Sanligang Shiitake Mushrooms

Sanligang Shiitake Mushrooms

　　Sanligang shiitake mushrooms are a specialty of Zengdu District, Suizhou City, Hubei Province.

　　Sanligang town has been honored as the "Hometown of Chinese Shiitake Mushrooms" by the China Edible Fungi Association. As early as 1964, the Fruit and Timber Department of the Hubei Provincial Foreign Trade Office recognized the oak resources in Sanligang and invited shiitake spawn experts to train local technicians. In the spring of 1966, the first small-scale on-site meeting on shiitake production in Hubei Province was held here. However, shiitake production came to a halt due to the “Cultural Revolution.” In 1978, the Yangjiapeng Brigade of Sanligang invited Professor Yang Xinmei from Huazhong Agricultural University to teach artificial log cultivation techniques for shiitake mushrooms, while also sending a group of outstanding young people to Huazhong Agricultural University for further studies. In the early 1980s, Sanligang quickly developed a landscape where “every brigade ran mushroom farms, and every household grew shiitake mushrooms.” The most widely spread folk rhyme at the time was: “Grow mushrooms for one year to build a new house, grow them for two years to marry a bride, grow them for three years to save in the bank, and keep growing them to stride toward prosperity.” According to the *Suizhou Trade Annals*, in 1973, the county only purchased 40 kilograms of shiitake mushrooms, marking the first recorded shiitake procurement. By 1983, shiitake procurement reached 50,000 kilograms, with the majority sourced from Sanligang. Shiitake mushrooms became the flagship export product of the county’s foreign trade.

　　When the development of shiitake mushrooms was constrained by local timber resources, the people of Sanligang began to expand outward. A group of farmers contracted mountain forests in major oak-producing provinces such as Shaanxi, Henan, and Sichuan, harvesting over 2,000 tons of shiitake mushrooms annually. Coupled with more than 1,400 farmer brokers purchasing over 4,000 tons of shiitake mushrooms across the country, along with scattered local transactions, the annual trading volume of the Sanligang shiitake market reached around 8,000 tons in the early 1990s. In recent years, the town’s dried shiitake production has exceeded 4,000 tons, generating an output value of over 200 million yuan, with 80% of rural per capita net income coming from the shiitake industry. The annual trading volume of the dried shiitake market has risen to 120 million tons, with a transaction value of 1 billion yuan. The area has become the largest shiitake distribution hub in Central and South China, one of the province’s five distinctive industrial towns with considerable scale, and has also obtained national-level “Protected Designation of Origin” certification.