Prominent historical and mythical figures often serve as a potent symbol for whole nations.
For the people of the British Isles, for example, tales such as those of King Arthur and the
Round Table are almost universally known as a part of that nation’s soul. Many of these
stories become so widespread and retold that their original meaning fades away, replaced
by an idealised reflection of what once was. Perhaps the most iconic example of this type
of heroic narrative is the tale of Mulan - China’s beloved warrior heroine.
Beyond just inspiring people in the land of her origin, Mulan has become a role model
for breakers of the mold and young women across the planet. The question remains: what seeds
did this legend grow from, and how has it changed throughout the centuries? Welcome
to our video on the famous Chinese legend of Mulan, its origins in the ancient past,
and how its legacy permeates into the 21st century.
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Our first written account of China’s most famous warrior woman comes from the anonymously
written Mulan shi - or ‘Ballad of Mulan’. Much like the Epic of Gilgamesh in Mesopotamian
culture, it is possible that Mulan’s tale filtered down through the generations in the
oral tradition before being written down for the first time. The earliest known text of
the Ballad was gathered in a collection of poems and other similar works known as the
Gujin yuelu - the ‘Musical Collection Ancient and Present’. Little is known about the
editor of this anthology except his name - Zhijiang - and his status as a Buddhist monk who lived
in the mid sixth-century. As for the Ballad of Mulan itself, early twelfth-century
Chinese scholar Pan Zimu speculated that it originated during the Jin Dynasty, which lasted
from 317 to 439, while others believe it was created during the reign of the Liang Dynasty,
in the early sixth-century. We are likely to never know for sure - but most agree it
originated between 386 and 581. The narrative of the Ballad of Mulan is a
familiar one to many westerners of the 21st century, lacking many of the ‘bells and
whistles’ in Disney’s famous adaptation, including the Li Shang love story and Mushu
- the magical dragon in need of redemption. In the original piece, Mulan was a normal
woman who lived with a typical family. She had an elder sister, a younger brother, as
well as an elderly mother and father. When the ruler to whom her family owed fealty came
to raise troops in the village, Mulan took her father’s place as the family’s military
tithe, leaving the life of a woman behind. After purchasing a fine horse, a saddle, and
a bridle at the market, the daughter departs as the aging mother and father call after
her. She then travels thousands of miles over the course of months and years, fighting over
a hundred battles that are so fierce that their general dies. A decade of constant conflict
against an unknown foe followed, after which Mulan was presented before her ‘emperor’
in the imperial court. For bravery and courage, our protagonist was rewarded with riches,
merits and positions, but Mulan declined. Instead, she was granted the right to return
to her family, leaving her comrades astonished that she was a lady the entire time.
Although Mulan is considered quintessentially Chinese, there is reason to believe that the
ballad may have an origin outside of the ethnic Han core. Specifically, that it might have
foreign beginnings in the northern periphery of middle-kingdom territory.
The Han Dynasty’s final collapse in 220AD was followed by 300 long years of disunity,
vicious civil war, fleeting imperial governance, and constant invasion from the outside. During
the fourth century, China’s collapsing Jin Dynasty resulted in the takeover of almost
all of Northern China by barbarian peoples, and began the Sixteen Kingdoms period. Almost
a century of warfare, upheaval, and destruction followed, during which the region’s population
suffered terribly, until finally, in 386, a Xianbei clan known as the Tuoba brought
the north under central control and established the state of Northern Wei.
This vibrant young dynasty placed traditionally Han lands under foreign control for the first
time. It also waged wars against another nomadic people known as the Rouran, the likely inspiration
for Bori Khan - a character in the upcoming 2020 live action film. The Xianbei were people
similar in character to some of China’s more recognizable neighbors, including the
earlier Xiongnu and the later Mongols. That is to say, they were a nomadic group whose
population, both male and female, were trained in horsemanship and archery from an early
age. Because of this, it can be speculated that the Ballad of Mulan originated as a folk
tale somewhere in a post-invasion north, a milieu in which the fable of a warrior woman
galloping on horseback and fighting in wars would have been more familiar to the tribal,
but increasingly Sinicized population. The ballad’s enigmatic author probably drew
from and expanded an orally recited story which was centuries old, transcribing his
Ballad of Mulan in an instance of fusion between two cultures - Han and nomad - which were
mingling with one another. As the Chinese literary historian Hu Shi put it: “The new
peoples of the north encouraged a military spirit and were fond of bravery and therefore
the folk literature of the north naturally carries such a heroic quality.”
In Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, it is written that ‘the empire
once divided must unite’. That statement proved correct in the early seventh century,
when Li Yuan took China’s dragon throne for himself, becoming the first Tang emperor
- Gaozu - and kickstarting an era of cultural vibrancy and intellectual brilliance. The
age-old story of Mulan inspired many artists, composers, and poets of the Tang era, and
was built upon by those same individuals. It was during this period that the original
Ballad of Mulan was explored and fleshed out for themes and lessons for the first time.
