A Northern Wei Ballad

Sino Despatch 11 October 2026 31 min read

Painting of Mulan in armour riding away from her family's farmstead at dawn as her parents watch

A folk song’s long afterlife

The Mulan legend has been a folk ballad, a Tang dynasty southern folk saint, a Ming dynasty stage heroine, a Qing dynasty temple cult, a Republican era national allegory, a Disney animated film, a Beijing musical, a 2020 live-action feature, a video game character since 2001, and a flashpoint in 21st century cultural politics. This essay traces that 1,500-year career from the original Ballad of Mulan through to the 2020 Disney live-action Mulan and the Chinese response.

For more than fifteen hundred years, a folk ballad about a young woman who takes her ageing father’s place in the army has been part of the Chinese cultural inheritance. The ballad is sixty-two lines long in the version that has come down to us, written in five-character lines in the yuefu style, and it tells the story with no proper names except one. The father is unnamed. The army is unnamed. The place is unnamed. The young woman is called 木兰, Mulan, and beyond that the poem declines to specify. It does not say when the events take place, where the army is going, or which dynasty it serves. It says only that the Khan raises an army, that the Khan’s conscription reaches the household, that the daughter goes in her father’s place, that she serves for twelve years, and that she returns home in triumph. The closing couplet of the ballad is one of the best known in Chinese literature: “The male rabbit kicks its feet as it runs, the female rabbit has eyes that blur, but when two hares run side by side, who can tell if I am male or female?”

In that time Mulan has been a frontier legend, a Tang dynasty southern folk saint, a Ming dynasty stage heroine, a Qing dynasty temple cult, a Republican era national allegory, a Communist era school text, a Disney animated film in 1998, a Beijing musical in 2019, a Disney live-action film in 2020, a Chinese animated film in the same year, a video game character since 2001, and a flashpoint in debates over Chinese representation, diaspora politics, and who owns a folk tale. She has been claimed by the People’s Republic as a national heroine, by Western feminist scholars as a proto-feminist, by Chinese-American writers as a figure of bicultural identity, and by Ming dynasty dramatists as a vehicle for the cross-dressed warrior woman. What follows is a reconstruction of that long story, beginning with the poem, working through the legends it spawned, and ending with the global pop-culture property the legend has become.

The original Ballad of Mulan

The Ballad of Mulan survives in a Northern Song anthology called the 乐府诗集, Yuefu Shiji, the Collected Poems of the Music Bureau, compiled by the scholar Guo Maoqian, who lived from about 1050 to 1130. Guo credited the ballad to an earlier source, the 古今乐录, Gujin Yuelu, Records of Ancient and Modern Music, a sixth century anthology compiled by a Buddhist monk called Zhi Jiang, which is now lost. The earliest catalogue entry, therefore, places the ballad no later than the sixth century and quite possibly earlier, per the standard textual history. The form, in five-character lines, narrative, set in the voice of the heroine, is that of the yuefu, a genre of folk-derived poems that the imperial court collected, edited, and sometimes performed from the Han dynasty onwards. The yuefu were the popular song tradition of imperial China.

The poem runs to sixty-two lines in its standard form, or 392 Chinese characters, and is sometimes given in a shorter cut, depending on the manuscript tradition. The voice is plain and unaffected. The language is the language of a frontier soldier rather than a court poet. The metaphors are domestic rather than martial. Mulan sits at her loom and sighs. She hears the army’s recruitment notices being read out, looks at her father’s name on the conscription list, and looks at her elder brother, who is too young to carry arms. She goes to the market to buy a saddle and a horse, and serves in her father’s place. She serves for twelve years without being detected, in part because, the ballad suggests, the frontier army is not the place where soldiers ask each other about their childhoods. The Khan offers her a high office. She refuses it, asks only to be sent home, and when she arrives at her village she pulls off her armour and puts on a woman’s dress, rouged her face, and pinned her hair. Her army companions, on hearing the news, are aghast.

The poem ends with the famous couplet. It is doing more rhetorical work than appears on the surface. The poem has refused, throughout, to specify Mulan’s era, her home, or the war. It has refused to give her a surname. The closing couplet extends the refusal: it asks the reader to recognise that the apparent distinction between male and female is exactly that, apparent, and that the war the heroine has fought in has been, in some sense, fought against the categories. The Khan’s empire, the poem suggests, does not notice. The frontier does not notice. Only the household notices, and even there the notice is one of admiration rather than scandal.

