Little mushrooms achieve big things
In terms of their structure, fungi are made up of filaments (hyphae) that have cell nuclei and cell walls, but do not contain chlorophyll. Hence mushrooms mostly grow in damp and dark places.
Current research shows that mushrooms produce at least 100 different natural antibiotics, and that many edible mushrooms have the effect of lowering blood pressure, contain special bioactive polysaccharides that can improve the human immune response and inhibit tumor growth, thus helping to prevent and combat cancer, or have constituents that can reduce blood cholesterol levels. On display in the "mushrooms' back garden" at the museum in Wufeng are real specimens of lingzhi (reishi) mushrooms (Ganoderma spp.), caterpillar fungus (Cordyceps sinensis) and fu ling (Poria cocos), all of which have long been prized as products to improve and maintain health.
The brightly colored lingzhi are bracket funguses with hard fruiting bodies. Few people eat them as food, but some types have medicinal effects. The first specialist pharmacological work to record lingzhi was the ancient Chinese pharmacopoeia Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing ("Shen Nong's Herbal"), believed to date from the 1st century BCE. It distinguishes six kinds of lingzhi: red, orange, blue, purple, white and black. Today, over 100 species of lingzhi are known, and they are the subject of intensive pharmaceutical research in many countries.
The caterpillar fungus, another well known Chinese medicinal ingredient, looks like a small, flat, dried-up insect larva, and there is nothing about it that would remind one of a mushroom. Is the caterpillar fungus-called "winter worm, summer grass" in Chinese-a plant or an insect? The Qing-dynasty book Liaozhai Zhi Yi Wai Ji contains this passage: "Winter worm summer grass is aptly named / In change and birth there is but one qi / One thing can indeed be both animal and plant / The world contains more wonders than we can understand."
The remarkable caterpillar fungus is in fact a fungus that parasitizes the caterpillars of ghost moths (genus Hepialus). Its spores germinate in the autumn and spread through the caterpillars' bodies, finally causing them to die and go stiff. The hyphae form sclerotia (compact masses of mycelium) inside the caterpillars' bodies, and in this form the fungus remains dormant through the winter. The following summer, thin, erect fruiting bodies grow out of the caterpillars, creating the part of the fungus generally referred to as "grass."
Little mushrooms can have countless remarkable uses. As well as the "mushrooms' back garden," the museum's "edible mushrooms" zone also introduces many mushrooms with medicinal effects. The ubiquitous cultivated button mushroom contains the enzyme tyrosinase, from which a drug to reduce blood pressure has been derived. The polysaccharides in button mushrooms also have a tumor-inhibiting effect. White jelly fungus is seen in traditional Chinese medicine as being remarkably effective in restoring yin, strengthening the vital essence, tonifying the kidneys, moistening the lungs, dispelling "heat" and replenishing the vital energy.
Lingzhi, which in traditional Chinese medicine is used to relieve "dampness," as an expectorant, and to treat lung disease, has in recent years also been developed as an anticancer and health maintenance medication. Hen-of-the-woods (Grifola frondosa) is also currently being actively researched as a source of anticancer drugs. Antrodia cinnamomea, popularly known in Taiwan as the "gateway between life and death" mushroom, and also called "blood lingzhi," or "coffin flowers" in mainland China, is a fungus that is mainly found in holes in old stout camphor (Cinnamomum micranthum) trees; it is said by some to be an antidote to poisons and to have anticancer properties. Because A. cinnamomea grows in very small quantities, it is currently one of the most expensive mushroom species around.
(above) In the "microscopic world of mushrooms" you can see mushrooms' reproductive organs blown up to 500-700,000 times their actual size.(facing page, 1-4) Don't be fooled by appearances-these colourful, attractive-looking mushrooms are all poisonous!(above, left) Whether button mushrooms (5) or lingzhi (6), the Taiwan Mushroom Museum's model mushrooms are all very lifelike.