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At the beginning of the Himalayan summer, when the snows start to melt, all the schools close for the season and Nepali parents and children move to the grasslands with enough food for a month-long journey on a quest for a herb more valuable than gold.
To find yarsagumba, families crawl through muddy fields hoping to spot a yellowish-green mummified caterpillar that resembles a disproportionate unicorn, with a dark-coloured elongated fungus growing out of a larva’s head.
In Chinese, the two-faced creature is called dong chong xia cao, which translates as “winter worm, summer grass”. During the winter, yarsagumba
