From Guoshan Yao to “Chosen” Mushroom Pickers—Termite Mushrooms Spark a Picking Frenzy
A Note from Foodthink
This article is supported by the Foodthink Lianhe Creative Programme, written in the summer of 2024. The “Guoshan Yao” series attempts to show how, amid migration in the new era, Yao people become entangled in urbanisation and the market economy through food. The author takes the Yao-Hakka market fair in Ruyuan County, Shaoguan, as a starting point, meeting local smallholder farmers, returning to Yao villages, and telling the emotional stories of people rooted in the mountains and fields and the food they grow.
“It’s only just the Dragon Boat Festival—have they really come up this early this year?”
Qiaoyi, heavily pregnant and resting at home, worried over the phone that we might miss the peak mushroom-picking season of 2024, and urgently informed us to head to the county town in northern Guangdong—Ruyuan County, Shaoguan—to pick termite mushrooms, which the locals call “Summer Solstice Mushroom.”
Ruyuan is a Yao Autonomous County. The plains are mainly home to indigenous communities, while the mountain areas are dotted with Hakka villages and Yao settlements. Among them, a Yao branch that has for generations moved between deep-mountain Yao villages is called the Guoshan Yao. Since the 1990s, pushed by poverty-alleviation policies and dam construction, Hakka and Yao settlements have gradually relocated to the plains, forming an intermingled Yao-Hakka landscape.
We are “Springflut,” an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural creative studio. We first came together with the Guoshan Yao community through a participatory art project in a Yao village. Over the past three years, as our fieldwork has deepened, we have travelled back and forth between deep-mountain Yao villages and the plains county town alongside our Yao friends. No matter how the setting changes, we always find our way back to the Guoshan Yao table and their food to care for one another, and this has become the cornerstone of our relationship with the Yao people—after all, eating is a serious business. The story of the “Summer Solstice Mushroom” was discovered quite by accident.
Unlike the wild shiitake that grows in deep-mountain Yao villages, the “Summer Solstice Mushroom” is found on the alluvial plains and hills of the Beijiang River, a tributary of the Pearl River system, near Danxia Airport in Shaoguan. Freshly picked Summer Solstice Mushrooms are sent via fresh-delivery courier or cold-chain transport, reaching farm-restaurants, upscale restaurants, and wet markets in the Pearl River Delta cities at the first opportunity, before finally arriving at the consumer’s table. The mushrooms are mostly used to make chicken soup or stir-fried plain, and their exquisite flavour has won over diners. Prices in Ruyuan fluctuate daily, generally ranging between 120 and 500 yuan per kilogram.
The market’s appetite for fresh flavour constantly stirs the nerves of the county’s mushroom-picking throng. Every summer, the “mushroom frenzy” sweeps across northern Guangdong—powerful torch beams pierce the eucalyptus groves and bamboo thickets as the mushroom army works through the night.
Even as they are swept up in the discourses of urban-rural mobility and rural revitalisation, the Guoshan Yao retain an open, receptive attitude to life. Their mobile, flexible, and resilient wisdom continues to be quietly passed down within the community. The story of the Guoshan Yao and the “Summer Solstice Mushroom” that follows is a microcosm of their “philosophy of mobility.”
I. From “Is It Edible?” to “Sells Like Hot Cakes”
Qiaoyi’s father was once a hunter; her mother was a farmer and an embroiderer. In the 1990s, the family ended generations of “mountain-crossing” life in the Nanling Mountains of northern Guangdong, over twenty kilometres away, and settled on the plains near Danxia Airport in Shaoguan. They had to relearn how to farm on these flatlands and built their house brick by brick, by their own hand.
Qiaoyi was still in primary school at the time. In her memory, it was a period of leaving behind her childhood companions in the deep-mountain Yao village and making new, Han Chinese friends at a new school. And it was on her walk home from school that Qiaoyi first brought a “Summer Solstice Mushroom” before her parents.
“I was in primary school then, walking home with my Han classmates, and we saw lots of mushrooms by the roadside. My classmates said they would dig them up and take them home to eat. I thought it was fun, so I dug some too. But my father flatly refused to eat them—he said he’d never seen them in the mountains and was afraid they might be poisonous. I told him my Han classmates’ families all ate them. He didn’t believe me and threw the mushrooms away. Another time, I picked a whole winnowing basket of them, and he gave them straight to a friend—I remember that person took the basket too and never brought it back.”
Qiaoyi’s parents, so accustomed to the mountain, were wary of the “Summer Solstice Mushroom” they had never encountered there, unsure at first whether it could be eaten. Only when the neighbours in the new Yao village began eating it did Qiaoyi’s parents allow the whole family to try it.
