The History of Functional Mushrooms: From Ancient China to Science
The history of functional mushrooms: from the Shennong Ben Cao Jing and lingzhi to Tibetan Cordyceps, Siberian Chaga and the modern science that confirmed ancient observation.
mitovito Media
9/28/20266 min read
KNOWLEDGE SERIES
The History of Functional Mushrooms: From Ancient China to Modern Science
The history of functional mushrooms is not one history. It is many.
Separate traditions developed independently across China, Japan, Tibet, Russia, and the Indigenous cultures of North America, arriving at strikingly similar conclusions about the same organisms through entirely different cultural pathways and without contact between them.
That convergence is, in itself, one of the more compelling arguments that these organisms do something real. When multiple civilisations separated by thousands of kilometres and centuries of time identify the same fungi as worth using, coincidence becomes a strained explanation.
Modern science is not discovering the benefits of functional mushrooms. It is arriving, finally, at the biological explanation for observations that were made a very long time ago.
The Beginning: China, 200 CE
The earliest written documentation appears in the Shennong Ben Cao Jing, the Classic of Herbal Medicine attributed to the legendary divine farmer Shennong, compiled during the Eastern Han Dynasty around 200 CE.
This foundational text of Chinese medicine classified 365 natural substances into three grades: superior medicines (shang pin), middle medicines (zhong pin), and lower medicines (xia pin).
Reishi, Lingzhi, was placed in the superior category. These were medicines considered safe for long-term daily use, intended to nourish the body's vital functions rather than treat specific disease. The text describes six varieties of Lingzhi distinguished by colour and recommends it for supporting the heart, lungs, liver, spleen, and kidney functions (¹).
The classification reflects something conceptually sophisticated. The Chinese principle of tonic herbs, substances that build resilience over time rather than fighting acute illness, anticipated modern thinking about adaptogens and preventive functional nutrition by roughly two millennia. It is a different model of what medicine is for, and it produced a different category of remedy.
Imperial China: Mushrooms as Objects of Power
By the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), Lingzhi had become a symbol of imperial authority and divine favour.
Court painters depicted it alongside cranes, deer, and pine, the classical Chinese iconography of longevity and immortality. Taoist alchemists pursued it as an ingredient in elixirs of eternal life. Imperial physicians prescribed it as a daily tonic for the emperor himself.
Its extreme rarity in the wild made it materially precious. Its association with longevity made it politically potent. A ruler who consumed Lingzhi was making a statement about the nature of his own authority (²).
Other species entered the Chinese pharmacopoeia during this long period. Shiitake, then called Dong Gu, winter mushroom, appears in Song Dynasty records from the 12th century as both cultivated food and medicine. Turkey Tail, Yun Zhi, cloud mushroom, appears in Ming Dynasty texts as a digestive and immune tonic (³).
Japan: The Buddhist Monk Connection
Japan received the Chinese herbal tradition during the Nara period (710–794 CE), carried across the East China Sea by Buddhist monks and scholars.
Reishi became Mannentake, then Reishi. It entered the Kampo medical tradition and was used for broadly the same purposes as in China: vitality, longevity, and the cultivation of calm.
Lion's Mane acquired a particularly interesting Japanese history. It was called Yamabushitake, after the Yamabushi, the mountain ascetic monks of the Shugendo tradition, who undertook extreme physical practices in remote mountain environments as a path to spiritual development.
These monks specifically valued Yamabushitake for what they described as its capacity to sharpen concentration and sustain mental effort during long periods of meditation.
They had no concept of nerve growth factor. No knowledge of hericenones. No neuroscience of any kind. They observed an effect, attributed it to the mushroom, and passed the observation forward.
Eleven hundred years later, Hirokazu Kawagishi isolated the compounds and demonstrated the mechanism. The monks had been right (⁴).
The modern Japanese scientific era began in the 1960s and 1970s, when pharmaceutical companies started investigating traditional medicines systematically. Lentinan was isolated from Shiitake at the National Cancer Center Research Institute in 1970. PSK was developed from Turkey Tail at Kureha Chemical in 1971. Both received formal approval as cancer adjuvant therapies, the first pharmaceutical validation of what Japanese traditional medicine had held for centuries (⁵).
Tibet: The Winter Worm, Summer Grass
The Cordyceps story begins not with cultivation but with a genuinely bizarre natural phenomenon: a parasitic fungus that infects and kills moth larvae buried in permafrost above 3,500 metres on the Tibetan Plateau.
The earliest written documentation of Dong Chong Xia Cao appears in a 15th-century Tibetan medical text attributed to the physician Zurkhar Nyamnyi Dorje. It describes the caterpillar fungus as a tonic for stamina, lung capacity, and exhaustion, properties directly relevant to human survival and labour at extreme altitude (⁶).
Cordycepin, the compound underlying these properties, was not isolated until 1950. The clinical evidence corroborating the altitude-performance observations took another half-century to accumulate.
The Tibetan nomads who collected and consumed this extraordinary organism were, as later science confirmed, observing something real. They simply lacked the vocabulary to describe adenosine receptor pharmacology.
Russia and Siberia: The Chaga Tradition
The Chaga story developed entirely independently of the East Asian traditions, in a different cultural context and a different forest ecology.
