The hallucinogenic mushroom that contains no known psychedelic

A globally distributed genus of boletes called Lanmaoa may represent a third family of psychoactive mushrooms, working through a chemistry that no one understands yet.

The genus already holds one of the strangest entries in the toxicological literature. In Yunnan, in southwestern China, eating an undercooked bolete known locally as jian shou qing can bring on vivid hallucinations of tiny people. Patients describe colourful figures only a few centimetres tall, marching, dancing and climbing over the furniture. The effect sharpens with the eyes closed.

More than a hundred such cases are treated each year at a single Yunnan hospital, 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 hospital help after eating the mushroom reported seeing little people. The clinical term is Lilliputian hallucination, after the six-inch inhabitants of Gulliver’s Travels.

The mushroom responsible for this bizarre phenomenology is Lanmaoa asiatica. Jian shou qing means turns blue in the hand, and it is really a market name for several blue-bruising boletes, but asiatica is the species that carries the documented reputation. It is also a prized edible, which is how people come to eat it undercooked in the first place.

Specimens have been collected across Asia, the Americas and Europe, but the genus, which includes edible species, prized regional delicacies and at least this one notorious hallucinogen, has never had a properly resolved family tree.

Researchers at the University of Utah, writing in Mycologia, have now sequenced whole genomes from 53 specimens and built a phylogeny from 1,515 single-copy orthologous genes. Every major branch in the resulting tree has full statistical support. It is the first time the genus has been mapped at this resolution.

The sampling included 21 type specimens, the original physical references that anchor a species name. Pulling DNA from these has allowed the team to reorganise the genus: six species are renamed into new combinations, four are identified as new to science, and two are formally described here as Lanmaoa fallax and Lanmaoa carbonilivor. The genus now contains 17 recognised species.

The striking result is that Lanmaoa asiatica lacks any known hallucinogenic chemical signature. The team mined its genome and searched for the biosynthetic gene clusters that produce psilocybin in Psilocybe mushrooms and ibotenic acid in Amanita muscaria. Neither was there.

In other studies, chemists have isolated and tested compounds from the fruiting body, or profiled the blood of poisoned patients, yet nothing identified so far accounts for the visions. Taken together, the chemical work and the completed genomic search remove the most familiar explanations and still leave the active agent unaccounted for.

Whatever L. asiatica is making, it is doing so via a pathway no one has seen before.

The reports of little people remain consistent and widespread. Tiny figures have been described far from Yunnan, including among communities in the northern Philippines, and a Chinese text from the third century refers to a mushroom that, eaten raw, lets one see “a little person”.

Psilocybin and ibotenic acid have shaped almost everything we know about psychoactive fungi: their pharmacology, their cultural histories and, increasingly, their clinical use. A third biosynthetic route, evolved independently in a lineage of boletes more closely related to the common porcini than to any known hallucinogenic species, would widen that picture considerably.