It was not until around 2016 that the “Summer Solstice Mushroom” appeared at the market near Qiaoyi’s home. Before that, “we would just pick a little and take it home to eat. If the mushrooms grew thick, they would rot by the roadside and no one paid them any mind. Sometimes we’d pick a handful and send them to relatives in the county town, because most people had no idea there were Summer Solstice Mushrooms growing nearby. We were among the first to find them, really.”
The Pearl River Delta’s love of fresh flavour has awakened the potential of the wild mushroom market. From the “lychee mushroom” in Zengcheng’s orchards to the “Summer Solstice Mushroom” in Shaoguan’s hills, mushroom traders have steadily expanded their sourcing territory. Compared with termite mushrooms from Yunnan, intra-provincial transport is faster and the mushrooms arrive fresher, offering better value to consumers. As a wild variety of termite mushroom, the “Summer Solstice Mushroom” does not appear in the edible-mushroom section of northern Guangdong’s wholesale produce markets, nor has it been included in the national “Vegetable Basket” programme, prompting the formation of its own “underground market.” In the “margins” of the market, pickers, consumers, and traders all push and pull, fuelling the annual “mushroom frenzy.”
And picking Summer Solstice Mushrooms has become a new livelihood option for villagers in the Yao-Hakka areas of northern Guangdong.
II. The Summer Pop-Up Mushroom Army
Because the Summer Solstice Mushroom appears only with the season, it cannot in itself sustain a year-round livelihood. Yet as profits rise, they continue to draw large numbers of “casual workers” from different ethnicities and walks of life.
In 2024, Qiaoyi was heavily pregnant and unable to venture deep into the hills and wilds. She took a casual stroll near her doorstep and, to her surprise, stumbled upon a colony of Summer Solstice Mushrooms. “They grow right in the grass, just a single fence’s width from the airport—so plump and beautiful.” Meanwhile, Qiaoyi’s mother found several colonies under the banana tree in their own yard. Both mother and daughter sold their mushrooms to the traders at the first opportunity.
The trader in question is none other than Qiaoyi’s closest friend—Xiuping. They were born and raised together in a deep-mountain Yao village, moved to the plains together, and remain neighbours even after each married and started a family. Xiuping and her husband were once simply members of the mushroom-picking army; this is now their third year as traders.
They know the Summer Solstice Mushroom intimately. Xiuping is attuned to its growth patterns: “The cycle of the Summer Solstice Mushroom follows the solar terms—across the four periods of Grain Buds, Grain in Ear, Summer Solstice, and Minor Heat, the mushrooms come up in waves.” Her experience tells her, however, that the solar terms are only a guide; the mushrooms do not always appear on schedule. In 2024, for instance, they did not emerge until well after Grain in Ear had passed.
She times her entry to perfection, stepping into the trade at the most opportune moment—”roughly a month, from start to finish.” When it is over, everyone sets off to find other work. Once the Summer Solstice Mushroom season wraps up, Xiuping and her husband prepare to head back to the mountains to run a small shop, because “so many people come to play in the water during the summer holidays.”
Not everyone is willing to take on greater risk and invest more capital to become a trader, as Xiuping and her husband have. Most simply follow Qiaoyi’s example, treating mushroom-picking as a temporary side job alongside their main occupation, earning a little extra to supplement the household income—for the work is strenuous and unpredictable.
Fifty-five-year-old A-Feng, a local smallholder, sells the vegetables she has grown at every market day. During the summer solstice period, her stall gains an extra item: Summer Solstice Mushrooms bundled in red plastic bags, their striking colour announcing to passers-by, “The hottest goods of the season are right here.”
A-Feng belongs to the ranks of “amateur mushroom pickers.” Come summer, she adds “mushroom-picking” to the list of odd jobs she juggles, working day and night, dawn to dusk and back again. “I leave home at two in the morning to pick mushrooms and work until first light. This is all I get in a small bag—less than half a jin. I go home, grab the vegetables I grew myself, and come straight to set up my stall.” Once all that is done, A-Feng still has to find time the very next day to cut tobacco.
On the village paths after dark we also encountered many “recreational” amateur pickers. Young people on motorcycles would speed past in groups, casually sweeping torch beams across the trees as they raced along. For this ever-renewing army of pickers, hunting Summer Solstice Mushrooms feels like a seasonal, luck-of-the-draw outing—much like a night-hiking group. They laughed and called out to one another, not too concerned about how much they actually brought home.
Only a small fraction follow the season and transform into professional mushroom pickers—every summer they set aside their “regular jobs” entirely, and some migrant workers even resign to join them. For these people, the Summer Solstice Mushroom is their sole source of income during this period. They rest by day and work by night, obsessed with efficiency, mostly operating alone or in pairs.
