn’t mean a revival for local culinary preparations of the mushroom.

The center of matsutake production and consumption in China is Shangri-La, in northern Yunnan. What makes Shangri-La matsutake stand out? Over the past century, Shangri-La has been repeatedly used in popular culture to embody “nature” and “the primordial.” Even the city’s name — changed from Zhongdian in 2001 to capitalize on the region’s association with the 1933 novel “Lost Horizon” — nods to this reputation.

When the wildly popular food documentary “A Bite of China” premiered in 2012, the pilot episode featured matsutake in Shangri-La. But the show’s choice to portray the city’s produce as “unpolluted” and “authentic” inadvertently placed in the same tradition Japan’s raw food culture. Per one popular quote from the documentary, “high-end ingredients often only need the simplest methods of cooking.” This aligned with a view famously espoused by Jiro Ono, sushi chef of the first three-Michelin-starred sushi restaurant and considered one of the best sushi masters in the world: “Food should be eaten as close as possible to its natural state. True cooking is the absence of cooking.” “A Bit of China” even explains matsutake quality based on exporters’ standards: those with open caps are considered poor quality, while those with unopened caps are of good quality, a distinction that was historically meaningless in Yunnan.

In one close-up shot in “A Bite of China,” ghee and matsutake mushrooms with unopened caps sizzled on a black clay pot in a Tibetan home in Shangri-La. It’s beautiful, yet I couldn’t help but wonder at what might be happening off-screen and whether the family also had old, open-cap mushrooms stewing with mountain chickens over their fire pit?

More recently, the discourse around matsutake has shifted again. Sales have skyrocketed in tech hubs like Shenzhen, where IT companies and their overworked workers value them for their supposed health properties. These new selling points align with recent societal crazes for yangsheng, or health-nurturing, products and affordable luxury consumption. And on short video platforms, mushroom sellers play up the fungus’ fresh properties.

This July, I visited the Wild Mushroom Trading Center in Kunming, where a matsutake wholesaler from nearby Dali was grading the matsutake mushrooms he had on hand. To my surprise, these local merchants — all of them well-versed in grading matsutake and supplying them to high-end restaurants — told me that they prefer the flavor of the non-export-grade, cheaper, open-capped matsutake over the expensive matsutake they sell. To them, the grading was a sales technique and had nothing to do with personal preference.

Perhaps we are simply in a transitional phase. Where the matsutake goes from here — whether it continues to be food for the rich, or returns to its humbler roots — remains to be seen.

Translator: Katherine Tse; editor: Cai Yineng.

(Header image: A villager sorts matsutake by weight in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan province, August 2023. VCG)