There is no love interest in the original ballad. There is no imperial villain. There is no dragon. The only named figure in the ballad is the Khan, and the Khan is referred to obliquely rather than characterised. The moral weight of the ballad sits entirely with the heroine, with her father, and with the unnamed household that the heroine returns to at the end. The filial daughter, the obedient soldier, the woman who serves and is recognised, the household that welcomes her home: these are the four characters of the ballad. The first three are Mulan. The fourth is everyone else.

A frontier setting: the Khan, the Northern Wei, and the meaning of 木兰

The setting of the ballad has been the subject of scholarly argument for more than a thousand years. The single most important piece of internal evidence is the title given to the ruler the heroine serves. The poem calls him the 可汗, the Khan, a Turkic-Mongolic title of the steppe rather than a Chinese dynastic title. The Khan title was the standard way of referring to the ruler of the Northern Wei dynasty in Chinese literature of the period, because the Northern Wei, which lasted from 386 to 535 CE, was a dynasty founded and ruled by the Tuoba branch of the Xianbei, a steppe people who had moved south into the Chinese heartland in the fourth century. The Northern Wei was, in effect, a steppe empire that had Sinicised itself; the imperial capital was moved from Pingcheng in modern Shanxi to Luoyang in modern Henan in 494 CE, and the dynasty was actively promoting intermarriage and the adoption of Chinese dress and surnames by the 480s. The early sixth century, when the ballad was being sung, was the moment of this transition.

If the Khan of the ballad is a Northern Wei emperor, then the army Mulan serves in is a frontier army of the steppe-Chinese borderlands, and the war she fights in is one of the long-running campaigns of the Northern Wei against the Rouran khaganate, the Gaoche, or some other Inner Asian enemy. The war is not specified in the poem because it was not specified in the song, and the song presumably did not specify it because the song was a folk song rather than a court record. The household that the heroine returns to is a household on the frontier, in a place where women of fighting age might plausibly be needed in time of war.

The name 木兰 itself is unusual. Chinese given names are almost always two characters, and 木兰 is two characters, but the second, 兰, is the name of an orchid, and the first, 木, is a tree; the combination has the feel of a plant name, a flower name, or a name drawn from a plant. 木兰 today is the Chinese name of the magnolia, literally “wood orchid”. Some scholars have argued that 木兰 is not a personal name at all but a folkloric name, the kind of stock name given to a young woman in a folk song, in the same way that a John Doe in an English folk song is a generic young man. That reading is consistent with the absence of a surname in the original ballad. Later versions of the legend do give her a surname: the Tang dynasty tradition gives her the surname Wei, 魏, the same character as the Northern Wei dynasty; the Ming dramatic tradition gives her the surname Hua, 花, the name by which she is most commonly known in Chinese, 花木兰, Hua Mulan. The folkloric name came first; the Chinese-sounding personal name came later.

The problem of the historical Mulan

The historical existence of a Mulan has been a question at least since the Tang dynasty. The earliest external mention of the ballad in a non-literary source is a brief notice in the Wei Shu, the History of the Northern Wei, completed in 554 CE by Wei Shou, which refers to a Mulan who is associated with the Yanmen frontier in modern Shanxi. This Mulan is said to have been a follower of the Xianbei, and the notice is too short to be the basis for any confident identification with the heroine of the ballad.

The earliest substantial historical claim about a real Mulan is in a Tang dynasty work, the Xiangyang Qijiu Zhuan, a collection of biographies of eminent men and women of Xiangyang, which is mostly lost but is quoted in later sources. The Tang dynasty Mulan is a frontier woman who fights for twelve years, refuses the Khan’s honours, and dies at home without telling anyone that she was a woman until the end. Subsequent dynastic histories and local gazetteers preserve versions of the story that variously place her in Yanmen in Shanxi, in Hua prefecture in modern Anhui, in Shangcai in Henan, and in several other locations. Each of these places now has a 木兰祠, Mulan Temple, a 木兰墓, Mulan’s Grave, or a 木兰故里, Mulan’s Hometown, and each is, in effect, a folk tradition of a Mulan that has accreted over many centuries. The Mulan hometown industry, as one might call it, is a small but durable example of the late imperial Chinese practice of using the prestige of a folk hero to claim a place on the map.