One of the famous scholar-bureaucrats of Chang’an’s imperial court was a man named Wei Yuanfu
- a Tang court official and accomplished poet who composed the so-called Mulan ge, or ‘Song
of Mulan’. Although this piece of work imitated the original ballad in form, Wei’s polished
style distinguished the song as a truly sophisticated piece of art, rather than a ‘mere’ folk
tale. The various details included by this imperial
courtier serve to emphasize certain aspects of Mulan’s character, specifically her exemplary
loyalty and Confucian filial piety1. In Wei’s rendition, for example, the young lady’s
father was not only unfit for military service due to his age, but also because of a debilitating
illness which he suffered from. Moreover, his description of how the ‘northern wind
cuts open people’s skin’ also showed just how terribly Mulan’s father would have suffered
had his daughter not stepped up to the task by temporarily discarding her womanly role.
After traveling with the army from snowy mountains to green seas and back, victory was attained
against the Qiang people by ambush, and Mulan returned home. Wei Yuanfu concluded by posing
the rhetorical question: How could such a woman, who served as such a fantastic example
of what a dutiful lady should be, be forgotten even after thousands of years? The implication
that contemporary women should try to imitate Mulan’s virtues is clear to see.
A dizzying array of other Tang literati contributed to the growth of her legend in addition to
Wei Yuanfu, including Du Mu with his short, four-line poem, and many, many others too
numerous to list here. Although dedicating poems specifically about
Mulan seems to have been incredibly popular during the Tang Dynasty, its influence also
seeped into the wider cultural consciousness, seeping into unrelated works throughout the
period. A scholar called Bai Juyi, for instance, referred to Mulan’s feminine beauty in order
to colour his description of a Magnolia flower in ‘A Poem Playfully Dedicated to Magnolia’.
If this specific topic of dedication seems quite odd, it is worth noting that Chinese
poetry is often beautifully dedicated to such mundane things as sunsets, snow, and in our
case, flowers. The other side of Luo Guanzhong’s proverb
that ‘the empire united must divide’ came to pass in the early 900s, when the great
Tang finally collapsed into a brief period of disunity. They were quickly succeeded in
their imperial role by the Song, who themselves were beset by repeated threats of northern
conquest by dynasties such as the Liao and Jin2. This nomadic storm finally broke at
the start of the 1200s, when Genghis Khan’s Mongol juggernaut conquered much of Eurasia,
before splintering into pieces later in the century.
One of those segments was Kublai’s newly Mongol China - known to us as the Yuan. The
Mongol dynasty’s scorn for Han bureaucrats pushed many in China’s traditional scholar
class deeper into cultural works, many of which criticised the Yuan emperors, their
ways of ruling, and their failures. A poet of this era known as Yang Weizhen composed
another Mulan shi which acted as a piece of satire against the emperors. It implied that
if the ruler was doing their job properly - advancing the loyal and good whilst controlling
the barbarians - a woman such as Mulan would not even be forced to carry weapons in the
first place. In addition to its function as an inspirational folk tale, the centuries
had allowed Mulan to become a vessel to criticise those in power.
As China’s mandate of heaven was passed down throughout the second millennium - first
from Yuan to Ming, and then around three centuries later from Ming to Qing, the story of Mulan
continued to serve as one of the middle kingdom’s greatest cultural achievements. Brilliant
pieces of art were dedicated to her journey, shrines were built in her honour, and different
locations, including Huayuantou3 and Wanzhou4, even competed to be Mulan’s place of origin,
so great was the pride associated with the Ballad and its successors. Even today, we
can imagine Chinese families putting their children to bed with the Ballad or its many
offshoots and developments, just as parents in the west and elsewhere might use myths
from their own history for the same purpose. Mulan also began gaining notoriety and popularity
in foreign lands far earlier than might be expected. The first time we can see its mark
on an outside work is in twelfth-century Korea, when Mulan was compared to Solssinyo [maybe
solshinyo], a similar female hero of Korean history. Although we only have documented
evidence that this time period was the Ballad’s ‘first’ instance of proliferation, the
incredibly close cultural link between the ‘Jupiter of the East’ and its neighbors
in Korea, Japan, and other nearby regions suggests ,that Mulan was probably spread far
earlier than this, maybe even during Tang times.
However common it was in China’s direct sphere of influence, the story only began
appearing in the western world during the late 1800s, when translations of Chinese texts
first became available. In America, Mulan was introduced by a group of Chinese students
studying at Colombia University during the 1920s, who performed a play based on the Ballad.
In the United States, as in Yuan China, Mulan was used as the vessel for a political message
more than once. During the interwar period, for instance, left-wing Chinese-American playwright
H.T. Tsiang produced China Marches On - a play featuring Mulan with the goal of educating
American workers about brutal Japanese imperialism in his mother country.
The metamorphosis of Mulan’s potentially two millennia-old story climaxed with Disney’s
interpretation in 1998. Both widely acclaimed for its narrative quality and critiqued for
its perceived orientalism, ‘Mulan’ is one of Disney’s greatest works. As Professor
Joseph Chan tells us about Mulan’s state in the modern day: “Mulan is not genuinely
Chinese, nor is it all American. It has become a transcultural text: a combination of old
and new, traditional and modern, East and West, collectivism and individualism, female
submissiveness and women’s liberation, filial piety and reciprocal love between father and
daughter.” No doubt Disney’s upcoming remake will continue the ever-advancing evolution
of a story that originated in the mists of China’s ancient past.
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