Lion's mane

The island of the elixir

In AD 230 Sun Quan, ruler of the southern Chinese kingdom of Wu, set his heart on two islands.¹

One was Yizhou, the island now called Taiwan.^{1, 3} The other was Danzhou, and the old men had a story about it. More than four centuries earlier, they said, the First Emperor had sent an envoy called Xu Fu out to sea with thousands of boys and girls to find the mountain of the immortals and its elixir. The whole company stopped on Danzhou and never came home.¹

Sun Quan's general Quan Cong warned him that lands across the sea had poisonous water and air, and that soldiers sent there would fall sick and pass it to one another.² Lu Xun, his greatest commander, agreed. Out there the wind and waves could not be foreseen, he wrote, and men who changed their water and soil were bound to fall ill.²

Sun Quan sent ten thousand armoured men anyway.¹

They never found Danzhou. Under the generals Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhi they reached Yizhou and came back with several thousand of its people.¹ In the year the campaign lasted, disease killed eight or nine of every ten soldiers.² Sun Quan deeply regretted it.² The next spring both generals were thrown into prison and executed, for disobeying orders and achieving nothing.¹

A few decades later a Wu official named Shen Ying wrote the oldest surviving account of Yizhou, and he is thought to have seen it for himself.³ Its warriors, he wrote, brought home the heads they took in battle and hung them in order on a pole more than twenty metres high in the middle of the village, where they stayed for years to show off their prowess.³

Then he turned to another people, the Anjia. They lived in the deep mountains, much as the islanders did, in houses raised on frames like towers. When a parent died they killed a dog as an offering, drank, sang and danced, then hung the body in a square box among the high rocks instead of burying it. Their descendants lived on the mainland, in Luojiang county.³

And they were mad about a thick soup called monkey head.³

A stew of five meats could not match it. Greens went into it, and it sobered them up after drinking. They even had a saying for it. Better to owe a man a thousand measures of millet than owe him monkey-head soup.³

Lu Di, a historian of early Chinese mushroom lore, reads that monkey head as a mushroom. That is the shaggy white fungus China still calls hóutóugū and English calls lion's mane. For him this soup is the oldest written record of it anywhere.^{3, 8}

Shen Ying did not outlive his kingdom. When the armies of Jin marched on Wu in the winter of 279, he was governor of Danyang. He urged the chancellor Zhang Ti to hold the south bank of the Yangtze and let the enemy come, because if they crossed the river and lost, everything was lost.⁵ Zhang Ti crossed. Shen Ying led five thousand sword-and-shield men, the Blue Turbans, against the enemy line. Three times they charged. Three times it held.⁵ He was killed in the spring of 280, and before that spring was out Wu had surrendered.⁵

A monkey, a hedgehog and a mountain monk

Lion's mane grows from the wounds of old broadleaf trees, a ball of soft hanging spines that starts out white and yellows with age.^{6, 8} Nearly everyone who met it saw an animal in it, or a person.

In China it was a monkey's head.^{3, 8}

In France it was a hedgehog. In 1780 the botanist Pierre Bulliard gave it a full-page plate in his Herbier de la France, its spines hanging in tiers, every one pointing at the ground. "This beautiful mushroom," the caption says, "is born from the scars of old oaks," and it can grow six or seven inches across.⁶ The specimen and the description came from a Monsieur Richard. The name was Bulliard's own. Hydnum erinaceus, the hedgehog.⁶

A decade later he had more to say. "I have only ever seen it on old living oaks," he wrote, but many people had assured him they had seen it eaten in several French provinces, notably in Lorraine.⁷ The hedgehog stuck. Hericium, the genus it sits in today, means hedgehog too.⁸

In Japan it became yamabushitake, the yamabushi mushroom, because it looks like the tassels Japan's mountain monks wear on their chests.^{9, 13}

Fifty pounds on a dead beech

In the early 1880s Charles McIlvaine was living in the mountains of West Virginia on what he called the fat of the land, which meant bacon. Riding through the forests, he saw fungi on every side, so clean and fleshy that it occurred to him they ought to be eaten.¹⁰

The books were no help. They were so often wrong that he tested hundreds of species on himself, and the poisonous ones gave him what he called "unpleasant results." By the time his book came out in 1900, he had found more than seven hundred he could eat.¹⁰