The safest scholarly view is that the ballad is genuine sixth century folk material, that the heroine of the ballad is a folkloric character rather than a historical person, and that the various historical Mulan traditions are retrojections from later centuries, with local elites adopting the legend for the prestige it conferred. The ballad itself is the strongest piece of evidence. The poem is too plain, too short, and too specific in its detail about household work and army routine to be a courtly composition. It is a folk song that has been written down. The surname Wei, the temple traditions, the local gazetteers, and the legend of the historical Mulan are the work of later generations trying to give the folk song a place in the world.

The Southern Mulan and the cult of Hua Mulan

From the Tang dynasty onwards, the Mulan legend splits into two distinct traditions. The Northern tradition, which is the tradition of the original ballad and of the Shanxi and Henan cults, treats Mulan as a frontier woman, a soldier, and a figure of filial piety. The Southern tradition, which begins in the Sui and Tang and matures in the Song and Yuan, treats Mulan as a figure of the Chinese south, of Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan, and Anhui, and embroiders her story with a love interest, a loyal companion, and the comic misunderstandings that are characteristic of the late imperial Chinese romance.

The Southern tradition is the source of the most elaborate early versions of the story. The Sui dynasty poet Yang Jiong, who lived from 650 to about 695, wrote a 木兰歌, Song of Mulan, in which the heroine is given a more courtly setting, a more specific army, and a more elaborate refusal of the Khan’s honours. The Tang dynasty 木兰辞, Ballad of Mulan, attributed to Wei Yuanfu, which survives only in fragments, is the first to give Mulan a surname, Wei, and to add a more detailed account of her return home. By the Yuan dynasty there was a 木兰女, The Woman Mulan, play, now lost, that is the earliest known dramatic version.

The Southern tradition is, in short, the tradition that prepares the Mulan legend for the stage and for popular literature. The Northern tradition retains the ballad’s austerity, but the Southern tradition is the one that makes Mulan a character who can be performed. The Southern Mulan is, in this sense, the Mulan of the theatre; the Northern Mulan is the Mulan of the school text.

The Ming transformations: drama, novel, and the new surname

It is in the Ming dynasty that the Mulan legend assumes its modern Chinese form. The Ming is the dynasty of the great Chinese dramatic and fictional forms, the chuanqi play, the kunqu opera, the zaju, and the long vernacular novel, and the Mulan story was taken up by all three. The late Ming saw at least three plays on the Mulan theme, in kunqu and other southern operatic forms. The most substantial surviving play, 木兰女, The Woman Mulan, is attributed in different sources to late Yuan or early Ming playwrights and runs to several dozen scenes. The play follows the ballad closely in its opening scenes but elaborates the romance, the cross-dressing comedy, and the climactic revelation at home in ways that the ballad does not. The Ming playwrights are also the first to give Mulan a surname in dramatic form: Hua, 花.

The origin of the Hua surname is best explained as a folk-etymological one. The 木兰 in the ballad reads as a single name; the Ming playwrights wanted a name that read like a Chinese personal name, and they broke the name into the surname 木, Mu, or 花, Hua, and the given name 兰, Lan. The choice of 花 over 木 is consistent with the character of the Ming period’s dramatic imagination: 花, which means “flower”, is more poetically suggestive for a young woman in a play. There is also a Ming folk story that Mulan came from a village called 花 or that her family name was changed to 花 by imperial decree after her return, but the story is not in the ballad and not in any reliable historical source. The dramatic tradition is what did the work of turning 木兰 into 花木兰.

The Ming versions also introduced a second character who would become standard in later retellings: the loyal companion. In some Ming plays this is a fellow soldier who is sworn-brother to Mulan; in others it is a romantic interest; in still others it is both. The dramatic tradition needed a male lead, and the ballad, which has no male lead, did not provide one. The figure who would become the standard male lead of later retellings, the army companion who eventually discovers that the heroine is a woman, is in this sense a Ming invention. The love story that the Ming plays added to the legend is also, in this sense, a Ming invention. The ballad, in short, did not have a love story. The love story was added by Ming dramatists who thought a love story was what the story needed.

