The Ballad of Mulan

The story

The Ballad of Mulan is the first known written record of Mulan, the legendary heroine who took her aged father's place in the army by disguising herself as a man. It is a folk song believed to have been composed during the Northern Wei regime (386–535 CE). It was first transcribed in the Musical Records of Old and New, a compilation of books and songs made by the monk Zhijiang under the Southern Chen dynasty (557–589) in the 6th century. That anthology is lost; the earliest surviving text of the poem is in the Music Bureau Collection (Yuefu Shiji), an anthology of the 11th or 12th century whose compiler, Guo Maoqian, names the Musical Records of Old and New as his source.

The ballad does not state its historical setting, but its geographic and cultural references point to the Northern Wei, founded by the Tuoba clan of the Xianbei, a proto-Mongolic people from the northern steppes who united northern China in the 4th century and moved their capital from Pingcheng (modern Datong) to Luoyang. Its emperors bore both the Chinese title "Son of Heaven" and the nomadic title "Khagan", and the ballad calls the sovereign by both. The office it says the Khagan offered Mulan, shangshulang, was a ministerial post in the highest executive organ of the state. The Black Mountain and the Yanran Mountain that the ballad names are both cited in the Book of Wei, the dynasty's official history, for Emperor Taiwu's expedition of 429 against the Rouran, nomads who raided the northern frontier and whom the Northern Wei called "wriggling worms". Xianbei women were typically skilled riders, and another Northern Wei folk poem, "Li Bo's Younger Sister", praises a woman's riding and archery, so the ballad may reflect the gender roles of nomadic societies. Mulan's name may be a sinified form of the Xianbei word "umran", "prosperous". Whether she ever lived is unclear: her name is not in Exemplary Women, the collection of biographies of women of the Northern Wei.

The story was retold for centuries. The playwright Xu Wei (d. 1593) dramatised it in two acts as "The Heroine Mulan Goes to War in Her Father's Place" and gave the heroine the family name Hua ("flower"), the one most used today; other versions call her Zhu or Wei. Chu Renhuo's novel Romance of the Sui and Tang (c. 1675) moved her to the founding of the Tang dynasty and gave her a tragic end, found in no earlier version, after the khan summons her to become his concubine; some commentators have read it as an anti-Qing message. Over time the story grew into a popular folk tale.

In the 20th century Mulan went onto the stage and the screen: Mei Lanfang starred in the play Mulan Joins the Army in 1917, and silent films followed in 1927 and 1928. During the Second Sino-Japanese War she became a symbol of unity and of resistance to Japan's aggression, notably in the 1939 film Mulan Joins the Army, directed by Bu Wancang and written by Ouyang Yuqian. Maxine Hong Kingston retold the tale in The Woman Warrior (1975), which popularised it in the West and may have led to Disney's animated film Mulan of 1998. A crater on Venus is named Hua Mulan after her.

What it says

A narrative poem in the plain style of the folk song: a daughter at her loom learns that her father has been called up, takes his place, rides to the northern frontier and serves through long years of war, then refuses high office and asks only to go home, where she puts on her own clothes again and astonishes her comrades. Its themes are duty to one's parents, courage and the gap between how a person looks and what she can do; the mood moves from quiet worry to the speed of the campaign and the joy of homecoming.

The words