Some spend more than ten hours a day picking, and all-night sessions are common. They are not merely having a good time; unlike the amateurs who rely on luck, these pickers draw on over a decade of experience. They work in hushed concentration, silently harvesting over ten jin of mushrooms in a single night—the equivalent of what an amateur might gather over an entire summer.
As the first batch of Summer Solstice Mushrooms began to push through the soil, Pingxiu, a sixty-one-year-old Hakka mushroom picker, had already racked up an astonishing haul—over ten jin of superbly graded half-opened and bullet-head Summer Solstice Mushrooms in a single night. “I set off at four in the morning and arrived at the market after eight.” Because the day’s overall pick was thin, the buying price rose accordingly—scarcity commands a premium—and the moment she reached the market, a familiar trader had already reserved her entire stock.
This professional picker not only keeps her own strict schedule but also goes to great lengths to improve her efficiency. “I spent an entire year in the neighbouring village learning how to pick Summer Solstice Mushrooms.” She talked as she scraped soil off the mushroom stems with a razor blade, her Mandarin peppered with Hakka dialect.
Once the brief mushroom season passes, the termite mounds that sustain the Summer Solstice Mushroom need time to recover or shift a short distance, nurturing the next year’s crop. The motley army of casual workers and pickers disperses rapidly by late summer, rushing off to their next jobs, only to regroup swiftly when the following summer arrives.
Yet among them, one group never stops learning when summer ends. They share and exchange knowledge within their community, spontaneously turning local knowledge about the Summer Solstice Mushroom into an oral tradition passed from mouth to ear—constantly refining it, spreading it—leaving other locals struggling to keep up. That group is the Guoshan Yao, the people to whom Qiaoyi belongs.
III. The “Chosen” Mushroom Pickers
“It’s not just about knowing how to pick—you have to be able to climb, too. Those Yao folk are remarkable, they climb so fast you can’t catch them even if you try.” A Hakka professional mushroom picker described the Yao pickers in her eyes with undisguised admiration. Travelling the hills alongside Qiaoyi and climbing up to the Yao villages with the elders, we had seen their agility firsthand—even young and strong as we are, we could barely keep pace. We wondered how skills forged in the deep mountains carry across to the plains, and how decades of accumulated natural knowledge allow the Guoshan Yao to rise above all the rest in the mushroom-picking ranks.
Under Qiaoyi’s urging, we finally reached Ruyuan, Shaoguan, on the very day of the Summer Solstice. “Dragon Boat Festival was this year’s peak—you’ve missed it. Today all we can do is try our luck.” Seize the right moment, and you are already halfway there. Clearly we had missed the window, and Qiaoyi felt sorry for us, opening a short-video app to cram us on Summer Solstice Mushroom know-how.
“This account belongs to a schoolmate of mine from junior high. He now owns several large cold-storage rooms and does bulk trading in Summer Solstice Mushrooms. He posts videos all the time, telling everyone the moment the mushrooms start pushing through the soil—go, go, go!” The clips Qiaoyi showed us had all been filmed in the dead of night. Under the glare of a powerful light, something glinted beneath a dead branch: a portly, middle-aged man lay sprawled on the grass, announcing in Yao dialect with an exaggerated expression, as if proclaiming to the world, that a fresh batch of Summer Solstice Mushrooms had arrived. He lay on his side, gently brushing aside the dry leaves beside him, and dozens of Summer Solstice Mushrooms appeared before the lens. “Of course, it isn’t quite as easy to find them as he makes it sound. He’s just stirring people into action and hyping up the mushroom market. But it still works as a signal to head out and pick.”
Much like any other county town, in Ruyuan, Shaoguan, short-video platforms are a key arena for local entertainment, socialising, shopping, and the spread of local news. Qiaoyi showed us how to use the nearby-location feature to quickly find posts of locals picking Summer Solstice Mushrooms. “So many people are posting videos today—the new batch must be starting to come up. You could go and have a go tonight. They might be hard to spot at first, so just treat it as a learning experience.”
Having said that, Qiaoyi took us next door to Xiuping’s home for a proper look at Summer Solstice Mushrooms. Xiuping’s family-run warehouse turned out to be a handful of chest freezers, their glass doors wrapped in thermal insulation film to keep the mushrooms at a constant temperature. “Summer Solstice Mushrooms are generally sorted into bullet-head, unopened cap, half-opened cap, and fully opened cap, with prices descending in that order.” Xiuping carefully displayed her meticulously categorised mushrooms, neatly arrayed in red plastic basins. “Bamboo-grove mushrooms tend to be whiter; the eucalyptus-grove ones are more yellow or darker. We usually eat the bamboo-grove kind, because bamboo groves, unlike eucalyptus groves, aren’t fertilised.”
