Lingzhi: Mushrooms and Myth

This thesis concerns myths surrounding the lingzhi mushroom, Ganoderma lucidum, a fungus fundamentally important as a Chinese medicine, but also as a literary, artistic, and cultural symbol. I aim to not only unearth what these myths are, but also how they function historically, how different semiotic encodings influence each other through time, how they are morphed and manipulated in accordance with social, economic, and environmental changes. To achieve this task, I first analyze a collection of texts and visual pieces from the Han dynasty to the Qing, looking at what status lingzhi holds in the hands and eyes of poets, politicians, alchemists and artists. The latter half of this thesis is an ethnography composed of a series of interviews with mycologists, mushroom farmers, and lingzhi vendors recorded during the spring and summer of 2019 in several Chinese cities, investigating the supply-chain and symbolic status of lingzhi in modern-day China and the U.S. I argue that lingzhi's discursive content is being tugged in two directions: between independent sellers obtaining the mushroom through local forest-scavenging associations, and corporate-governmental entities growing lingzhi in rural poverty-alleviation projects, commercially flattening complex histories and utilizing lingzhi as a tool of state soft- power promulgation. Though this thesis is focused on a specific mushroom, its ultimate aim is to use a microscopic view in order to understand macroscopic patterns: how investigating the lingzhi can reveal larger truths concerning cultural conceptions of modernization, environmental degradation, and the semiotic morphology of myths.