The globally distributed genus of boletes called Lanmaoa may represent a third family of psychoactive mushrooms, working through a chemistry that no one yet understands.
The genus is already one of the strangest entries in the toxicology literature. In Yunnan, southwestern China, eating undercooked bolete, known locally as jian shu qing, can cause vivid hallucinations in young people. Patients describe colorful figures only a few centimeters tall, marching, dancing and climbing on furniture. Closing the eyes intensifies the effect.
A hospital in Yunnan treats more than a hundred such cases each year, and according to a November 2025 article by the study’s lead researcher, Colin Domnauer, published on the University of Utah’s news site, 96 percent of those who sought help at the hospital after eating the mushrooms reported seeing the little people. The clinical term is Lilliputian hallucination, after the six-inch inhabitants of Gulliver’s Travels.
The mushroom responsible for this strange phenomenon is Lanmaoa asiatica. Jian Shou King means blue in hand, and it is actually a market name for several blue-hued boletes, but asiatica is the species that holds the documented reputation. It is also a valuable food item, which is why people like to eat it half-cooked first.
Specimens have been collected throughout Asia, the Americas, and Europe, but the genus, which includes edible species, prized regional delicacies, and not least this one a notorious hallucinogen, has never had a properly developed family tree.
Researchers at the University of Utah, writing in Mycologia, have now sequenced entire genomes from 53 specimens and constructed a phylogeny from 1,515 single-copy orthologous genes. Each major branch of the resulting tree has full statistical support. This is the first time that the genus has been mapped at this resolution.
The specimen included 21 type specimens, the original physical references that underlie a species’ name. Extracting DNA from these has allowed the team to reorganize the genus: six species have been renamed into new combinations, four have been identified as new to science, and two have been formally described here as Lanmaoa fallax and Lanmaoa carboniliver. The genus now contains 17 recognized species.
The surprising result is that Lanmaoa asiatica lacks any known hallucinogenic chemical signature. The team mined its genome and discovered biosynthetic gene clusters that produce psilocybin in Psilocybe mushrooms and ibotenic acid in Amanita muscaria. There was no one there either.
In other studies, chemists have isolated compounds from the fruit bodies and tested them, or profiled the blood of poisoned patients, yet no identification has yet been made for the sightings. Overall, chemical work and complete genomic discovery eliminate most familiar explanations and still leave the active agent unaccounted for.
Whatever L’Asiatica is creating, it is doing it in a way that no one has seen before.
Reports of little people remain frequent and widespread. Little figures have been described far beyond Yunnan, including in communities in the northern Philippines, and a Chinese text from the 3rd century mentions a mushroom that, if eaten raw, could cause one to see “a little person”.
Psilocybin and ibotenic acid have shaped everything we know about psychoactive fungi: their pharmacology, their cultural history, and, increasingly, their clinical use. A third biosynthetic pathway, which evolved independently in a lineage of boletes more closely related to the common porcini than to any other known hallucinogenic species, would broaden that picture considerably.
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