Lingzhi and the ruyi sceptre: the fungus that turned into an ornament

An ornament the size of a thumb

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds an eighteenth-century Chinese carving two inches long — 5.1 cm — catalogued under the title “Lingzhi mushrooms”, object name “Ornament”, accession number 2015.500.5.17. It is nephrite: a russet cap incised with scrolls rising over a pale mass cut into further curls, the stone’s natural brown skin used to set the cap apart from the body. The museum’s record names the fungus outright.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is more reserved about a larger object of the same family. Its Qing-dynasty boxwood sceptre, overall 38.1 cm, is titled “Scepter in the Shape of a Ruyi Fungus”, and the catalogue adds that the fungus-shaped head is an emblem of immortality. It says fungus. It does not say lingzhi and it prints no Latin name. Two institutions, two degrees of caution, one silhouette that keeps recurring in Chinese decorative work: a broad cap with a lobed, undulating rim on a curving shaft.

Where that silhouette came from is stated more cautiously in the sources than in the popular account. A review of lingzhi research at the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences records that the fungus was known in early China as xian-cao (仙草), rui-cao (瑞草) and rui-zhi (瑞芝), names standing for good luck and happiness, and states that the traditional handicraft ru-yi (如意) “was designed from Ling-zhi”, lingzhi being a common element in Chinese drawing and painting. That sentence is worth quoting with its authors attached rather than adopting as a finding. The paper traces no route from fungus to sceptre, and ruyi heads were also carved as clouds and as a closed fist — forms that none of the sources used here derives from a fungus. Cleveland’s own title is the hint: calling an object a sceptre in the shape of a ruyi fungus presupposes ruyi that depict no fungus at all. A single shape usually has more than one ancestry.

The point at which the imagery multiplies can be dated, but again on someone else’s authority. A 2011 chapter on Ganoderma in Herbal Medicine: Biomolecular and Clinical Aspects reports that the proliferation of these images in art began in 1400 AD and was associated with Taoism, crediting that to McMeekin (2005), and that the images then spread beyond religion into paintings, carvings, furniture and even women’s accessories, crediting that to Wasser (2005). The written trail runs further back, to the first book wholly devoted to herbs, the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing. The chapter dates that book to the Eastern Han dynasty, 25–220 AD, with no citation attached to the date itself, and only then adds, after Zhu (1998), that it was composed in the second century under the pseudonym Shen-nong, “the holy farmer”. These are other people’s findings relayed in a textbook, not demonstrations by its authors, and they should be read that way.

A name borrowed from England

The genus Ganoderma was established by Petter Adolf Karsten, and its generic type is Ganoderma lucidum (Curtis) P. Karst. from England. That is the whole difficulty in one line: the name applied for decades to the cultivated Chinese lingzhi was attached from the outset to a European fungus.

The route of the mistake is well documented, and it does not run through the West, convenient though that story would be. Patouillard first identified G. lucidum in China in 1907, from specimens collected in Guizhou Province. Teng described Chinese collections in 1934, and Liu included the species in his 1974 monograph of traditional Chinese medicinal fungi. After that, as the authors of a 2017 paper reporting the species new to Thailand set out, G. lucidum was accepted as the scientific binomial of lingzhi in many reports on Chinese edible and medicinal mushrooms, and the Chinese lingzhi “has continuously been referred to as G. lucidum in monographs of Ganodermataceae in China”. The 2016 review shows the same habit from inside the industry: it calls the cultivated Chinese form chi-zhi (赤芝) and glosses it as the one “known as ‘G. lucidum’ in most historical literatures”. The name held on longest where the fungus was actually grown.

Doubt accumulated slowly and began with morphology. Pegler and Yao argued from the thickness of the context and the diameter of the stipe that the widely cultivated Chinese material was not the same species as the European one; phylogenetic work pointed the same way. The genus itself is cosmopolitan, as the 2023 paper says in its opening line, so the question was never whether the Chinese fungus belonged to Ganoderma, but whether it was the English type species.

Nine sequences from a steel-plant collection

A study published on 5 March 2023 in the Journal of Fungi went back to the type material. Zhuo Du, Yi-Jian Yao and colleagues at the HMAS fungarium of the Institute of Microbiology designed six primers specific to Ganoderma sichuanense plus one universal primer, and recovered nine ITS sequences from the holotype, HMAS 42798, using directed and nested PCR. The DNA of the first cultivated lingzhi, HMAS 25103, was too degraded for that approach, so its ITS sequence was assembled from genome sequencing instead.

