Cui Gui-lin works only three months of the year, minding his family's mushroom stall at a temporary market in Zhongdian town. Every day, the market bustles with commercial activity as colourfully clad Tibetan and Yi minorities shuffle boxes of exclusive matsutake - a pungent fungi cherished by Japanese food aficionados - around to each stall in search of the highest bidder.
Ten years ago, Cui ditched his life as an itinerant butcher to join the matsutake harvest, known as songrong in Putonghua. When Japanese stocks were wiped out by insect plagues 15 years ago, importers looked to the mountains of northern Yunnan in China's southwest, which now supply Japan with more than half its annual intake.
About 80 per cent of Zhongdian town's population of about 100,000 is involved in the trade, earning up to 90 per cent of their annual income during the harvest period. For the villagers, the matsutake boom was an economic revolution. 'Before the Japanese came, we would sell songrong in the market for one yuan a kilo,' Cui says.
Better known to Tibetans as 'dirt termite mushrooms' or 'old eagle mushrooms', matsutake have never rated high on the culinary scale. 'Before the Japanese came, there were so many songrong, we would use baskets to gather them,' recalls Quiling Sui-nong, a veteran picker who comes from one of the richest villages in Zhongdian. 'We'd put them in soup or sell them at the market. But now, everybody wants to pick mushrooms. But they pick them when they're too immature, so the mushrooms get fewer and fewer.'
Matsutake now fetches from 60 to 200 yuan a kilo in the peak season (July to September), skyrocketing to 4,500 yuan a kilo during the meagre low season.
But Zhongdian's newfound wealth has come at a price. 'It used to be easy money,' says Cui, a middleman who buys matsutake from the pickers then sells it to other middlemen or companies exporting the mushroom to Japan.