On guerrilla prevention of mushroom deaths in Yunnan

With mushroom season soon upon us in southwest China, I mentioned to my Chinese teacher that I was planning on heading back to Yunnan to find someone with whom to go mushroom hunting. From July to October, Yunnan is perhaps the most mushroom-rich region on earth. She brought up a recent - as in, the past couple of days - mushroom-related video that was doing the rounds on Chinese internet. As luck would have it, it's cross-pollinated to Youtube. Take a look.

This is just one example of hundreds of made-for-TikTok videos meant to spread the dangers of mushroom hunting to an online population. The speaker has a pretty strong Yunnan accent. You can find many more by searching Youtube for '红伞伞' (hongsansan - red umbrella). (Also, a brief aside about this video's thumbnail: this is a surreal example of cross-cultural memes-within-memes. It's a cute Chinese version of the Ghanaian coffin dancers meme (which Wikipedia calls 'dancing pallbearers' - incidentally a great name for a metal band). This meme, too, is wildly popular in China - you can often hear the distinctive music echoing through a crowded train).

A rough translation:

Red umbrella, white stalk (referring to amanita muscaria, or the 'fairy' toadstool: red umbrella, white stalk, white spots)

After you've eaten it you'll lie on the board (i.e. a stretcher)

Lying on a board, sleeping in a coffin

Then you'll go to be buried on the mountain

Buried on the mountain, crying and wailing (i.e. your family and friends mourning you)

Family and friends all come and eat together

Eating food, the food has the red umbrella (mushroom again)

The whole village lies together on boards (a longer version of the song then has the red mushrooms growing from everybody's graves, only to be picked again by an ill-informed forager, thus completing the fungal cycle of destruction)

fin

It's really quite catchy.

Ironically, the mushroom about which these memes are warning you, amanita muscaria, is actually not fatally poisonous - there are no recorded deaths from it. It is, however, both quite poisonous and mildly psychedelic. Ingested fresh, it causes moderate-to-severe diarrhea and vomiting along with barely-noticeable psychedelic effects (depending, of course, on quantity ingested). But Eastern Europeans have eaten it for centuries, boiling it multiple times to remote any active toxins before pickling and storing in jars. It's been hypothesised to have been used as a coming-of-age ritual for young men, or to have been used by Vikings in their 'berserker rage'.

The remarkable thing to me is how high-effort many of these videos are. They have individual animations, and there are lots of live-action versions - even a Minecraft one! - floating around. See this compilation for a better idea. Where did they come from? Why are people making these? Sure, after a certain point there's clout/social value in being an early adopter of a 'fresh' meme, but that initial push has to come from somewhere. I can't find anything online - even the Chinese version of Yahoo Answers, Ask Baidu, says it just 'started' about four days ago. I suspect there's some sort of incentive scheme for content creators put in place by the local government, as over recent years many hundreds of people in Yunnan have died eating the wrong mushroom. (I badly translated 'all mushrooms are edible, some only once', which my teacher found very amusing). Poisonous mushroom charts are commonplace in shops and homes, and larger, more specific booklets are also readily available.

But what's particularly interesting is that recently, a few descriptions of psychedelic mushroom experiences have gone viral on Chinese internet, sparking massive interest. The gradual rise of clinical trials and psychedelic medicine companies in the west might also have some influence. You could imagine a few Chinese-language articles about marijuana legalisation in the US mentioning other drugs being decriminalised, clinical trials with psychedelics and so on.

Either way, this is an example of guerrilla marketing done really quite effectively. Is it technically fake news? Yes: amanita muscaria will not kill you. But plenty of people are poisoned, some fatally, by mushrooms each year. I reckon this will make many netizens think twice before venturing out to pick their own mushrooms, and, on balance, save lives.

That said, I do wonder whether it will also fortify a small subculture, making them all the more curious about mycology. What's certain is that a psychedelic-mushroom-taking subculture will not be allowed to thrive any time soon, and that China is still decades off decriminalising any major controlled substance.