The Ming dramatic tradition also standardised the Mulan cult. The Ming is the period in which 木兰祠, Mulan Temples, and 木兰故里, Mulan Hometown, sites began to be established in multiple provinces, in the kind of competitive place-making that characterises late imperial Chinese local state. By the Qing dynasty the Mulan cult had temples in Shanxi, Henan, Anhui, Hubei, and Hunan, and the ballad was a standard text in the primers used to teach children to read. The Mulan of the late imperial period was, in this sense, both a literary character and a local goddess, a figure of filial piety honoured in temples and a figure of stage entertainment performed in theatres.

The twentieth-century revivals: opera, film, and the national heroine

The twentieth century saw the Mulan legend reanimated three times. The first was the literary revival. The Ballad of Mulan returned to a central place in the Chinese literary curriculum in the Republican period, and the editorial work of the May Fourth intellectuals turned the poem into a foundational text of modern Chinese national literature. Hu Shi, in his 1919 essay on the new woman, cited Mulan as an example of the traditional Chinese woman of action; Lu Xun cited her as an example of the silent and unrewarded heroism of the Chinese past. By the 1930s the ballad was in every Chinese literature textbook.

The second reanimation was the operatic and filmic one. In 1939, in the early years of the war of resistance against Japan, the Peking opera star Mei Lanfang filmed a version of 木兰从军, Mulan Joins the Army, in Shanghai. Mei Lanfang was the most famous Peking opera actor in China, and he was a dan actor, a man who specialised in playing female roles. His 木兰从军 was a filmed record of his stage performance, and it was a sensation, as the standard histories record. The film was a national allegory as much as a costume drama: Mulan, taking her father’s place in the army, was a figure for the Chinese nation taking up arms against the Japanese, and the cross-dressing heroine was a figure for the Chinese people, who had to set aside their peacetime selves to fight the war. The film ran for weeks in Chinese cinemas in 1939 and 1940, and the imagery of Mulan in armour, on horseback, was widely reproduced in wartime propaganda. The 1939 Mulan is, in this sense, the moment at which the legend became a national symbol rather than a folk story.

The third reanimation was the Communist one. From the 1940s onwards the Mulan story was an important figure in the new Chinese nationalist culture. The People’s Republic treated Mulan as a national heroine and incorporated her into the standard school literature curriculum, where she has been ever since. The Chinese cinema of the 1950s and 1960s produced several Mulan films, the most notable being the 1963 木兰从军, a mainland Chinese opera film. By the 1980s the Mulan story was one of the best-known Chinese folk tales in the world of Chinese readers, and the ballad was a fixture of every Chinese middle-school Chinese literature textbook, where it remains today.

Disney’s 1998 animated Mulan

The first international adaptation of the Mulan story in the modern media age was Disney’s animated Mulan, released in the United States on 19 June 1998. The film was the eighth film of the Disney Renaissance, the sequence of critically and commercially successful Disney animated features that ran from The Little Mermaid in 1989 to Tarzan in 1999, and the first Disney animated feature with a Chinese setting and a Chinese heroine. It was produced during the same period that gave Disney The Lion King, Pocahontas, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

The film was directed by Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook, with a screenplay credited to Rita Hsiao and three collaborators. The voice cast was led by Ming-Na Wen as Mulan, and by Eddie Murphy as the voice of Mushu, the dragon. The musical score was by Jerry Goldsmith; the songs were by Matthew Wilder and David Zippel. The film is set in an unnamed imperial China that the production team conceived of as Han dynasty Chinese, with elements drawn freely from the Tang and Ming dynasties, with no claim to historical accuracy.

The plot of the 1998 Mulan follows the ballad at a high level but departs from it in important ways. The ballad’s frontier soldier has been transformed into a daughter who is mocked by the matchmaker for being too tomboyish to make a good wife. The Khan of the ballad is now the Emperor of China. The father is now a one-legged veteran of an earlier war. The villain is now Shan Yu, a generic steppe conqueror modelled in part on Attila the Hun. The cross-dressing is now a comedic subplot. The love interest is now a young captain, Li Shang, who eventually discovers that the heroine is a woman and falls in love with her. Mushu, the dragon, played for comic relief by Eddie Murphy, is a wholly new character with no analogue in the ballad. The film’s signature songs, “Reflection” and “I’ll Make a Man Out of You”, have no analogue in the ballad either.

