It is probably fifty years ago since Chew Chong, a Chinese storekeeper in New Plymouth, found out the value of fungus as a marketable commodity, and offered to buy as much of it as the poor struggling Taranaki farmer was able to gather from the stumps in the bush clearing which settlement had made, and was making. Fungus gathering (states the Auckland Star) became quite an industry at certain seasons of the year, but it took an awful lot to make a sackful of pre dried product, for after it was picked from the stumps in a wet state it had to be spread out and dried till every particle of moisture was out of it. After Chew Chong had been dealing in fungus for a short time he decided to go back to China on a visit, but did not want to let the industry languish, so he left a sum of money with a European storekeeper to buy for him all the fungus offering. Many months afterwards Chew Chong walked into the storekeeper's shop and paid over the money for the accumulatedr fungus. He had found a regular market for the stuff in his own country, where the demand was unlimited, because of the use that was made of it for culinary purposes, especially in the making of vegetable soup. What the kauri gum industry was in Auckland, so. the fungus industry was to Taranak half a century ago Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, 18 August 1922, Page 4