Hua Mulan
Based on Wikipedia: Hua Mulan
A young woman sits at her loom, sighing. Draft notices keep arriving at her family's door, each one bearing her elderly father's name. The army is mobilizing, and every household must send a man to fight. Her father is too old, her brother too young. So she makes a decision that will echo through fifteen centuries of storytelling: she will go to war in her father's place, disguised as a man.
This is the story of Hua Mulan, and whether or not she ever existed, she has become one of the most enduring figures in Chinese folklore—a warrior whose legend has inspired everything from classical opera to a billion-dollar Disney franchise.
The Ballad That Started Everything
The earliest written record of Mulan comes from a folk song, believed to have been composed sometime between 386 and 535 AD during the Northern Wei dynasty. The original anthology that contained this ballad has been lost to time, but the poem itself survived by being copied into later collections. We know it today from an eleventh or twelfth century anthology called the Music Bureau Collection.
The ballad is surprisingly short—just thirty-one couplets, mostly in five-character phrases. It reads almost like a film synopsis, hitting the emotional beats without lingering on details.
Mulan hears that the Khagan—a title used by rulers of nomadic empires—is calling up soldiers. She buys a horse from the eastern market, a saddle from the western market, a bridle from the southern market, and a whip from the northern market. This deliberate mention of all four markets suggests the thoroughness of her preparation, the commitment of her decision.
She rides to war. The ballad compresses twelve years of military service into a few vivid images: camping by the Yellow River where she can no longer hear her parents' voices over the rushing water, advancing "ten thousand li to battle as if flying past the mountains," moonlight reflecting off her metal armor during cold night watches, generals dying around her in a hundred battles.
Then comes the homecoming. The emperor offers her a high government position—specifically the role of shangshulang, a ministerial post in the highest executive organ of imperial power. She declines. All she wants is a fast horse to take her home.
The final scene is the most famous. Her parents come out to greet her. Her elder sister puts on fine clothes. Her younger brother sharpens the butcher's knife for a celebratory feast. Mulan returns to her old room, changes out of her military tabard, combs her hair, and adorns herself with golden flowers. When her comrades see her, they are stunned.
For twelve years, they never knew.
Who Were the Northern Wei?
To understand Mulan's story, you need to understand the world it emerged from—and it's a world quite different from what most people imagine when they think of ancient China.
The Northern Wei dynasty was founded not by ethnic Han Chinese, but by the Tuoba clan of the Xianbei people. The Xianbei were a proto-Mongolic group, originally nomads from the northern steppes who had conquered and unified northern China in the fourth century AD. This type of rule, where a foreign group conquers and governs a Chinese population, is sometimes called a "conquest dynasty."
The Tuoba Xianbei rulers gradually adopted Chinese customs and institutions as they settled into their role as emperors. They took on the Chinese dynasty name "Wei," changed their surname from "Tuoba" to "Yuan," and eventually moved their capital from the northern frontier city of Pingcheng (modern-day Datong) to Luoyang, deep in the Central Plain that had been the heartland of Chinese civilization for millennia.
But they kept certain nomadic traditions. The emperor bore two titles simultaneously: the sacred Chinese designation "Son of Heaven" and "Khagan," the title of nomadic rulers. The Ballad of Mulan uses both titles, which is one of the clues scholars use to date and locate the story.
Xianbei women were typically skilled horseback riders, unlike their Han Chinese counterparts who were more confined by Confucian gender expectations. Another popular Northern Wei folk poem praises a woman named Yong Rong for her riding and archery skills. The Ballad of Mulan may reflect this relatively more fluid understanding of gender roles in nomadic-influenced society.
This might also explain the poem's most puzzling feature: how could Mulan possibly hide her sex for twelve years of close-quarters military life? Perhaps in a society where women already rode horses and handled weapons, the disguise was more plausible than it would seem in other contexts.
The Enemies at the Gate
The Northern Wei spent decades fighting the Rouran, a nomadic confederation that constantly raided the northern frontier. The Wei emperors held the Rouran in contempt, considering them uncivilized barbarians. They called them "Ruanruan"—which translates roughly to "wriggling worms."
The ballad mentions specific locations that match historical records. Mulan camps near the Black Mountain, which corresponds to a real place called Shahu Mountain, located southeast of modern-day Hohhot in Inner Mongolia. She hears enemy cavalry in the Yan Mountains, shorthand for the Yanran Mountains, now known as the Khangai Mountains in central Mongolia.
According to the official dynastic history, Emperor Taiwu of Northern Wei launched a major military expedition against the Rouran in 429 AD, advancing through both of these locations. This suggests the ballad may preserve a memory of real military campaigns, even if its heroine is legendary.
What's in a Name?
Interestingly, we don't actually know Mulan's family name with any certainty. The earliest source says her given name is unknown and implies that "Mulan" is actually her surname. Different later versions assign her different family names: Zhu in one text, Wei in another.
The family name "Hua," which has become standard in modern retellings, was introduced by the playwright Xu Wei in the sixteenth century. "Hua" means "flower," which pairs poetically with "Mulan," meaning "magnolia." So the name we know her by—Hua Mulan, "Magnolia Flower"—is actually a relatively recent invention, chosen for its beauty rather than historical accuracy.
There's another possibility altogether. Since the Northern Wei was ruled by the Xianbei, who had exclusively compound surnames, some scholars suggest "Mulan" might be a Chinese adaptation of the Xianbei word "umran," meaning "prosperous." If this theory is correct, Mulan wasn't ethnically Han Chinese at all.
Her name doesn't appear in any list of historical women from the period. Whether she was a real person whose story was embellished into legend, or a purely fictional creation that resonated so deeply it became treated as history, we simply don't know.
