Reborn in 1983: Picking Matsutake from the Mountains

In 1983, in a remote mountain village in western Yunnan, a man who roams the mountains knows the value of what others call worthless. The locals call it stinky termite mushroom, so unpalatable that even pigs sniff twice before eating. The purchasing station classifies it as miscellaneous fungus, paying two cents per jin. Yet the same item, 120 li away at the county foreign trade office, is listed on a Japanese trading company's order: sixty yuan per kilogram, and they can't get enough. It's not that there's no supply—it's that no one knows where it grows, that it opens its cap within days if not picked, and that it spoils within hours without ice. Last year, the province collected 3,200 jin, shipped it by two trucks to Kunming, but it all rotted upon opening the boxes, so they buried it in a pit. Yang Shoufu knows. In his past life, he worked with matsutake his entire career, from two cents a jin to selling by the piece, where one good mushroom was worth a mountain family's entire corn harvest. But he also knows that in this era, he can't even utter the word matsutake—that name won't reach the mountains for another decade. Others pick 120 jin and earn twelve yuan. He selects 26 jin and earns twenty-six yuan. The hard part is getting people to believe him. The mountains are full of treasures that spoil in two days. This trade isn't a gamble on eyesight—it's a gamble on timing. — Description from novelcodex.org