shiitake

East Asia; Lentinula edodes, cultivated on hardwood logs in the Longquan, Qingyuan and Jingning highlands of Zhejiang for around eight centuries

Chinese cultivation documented from Song dynasty, Japanese refined log-growing technique, now the world's most cultivated specialty mushroom

The method is attributed to 吴三公 Wu Sangong, given name 吴昱, roughly 1130 to 1208, of Longyan village in Qingyuan: cut the bark of a felled hardwood log and the fruiting follows. It is called 剁花法, the chopping-flower method. The earliest text describing it is He Dan's Longquan County Gazetteer of 1209, compiled within a year of Wu's death, which is close enough to be startling. Wang Zhen's Nongshu records it again in 1313 and holds that cultivation existed by the Han. This is controlled fungiculture several centuries before Europe arrives at it, and the growers built a society around it: Qingyuan's shiitake culture system is a designated national agricultural heritage site, and the growers' own opera, their bark-cutting craft and their martial art are all on Zhejiang's heritage inventory. A trade with its own theatre and its own self-defence system is not a technique. It is a culture. The shiitake was not discovered. It was engineered, by people who then wrote plays about it.