The holotype carries collection data that is hard to confuse with anything else: Sichuan Province, Dukou — now Panzhihua — City, the Panzhihua steel plant, on the rotten wood of a broad-leaved tree, 1976, collected by C.M. Li, number 116. The paper’s taxonomy section prints Ganoderma sichuanense J.D. Zhao & X.Q. Zhang (1983) and treats Ganoderma lingzhi S.H. Wu, Y. Cao & Y.C. Dai (2012) as a later synonym of it. Its conclusion is blunt: G. lucidum is a name mistakenly applied to the widely cultivated Ganoderma species in China, and the binomial for lingzhi is G. sichuanense.

This is not unanimity, and the authors do not pretend otherwise. They record that the epitype HMAS 252081, designated by Yao and colleagues, “was not accepted by some researches”, which is precisely why the 2023 work returns to the type material instead of relying on earlier sequences. Species Fungorum and MycoBank have listed G. lingzhi as a later synonym of G. sichuanense for years, but agreement between databases is agreement between editors, not the end of an argument.

The institute that disagrees with itself

Here the article has to stop and admit a contradiction, because both accounts come out of the same institute. The 2023 paper states that the first successful cultivation of lingzhi fruit bodies was achieved at the Institute of Microbiology in 1959, and that the specimen HMAS 25103 was grown in Beijing in June 1959 by Zhuang Deng, daughter and assistant of Professor Shu-Chün Teng. A 2016 review from the same institute puts the breakthrough a decade later: in the late 1960s a wild lingzhi fruit body was presented to Chairman Mao Zedong by Unit 6037 of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, passed to Guo Moruo, president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and from him to the institute, where the mycologist X.J. Liu was appointed to lead the cultivation programme. Earlier attempts, the review says, all failed because only stipes formed without caps; Liu’s team found that humidity late in fruiting was decisive, 85–95 per cent producing an intact pileus while low humidity yields only a staghorn-like form. The technique was then published in the Compilation of Microbial Data and spread across the country.

The two dates cannot be reconciled by picking the more convenient one. At most they can be read as describing different thresholds — a first fruit body and a first repeatable industrial method — and it is worth noting that the 2023 paper itself adds that “approximately 10 years later” lingzhi cultivation became an important industry in China. That is a reading, not a source statement, and it is left as one here.

The 2016 review also lists where lingzhi was then being grown: the north-east (Jilin, Liaoning), the east (Anhui, Jiangsu, Zhejiang), the south (Hainan, Fujian) and the south-west, Sichuan and Yunnan. That last pair closes a circle. The province that gave the species its epithet is also one of the cultivation regions the review names.

The limits of a carved likeness

A carving is not an identification. Neither the Cleveland boxwood nor the New York nephrite shows a pore surface, a lacquered cuticle or concentric growth zones — the characters by which a Ganoderma is actually recognised. The resemblance runs one way: a carver stylised a fungus, and the stylisation confirms no species. That is why neither caption in this article carries a Latin name.

The numbers need the same care. The 2016 review estimates 200,000 farmers working in lingzhi cultivation in China and about 200 lingzhi enterprises, with a national capacity of “over 110,000 ton/year” — the paper writes ton without saying which. Those are statements made in 2016, not a present-day position. The figure of US$2.5 billion in yearly sales is credited in that same paper to Chang (2004) and describes lingzhi products consumed “especially in Asian countries” — not Chinese sales, and not a 2016 measurement. Likewise, the claim that the use of Ganoderma in China reaches back 6,800 years appears in the 2023 paper as a reference to someone else’s work, not as a result of this one.

Then there is the name itself. Popular writing renders lingzhi as the mushroom of immortality; the 2011 chapter offers no such translation. It says the name combines spiritual potency with the essence of immortality, calls lingzhi the “herb of spiritual potency”, and lists what it symbolises: success, well-being, divine power and longevity. That is what the word carries in Chinese usage; it is not a description of what anything does. This article makes no health claim in either language, and the authors of that chapter say plainly that beliefs about the benefits of this fungus rest largely on anecdotal evidence, traditional use and cultural mores.

How to check any of this

The simplest exercise is reading museum titles closely. Cleveland writes fungus and stops where its evidence stops; the Met writes “Lingzhi mushrooms”. Looking a name up in Species Fungorum or MycoBank rather than on a product label works the same way: the database will show which name is accepted, which is a synonym, and since when.

The rest can be done outdoors. Bracket fungi of this genus grow at the base of trunks and on dead wood across Europe; turning one over reveals the layer of tubes that no carver ever reproduced. Setting that surface beside the wavy head of a sceptre shows exactly what the ornament shows and nothing more: that someone once found the shape worth repeating. No carving and no binomial says anything whatever about what may be collected or eaten.