Cornell University Returning Prized Mushrooms to China

An Ivy League school is giving China back its treasured mushrooms.

From left, Cornell University Herbarium Director Emeritus Richard P. Korf, Director Kathie T. Hodge,...

From left, Cornell University Herbarium Director Emeritus Richard P. Korf, Director Kathie T. Hodge, and Curator Robert Dirig pose with a display of fungi specimens that comprise the Fungi of China collection at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., Monday, April 13, 2009. After 70 years, fungi collected and subsequently shipped out of China prior to World War II, was repatriated Monday as part of a symbolic hand-off between Cornell University and China. (AP Photo/Heather Ainsworth)

(AP)

Shu Chun Teng traveled halfway around the world on a scholarship to study mycology at Cornell University in 1923. He left five years later with a knowledge of fungi unequaled in China, then spent the next decade traveling on horseback gathering up molds, lichens, yeasts, rusts and morels in the forests, fields and marshes of his homeland.

During the Japanese invasion in 1937, Teng arranged for his best specimens to be removed from a national botany institute he directed in Nanking to save them from destruction. During World War II, they were smuggled by ox cart to Indochina and then by sea to the United States, and 2,278 of the specimen packets ended up at Teng's alma mater.

At Cornell's initiative, the university is dividing up and sharing its Fungi of China Collection with the Academy of Sciences in Beijing to help advance the exploration of fungal species. Only an estimated 6 percent of those believed to exist in the world have been recorded.

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In a repatriation ceremony Monday, Cornell President David Skorton presented a high-level Chinese delegation with a rare mushroom called Lentinus tigrinus, reaffirming the university's desire to share a collection he said it "has held in safekeeping for the global scientific community since 1940."

Some 1,700 specimens will be delivered to China in the fall, including 57 considered irreplaceable. Cornell will retain fungi that can't be divided, but make them available to scholars.

More than 70 years after their discovery, "examples of this kind almost do not exist in China, which makes this collection invaluable (for) the study of the variety, distribution and evolution of Chinese fungi," said delegation leader Liu Yandong. "On behalf of the Chinese government, I would like to say a big thank you to Cornell University."

Kathie Hodge, the Cornell herbarium's director, said the fungi are invariably tiny — "just dried up leaves, most of them, or pieces of wood with a little dot of them. To an average person, they look like something you would sweep off your kitchen floor. But under the microscope they're beautiful and exciting and incredibly diverse."