When it came to picking technique, Qiaoyi produced a small iron trowel and a spade, both worn to a high shine. “You need tools to dig out Summer Solstice Mushrooms, because part of them is buried in the soil. But you must be very careful—dig too deep and you’ll damage the termite mound underneath, and the mushrooms won’t grow near that spot next year. Too shallow, and you might snap the stem.” On top of that, she insisted we bring torches, saying that white light works better than yellow.
“Daytime is hot, and you’re more likely to run into snakes. Some people start looking at dusk. But most set out at night—first, it’s cooler; second, they’re easier to find, because once the torch catches a glint in the dark, there’s a good chance it’s a Summer Solstice Mushroom. Some people don’t go until the small hours and work straight through the night—that takes real nerve, because it’s pitch-black out. Once my mum and I accidentally wandered up to the graveyard to pick mushrooms. We were absolutely terrified.”
Having absorbed Qiaoyi’s crash course, we set off on a motorbike towards a nearby bamboo grove. A motorbike is more nimble than a car, able to reach more hidden corners. After sweeping through five bamboo groves, we managed to find just two wild mushrooms—but they looked suspicious, so we sent photos to Qiaoyi for identification. “Both of those are poisonous. Don’t pick them. Summer Solstice Mushrooms always grow in colonies, dozens together. If there’s only one, it’s definitely not one.”
Having grasped the Summer Solstice Mushroom’s “colonial” nature, we decided to venture into the recently famous eucalyptus groves. Qiaoyi said that in 2023 they had been a bumper crop there, with the mushroom-picking army in full force—worth a shot at luck.
The Yao traders among the pickers propagate knowledge of the Summer Solstice Mushroom and set market rules through commercial logic. Pickers like Qiaoyi, however, teach by experience: to earn a living at heaven’s mercy, you must first learn the rules that govern sky and earth.
Qiaoyi’s mind can assemble a growth map of Summer Solstice Mushrooms, much like the map she carries of where medicinal herbs and wild greens grow in the Yao villages. These lessons have been earned over years of walking the land on foot, and shaped gradually through the exchange of information within the community.
So rather than calling the Yao people “chosen” mushroom pickers, it is truer to say that their mushroom-picking “superpowers” come from an intimate, unmatched familiarity with the mountains and the land. The Guoshan Yao have migrated for generations, building their villages on the steep slopes of the Dayao Mountains, clearing hillside plots for crops or fir plantations. Living by the mountain, they have dealt with it across generations, and so they have developed a keener sensitivity to soil, woodland, and climate, accumulating unique knowledge of the natural world. Faced with mountain and forest, they do not shrink or fight but seek to know and understand it. Their relationship with nature mirrors the symbiosis between the Summer Solstice Mushroom and the termite.
To the Guoshan Yao, the plains, the hills, and the Summer Solstice Mushroom are simply a new environment and a new wild mushroom. Drawing on their long experience of a life rooted in mobility and change—shifting cultivation and migratory dwelling—the Guoshan Yao are adapting to the rhythms of modern urbanisation. They understand the fragility of the bond between humans and nature, and so, rather than anxiously grasping for control, they seek, with their feet firmly on the ground, a way to coexist. This gives them a swifter, deeper hold on the mysteries of the Summer Solstice Mushroom, and leads them to new ways of living with nature in the shadow of urbanisation.
IV. Compensatory Living from Nature
For Qiaoyi, however, picking Summer Solstice Mushrooms feels more like a compensatory substitute for a mountain way of life. Whether it is the Summer Solstice Mushroom or some other wild fungus, it hardly matters—what she needs is a reason to keep returning to the Yao hills, or to wander the low flat hills, following old memories to seek out seasonal wild greens and fruits, stirring up childhood recollections of the Yao mountains. That is a stirring emotional force, one that nourishes Qiaoyi. These feelings, swept into the contemporary discourse of urban-rural mobility, can be grasped only through food—or perhaps through a way of cooking, a particular taste.
For the Guoshan Yao, the Summer Solstice Mushroom is a node connecting new surroundings to an old world. In the new Yao village where Qiaoyi lives, many young people head out after work, in small groups of three or four, to the little hills around the village to pick mushrooms. “It’s like going into the mountains to pick wild fruit when I was little,” Qiaoyi recalled, her mind drifting back to her childhood in the deep-mountain Yao village.