The Story Grows
Over the centuries, the spare ballad accumulated new details and plot twists, the way folk tales tend to do.
In 1593, the playwright Xu Wei dramatized the story as "The Heroine Mulan Goes to War in Her Father's Place," a two-act play. This version gave Mulan the flowery surname that stuck.
The most elaborate retelling came about eighty years later, when the author Chu Renhuo wove Mulan into his novel "Romance of Sui and Tang," a sprawling work of historical fiction set during the transition between the Sui and Tang dynasties—several centuries after the Northern Wei setting of the original ballad.
In this version, Mulan lives under the rule of the Western Turkic Khaganate. Her father, given the name Hua Hu, fears conscription because he has only two daughters and an infant son. Mulan takes his place and is eventually captured by enemy forces, where she's questioned by a warrior princess named Xianniang.
Xianniang tries to recruit Mulan—believing her to be a man—for her father's army. When she discovers Mulan is actually a woman, she's so delighted to find a kindred spirit that they become sworn sisters.
But this version ends in tragedy. Xianniang's father backs the wrong side in the wars that establish the Tang dynasty, and when he's defeated, both sworn sisters surrender themselves for execution in his place, holding knives in their mouths as a symbol of their willingness to die. This act of filial piety—loyalty to one's parents and family—wins them a reprieve from the emperor.
Mulan is finally allowed to return home. She discovers her father has died and her mother has remarried. Worse, the Khan has summoned her to become his concubine. Rather than submit to this fate, she kills herself.
This ending has puzzled scholars. It appears nowhere in earlier versions of the legend. Some interpret it as a political message from the author: even a half-Chinese woman would prefer death to serving a foreign ruler. The novel was written during the Qing dynasty, when China was ruled by the Manchus, another group from the northern steppes. The suicide might be a coded protest against foreign domination.
The Rabbit Metaphor
The original ballad ends with a striking image that has become famous in Chinese literature. After Mulan reveals herself to her astonished comrades, she offers them a metaphor:
When a male rabbit runs, its feet hop and skip. When a female rabbit runs, its eyes are blurred and confused. But when two rabbits run side by side close to the ground, who can tell which is male and which is female?
The meaning is debated. Is it simply a clever way of saying that in the chaos of war and flight, gender differences become invisible? Or is there something deeper—a suggestion that gender itself is more fluid and situational than society admits?
For a poem composed over fifteen hundred years ago, it's a remarkably modern question.
Why Mulan Matters
The Mulan story connects to themes that run deep in Chinese culture. Filial piety—duty to one's parents—is perhaps the most important virtue in Confucian ethics, and Mulan's decision to take her father's place is presented as its ultimate expression. She doesn't go to war for glory or adventure, but to spare her aged father from a death sentence disguised as military service.
At the same time, the story subtly questions gender restrictions. Mulan proves herself not just as a soldier but as a potential government minister—the emperor's job offer suggests she demonstrated both martial and literary accomplishments during her service. And yet she returns to her old room, puts on her old clothes, and adorns herself with flowers. The story doesn't imagine her rejecting femininity; it imagines her having access to both worlds.
This complexity may explain the story's endurance. It can be read as reinforcing traditional values—Mulan serves her family and her emperor, then returns to her proper place—or as quietly subverting them. The ballad doesn't moralize. It simply presents its heroine with a kind of wonder.
A Thousand Adaptations
The story has been adapted countless times. The first film version appeared in 1927, a silent movie from Tianyi Film Company. Another studio tried to capitalize on its success the following year, but audiences weren't interested in a second Mulan so soon.
In 1939, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, a new Mulan film became enormously popular. The parallel was obvious: Chinese audiences saw in Mulan's story a reflection of their own struggle against foreign invasion.
Chinese opera has produced dozens of Mulan adaptations across regional styles: Yueju opera, Yuju opera, Huangmei opera, Longjiangju opera. Each brings different musical traditions and performance conventions to the same basic story.
Western audiences know Mulan primarily through Disney's 1998 animated film, which took considerable liberties with the source material. The Disney version added a comic dragon sidekick, a love interest, and a villain—none of which appear in the original ballad. It changed Mulan's family name to "Fa," the Cantonese pronunciation, and invented an entirely new plot about saving the emperor from a Hun invasion.
Disney's Mulan became one of the most successful animated films of its era and spawned a sequel in 2004 and a live-action remake in 2020. The Mulan character became part of the Disney Princess franchise, appearing on merchandise alongside Cinderella and Snow White—a strange fate for a warrior who spent twelve years disguised as a man.
The year 2020 saw an unusual confluence of Mulan films: not just the Disney remake, but at least five Chinese productions, including both live-action films and a CGI animation. The story had become something of a cultural battleground, with Chinese studios perhaps eager to reclaim a national legend from Hollywood's interpretation.
The Woman Behind the Legend
Did Mulan exist? Almost certainly not as the ballad describes her. No contemporary historical records mention her. Her name doesn't appear in the "Exemplary Women," a collection of biographies of notable women from the Northern Wei period.
But the ballad itself is real, and very old. It emerged from a specific historical moment—the Northern Wei dynasty, the wars against the Rouran, a society where Xianbei nomadic culture mixed with Chinese Confucian traditions. Whatever kernel of truth or imagination gave rise to the story, it resonated deeply enough to be preserved, copied, adapted, and reimagined for over fifteen centuries.
Perhaps that's enough. The question of whether Mulan was "real" may be less interesting than the question of why her story has persisted. What is it about a daughter who goes to war for her father, who proves herself the equal of any man, who returns home and puts on flowers—what is it about this story that we keep wanting to tell?
The ballad doesn't answer. It just ends with those two rabbits, running side by side, indistinguishable.