By Alina @ TLY
The oldest text we can point to is a late-15th-century Tibetan medical work by the physician Zurkhar Nyamnyi Dorje (1439–1475), widely cited as the earliest known written record of yartsa gunbu, the Tibetan name for wild cordyceps. Chinese records begin later, in 1694, and the earliest European account we found was published in Paris in 1726. Customers at Ten Lei Yen in Westminster often ask where cordyceps actually came from, and the short answer is the high Tibetan plateau, a very long way from our counter.
What is the oldest text that mentions cordyceps?
The name yartsa gunbu is first recorded in the 15th century, in the writing of the Tibetan physician Zurkhar Nyamnyi Dorje, who lived from 1439 to 1475. Researchers such as Daniel Winkler, who has studied the Tibetan trade in detail, describe his work as the earliest known documentation. You'll sometimes read that cordyceps goes back much further, to an 8th-century Tang dynasty mention or to the old Tibetan medical classic known as the Four Tantras. The evidence for that is thin. The Tang claim has not been substantiated, and whether the "daji" named in the Four Tantras is cordyceps at all is still disputed. Tibetan medical texts also use a second name, tsa daji, so even the early writing gives the same fungus more than one label. So when we say "first written down", we mean the 15th century, and all we're saying is that it appears in those texts.
When did Chinese writers first record it?
The first record in China that researchers can confirm is Wang Ang's materia medica, the Ben Cao Bei Yao, published in 1694, which makes the Chinese written record about two centuries younger than the Tibetan one. In the 18th century Wu Yiluo's Ben Cao Cong Xin listed it as well, and 1757 is the date usually given for that book. The Chinese name 冬虫夏草 is a translation of the older Tibetan one. We tell the story of that name in our article on winter worm, summer grass, so we'll leave it there.
How did Europe find out about it?
Jesuit missionaries in China, among them Dominique Parrenin, sent specimens back to France, and in 1726 the naturalist René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur wrote about the "plant" in the memoirs of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, under the name Hia Tsao Tom Tchom. It took more than a century for science to give it a formal name. The Reverend Miles Berkeley called it Sphaeria sinensis in 1843, the Italian mycologist Pier Andrea Saccardo moved it into the genus Cordyceps in 1878, and in 2007 a DNA-based study of the whole group placed it in Ophiocordyceps. That's why you'll see both names on labels today.
How did a regional ingredient become a global one?
For a long time it was a trade good moving out of the plateau in small quantities. Winkler notes that Tibetans were trading it with China at least as far back as the 17th century, bartering it for tea and silk. During the commune period, from 1956 to 1981, collecting in Tibet came under state quotas, and the market collapsed during the Cultural Revolution. In the 1970s a kilogram sold for 21 yuan in Xining. After economic reform in the early 1980s, prices started to climb. The Lhasa wholesale figures cited in the research run from 1,800 yuan a kilogram in 1985 to 8,400 in 1997 and 36,000 in 2004. Today collectors across the plateau and the Himalaya bring in a short spring harvest that is traded around the world, including to a shop in Orange County. The price jump is a story of a few decades, not of centuries.
So where did cordyceps come from?
From meadows roughly 3,000 to 5,000 metres up on the Tibetan plateau and the Himalaya, where a fungus meets a ghost moth caterpillar underground. The wild cordyceps we sell comes from Nagqu in northern Tibet. Our article on where wild cordyceps comes from covers the geography and why it is rare, and the moth behind wild cordyceps covers the biology. This piece is only about the written record, and we've kept to what the texts and the researchers can actually confirm.
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