“When we first moved out, the airport was idle, and we would take our cattle to graze there. There were still plenty of wild fruits around. Later, when we got to know the Summer Solstice Mushroom, we started picking them on the small hills nearby—there were so many, and you didn’t need to go far. Then the airport was brought back into use, converted from military to civilian, and the small hills in the distance were leased out to grow eucalyptus or Hairy Fig (Ficus hirta). By 2024, fewer Summer Solstice Mushrooms were growing near home—you had to go further afield now.”
Qiaoyi’s house is just fifty metres from the airport, and the bird-scaring cannons crackle one after another. Having experience picking both Summer Solstice Mushrooms and wild fruits, she has keenly felt the compression of the natural world around her. As the airport expands, this new Yao village is set to face another round of relocation.
The Guoshan Yao ancestors crossed hill after hill, searching for new shifting cultivation land. Qiaoyi’s generation searches for Summer Solstice Mushrooms among bamboo groves and eucalyptus groves—for a new livelihood, and for a nostalgic search for space to be with nature in the gaps left by urbanisation. Qiaoyi’s father, after frequent moves, learned to build houses; he then transitioned from hunter to farmer to building foreman and craftsman, and on his days off he would always take his motorbike and ride out to find a spot to fish.
Qiaoyi’s mother still farms, growing rice and vegetables for the family’s own table, whether on mountain slopes or in the plains, and sometimes venturing into the wilds to gather herbs for the Yao medicinal bath.
And Qiaoyi herself, besides growing chillies and greens in the village flower-and-vegetable garden, searches the nearby woods and stream banks for seasonal wild greens and fruits. “Sometimes we go back to the mountain Yao villages—some wild greens and fruits only grow there, and they taste better too.” Each in their own way, they interpret their emotional memories of the Yao village and the Yao mountains.
As urbanisation accelerates, the Yao villages grow ever quieter, and the Guoshan Yao scatter with each migration. People like Qiaoyi can only seek their lost emotional memories in new surroundings and new foods, intermittently practising a life lived from nature. The food memories of the deep-mountain Yao villages are inscribed deeply on their palates.
Unlike most places, which use chicken to make a broth for termite mushrooms, Qiaoyi prefers pig face. Simply add ginger and salt to season, simmer over medium heat until the broth turns milky white and the pig gums and scalp turn crisp—it is done. The mushroom broth is fragrant yet not greasy; the termite mushrooms grow ever more delicately sweet, unencumbered by heavy chicken fat stealing the flavour. Rather than eating Summer Solstice Mushrooms, you might say you are cooking pig face—an ingredient that demands careful handling at the annual pig-slaying feast, where no part of the animal must go to waste.
V. Afterword: Summer Solstice Mushrooms, Too, Cross the Mountains
In the season when the Summer Solstice Mushroom season drew to a close, Qiaoyi brought a new life into the world. After summer, the new development around the local airport progressed at a staggering pace—commercial districts shot up from the ground, and, it is said, an industrial zone is under construction. How much idle woodland will remain for Summer Solstice Mushrooms to grow in 2025, and how many will still wish to make a living from picking them—we cannot know. What is foreseeable is that, with the ongoing development of the airport district, the suburban industrial zone, and the commercial quarter, the local economy will gradually transform, and with it the ways of life of the Yao, the Hakka, and the indigenous communities alike.
For this year’s mushroom-picking season, Qiaoyi has promised to take us with her again—to her secret picking spot.
A single Summer Solstice Mushroom sets in motion the daily lives and livelihoods of the locals, and is swept into the Guoshan Yao’s new-era migration. No one can dictate where a Summer Solstice Mushroom will appear, for the termites have a will of their own. Their migration mirrors that of the Guoshan Yao—full of wisdom and courage, seeking new paths through collective effort. In the process, a new species brings new food, and with it comes a new livelihood and a new way of living.
The Summer Solstice Mushroom, the termite, and the Guoshan Yao are engaged in an inter-species exchange of feeling—nurturing new lives, human and non-human alike, equally fragile and interdependent—embracing in their mobility a more diverse living environment and way of survival. This is the lesson that Qiaoyi and her Guoshan Yao kin, the Summer Solstice Mushroom and the termite, offer us about how to live.
After multiple rounds of interviews with six judges, eighteen projects were selected for support under the Foodthink Lianhe Creative Programme. Four have now been published:
“Cleaner A-Mei, Wanting to Eat Properly | The Worker’s Table”
“In Malaysia, Chinese Traders Want Only Grade-A Durian”
“‘Fake Meat’ Drives Out the Real: Herders, the Table, the Amazon”
“Sweet Watermelons Guaranteed—Bitter Lives for Those Who Grow Them”
Editor: Xu Youyou