Lion's mane was one, already eaten in Germany and France, he noted.¹⁰ In August 1898, at Eagles Mere in Pennsylvania, a dead beech carried at least fifty pounds of it. It draped one side of the trunk from root to top in yellowish tufts, with spines up to three inches long "which waved in the wind."¹⁰

The spines and tender parts were stewed and, in his words, "enjoyed by many." Dried, he warned, it shrinks badly and turns sour.¹⁰

Bottles, tablets and a Japanese lab

For most of history, lion's mane had to be found in the woods.⁸ That changed in 1959, when Chinese scientists isolated pure strains and brought it into cultivation. Today it grows on greenhouse shelves in bottles and bags of wood chips and corncobs, and in 2023 China grew almost 107,000 tonnes of it and a close cousin.¹¹ Farming put the "mountain treasure," as one Chinese mycologist calls it, on banquet tables and ordinary dinner tables alike.¹²

Chinese medicine made it a stomach remedy. Tablets of the mushroom and its fermented culture are sold for stomach complaints, and by 1985 Chinese doctors were testing it on chronic atrophic gastritis in a double-blind trial.¹²

The brain came later, and from Japan. In 1991 a team led by the chemist Hirokazu Kawagishi reported three compounds from the mushroom, hericenones C, D and E, that stimulated the making of nerve growth factor, a protein nerves need to grow and stay healthy.¹³ The erinacines followed in 1994, from the mycelium, the mushroom's thread-like body. His team later called them the first nerve growth factor inducers ever found in nature.¹³

Then came the animal tests. In one Japanese study of 2011, mice had a fragment of amyloid beta, a protein linked to Alzheimer's disease, injected into their brains, were fed the mushroom for 23 days, and were sent through a maze.¹⁴

People were next. In a trial published in 2009, a researcher from the in-house mushroom laboratory of a Japanese company, Hokuto, gave thirty men and women aged 50 to 80, all with mild cognitive impairment, tablets of the dried mushroom or a dummy pill for sixteen weeks.¹⁵ What that trial and the ones after it found is in the Research tab.

Stood back up and caged

In Britain lion's mane is rare. The oldest dated records in the national database come from Hainault Forest in Essex, on hornbeam, in November 1863. More than eight in ten records in England are on beech, and its stronghold is the New Forest.¹⁶

Since April 1998 the law has protected it as "Fungus, Hedgehog," one of just four fungi on the list, lichens aside. Pick it, uproot it or destroy it on purpose and you commit an offence, and so does anyone who sells a wild one.^{16, 17}

Some of the protecting is done by hand. On High Standing Hill in Windsor Forest, the top of a beech that carried it fell early in 2002. Later that year it was stood back up by Ted Green, called Britain's foremost ancient tree expert.^{16, 18}

In 2022 it turned up twice at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall. The second time it appeared right next to a playground, in the gardens' bug hotel, Buggingham Palace. The mushroom is edible. So the wildlife coordinator Toby Davies put a cage around it. "Usually this mushroom is found in dense woodland where members of the public wouldn't see it," he said. "Nine out of ten people wouldn't know what it is, but the cage is mainly there to prevent people from tampering."¹⁹

The monks who weren't there

Supplement sites send the mushroom to a monastery, where Buddhist monks drank it as tea to sharpen their focus in meditation.²⁰

A Japanese version goes further. A 2024 newspaper column says there are records of the yamabushi themselves eating it to concentrate, and never says which records.²¹

Follow the trail back and it thins fast. Shen Ying's hill people made it into soup, Bulliard heard of it eaten in Lorraine, and in Pennsylvania it went into a stew.^{3, 7, 10} Chinese medicine used it for the stomach.¹² The brain only enters the story in a Japanese lab in 1991.¹³

And the yamabushi? On the record, all they ever gave the mushroom was its Japanese name, because it looks like their tassels.⁹ No old Chinese or Japanese text has yet turned up with a monk eating it, let alone eating it for focus.

The monks lent the mushroom their costume. The legend did the rest.

Still on the old trees

Every age has found its own use for the monkey head. It has been a soup worth more than grain, a hedgehog in a French herbal and a stew in Pennsylvania, then a greenhouse crop, a lab compound and a caged rarity.

It still grows where Bulliard found it, from the scars of old trees. Shen Ying's hill people would sooner have owed a thousand measures of millet than a bowl of it. Find one on a wounded old beech in the New Forest today, and the law says leave it where it hangs.^{6, 16, 17}