The Khanty people of Western Siberia used Chaga as a medicinal tea for gastrointestinal complaints and topically for skin conditions. Their use predates written documentation, placing it potentially among the oldest continuous mushroom medicine traditions anywhere (⁷).
Russian peasant traditions of long-simmered birch fungus decoction spread across the forest regions of European Russia and into Eastern Europe from the 16th century onward. Russian physicians began documenting these practices in the 19th century, leading eventually to Soviet Medical Academy approval of Befungin, a standardised Chaga preparation, as a registered medicine in 1955.
Chaga's global reach came from an unlikely direction: literature. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, published in 1966, features a character attributing his survival to Chaga tea. Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize and worldwide readership introduced Chaga to audiences who had never encountered it, a diffusion no scientific publication could have achieved (⁸).
Indigenous North America: The Overlooked Tradition
The functional mushroom traditions of Indigenous North American peoples are less documented in Western literature but no less real, and their omission from most accounts of mushroom history is a gap worth naming.
The Cree, whose traditional territory spans much of what is now Quebec, Ontario, and the Prairie provinces, have their own names for Chaga: Poashkan and Wiskakecakomikih. Their use of it as a medicinal tea and topical preparation developed entirely independently of the Siberian Khanty tradition, across an ocean, for a fungus that grows in birch forests on both continents.
Two unconnected cultures, separated by the Bering Strait and thousands of years, identified the same organism growing on the same tree genus and put it to overlapping uses.
Other nations across North America, the Ojibwe, the Haudenosaunee, and many others, held sophisticated knowledge of local fungi that has received considerably less scholarly attention than the East Asian traditions. That is a deficiency in the literature, not an absence in the historical record (⁹).
For a brand based in Quebec, this is worth stating clearly. The forests around us hold their own mushroom medicine history, and it belongs to peoples who were here first.
The Modern Era: 1991 to the Present
The modern scientific era can be dated with reasonable precision to 1991, the year Hirokazu Kawagishi and colleagues at Shizuoka University published the first isolation and characterisation of hericenones C, D, and E from Lion's Mane, demonstrating their capacity to stimulate nerve growth factor synthesis (¹⁰).
This was the first molecular-level explanation for a traditional functional mushroom claim that went beyond immune modulation into direct neurological mechanism.
The three decades since produced: lentinan and PSK approvals in Japan; the characterisation of cordycepin's adenosine receptor mechanism; the first human randomised controlled trial on Lion's Mane cognition (Mori, 2009); the NCI-funded Turkey Tail human trial (Torkelson, 2012); the Shiitake whole-mushroom immune trial (Dai, 2015); the Turkey Tail microbiome trial (Pallav, 2014); and most recently the first acute-dose human cognitive trial on Lion's Mane (Docherty, 2023).
Each of these marked a moment when the distance between traditional empirical knowledge and mechanistic explanation narrowed slightly.
The Thread That Connects Everything
What is most striking about this history is not the diversity of traditions. It is the consistency.
Cultures separated by oceans and centuries identified the same organisms, used them for overlapping purposes, and independently developed similar preparation methods, typically long-simmered water decoctions which, we now understand, served to break down chitin cell walls and release water-soluble beta-glucans.
Nobody involved knew what chitin was. They knew that simmering worked and eating raw did not.
Modern science is not correcting the traditional record. It is, increasingly, confirming it, while supplying the molecular vocabulary to explain what could previously only be described through observation.
The functional mushroom industry that exists today, from pouches in Quebec kitchens to pharmaceutical PSK in Japanese oncology wards, is the commercial and clinical expression of a two-thousand-year-old insight: that certain fungi, properly prepared and consistently consumed, do something meaningful for the human body.
That insight was arrived at through patient observation across many generations, in many places, by people who had no way of knowing they were all noticing the same thing.
It seems worth taking seriously.
Sources
(1) Shennong Ben Cao Jing. Compiled ~200 CE. English translation: Yang Shou-zhong, Blue Poppy Press, 1998.
(2) Wasser SP. (2005). Reishi or Ling Zhi. Encyclopedia of Dietary Supplements, 603–622.
(3) Li Shizhen. (1578). Bencao Gangmu (Compendium of Materia Medica). Ming Dynasty.
(4) Powell M. (2010). Medicinal Mushrooms: A Clinical Guide. Mycology Press.
(5) Chihara G et al. (1970). Cancer Research, 30(11), 2776; Kidd PM. (2000). Alternative Medicine Review, 5(1), 4–27.
(6) Winkler D. (2008). Yartsa Gunbu (Cordyceps sinensis) and the fungal commodification of Tibet's rural economy. Economic Botany, 62(3), 291–305.
(7) Shashkina MYa et al. (2006). Chemical and medicobiological properties of Chaga. Pharmaceutical Chemistry Journal, 40(10), 560–568.
(8) Solzhenitsyn A. (1968). Cancer Ward. Bodley Head, London.
(9) Moerman DE. (1998). Native American Ethnobotany. Timber Press.
(10) Kawagishi H et al. (1991). Hericenones C, D and E, stimulators of nerve growth factor synthesis, from the mushroom Hericium erinaceum. Tetrahedron Letters, 32(35), 4561–4564.
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