The film earned about $304 million at the worldwide box office, per Box Office Mojo, which made it a moderate success for Disney, well below the studio’s biggest hits of the period but above the cost of production. The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song, for “Reflection”, and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Score. The critical reception was largely positive: the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times both praised the film’s strong central character and the work of the voice cast. The film was criticised in some Western reviews for the supporting characterisation, especially the comic-relief ancestors, and in some Asian and Asian-American reviews for its handling of Chinese culture, with commentators noting that the film is less an adaptation of a Chinese folk tale than a Disney princess film set in a vaguely Chinese world.

The 1998 Mulan was followed in 2004 by a direct-to-video sequel, Mulan II, in which Mulan and Li Shang prepare to marry and are sent on a diplomatic mission to a neighbouring kingdom. The sequel was not as well received as the original. The franchise was also extended into Disney theme parks, with a Mulan attraction at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida and a Mulan meet-and-greet at the Disneyland park in California. The 1998 Mulan remains the principal work of the franchise, and the standard reference for what “Disney’s Mulan” means.

The Chinese renaissance: TV, film, and the martial arts Mulan

While Disney was making its animated Mulan, the Chinese television and film industries were also revisiting the legend. In 1999, the year after the Disney animated film, the state broadcaster CCTV produced a thirty-episode television series, 花木蘭, Hua Mulan, which was also broadcast on TVB Jade in Hong Kong. The series was a costume drama, with the Hong Kong actress Anita Yuen in the title role, and it was followed in 2000 by a mainland sequel, 花木蘭 II, Hua Mulan II. The 1999 TV series is interesting as an example of how a Chinese state broadcaster treated the legend in the same year that Disney released its very different Mulan.

In 2009 the Mandarin Films studio released a feature film, 花木蘭, Mulan, directed by Ma Chu-cheng and starring Vicki Zhao in the title role, with Nicky Wu as the love interest, Sun Li as a fellow soldier, and Jaycee Chan as the villain. The film draws on a different set of influences from the Disney film: the Chinese wuxia tradition, the Shaw Brothers studio’s martial arts films, and the contemporary Chinese blockbuster aesthetic. The film’s plot is closer to the ballad than Disney’s 1998 film is: there is no dragon, no comic ancestors, and the heroine’s cross-dressing is presented as a serious problem rather than a comic device. But the love interest, the villain, and the elaborate battle sequences are all additions to the ballad. The 2009 Mulan was a moderate commercial success in mainland China, where it was released in November 2009 and earned tens of millions of yuan at the box office, and it was the most expensive Chinese-language film of its year. It was not, however, a critical success, and the reviews in the Chinese press were mixed.

The Chinese Mulan renaissance of the 2000s also produced a number of stage adaptations, including a 2008 Beijing opera production and a 2010 jingju, Peking opera, production, both of which were based on the 1939 Mei Lanfang staging. The Beijing musical 木兰, Mulan, produced by the National Centre for the Performing Arts in 2019 and 2020, was a major new stage adaptation that has been touring China and abroad since then. The musical is in many ways the most ambitious Chinese-language stage Mulan to date, with a score by the composer Qian Yi, a libretto by the playwright Zou Jingzhi, and a substantial production with a full orchestra and a large ensemble. The musical draws on the ballad, on the Ming dramatic tradition, and on the contemporary Chinese musical theatre aesthetic, and it is the Chinese stage’s principal response to the Disney versions of the legend.

Disney’s 2020 live-action Mulan

The second major Disney adaptation of the Mulan story was a live-action feature, released in September 2020. The film was directed by the New Zealand-born director Niki Caro, who had previously directed Whale Rider in 2002, and it starred Liu Yifei, also known as Crystal Liu, in the title role, with Donnie Yen as Commander Tung, Jet Li as the Emperor, and Gong Li as Xianniang, a witch. The film was shot in New Zealand and in China, with a budget of around $200 million, which made it one of the most expensive live-action Disney remakes, per the standard production history.

The release schedule of the 2020 Mulan was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The film was released on 4 September 2020 on Disney+ as a premium video-on-demand rental, at $29.99 above the standard subscription price, and it was released theatrically on 11 September 2020 in mainland China. The film earned about $66 to $70 million worldwide at the box office, per Box Office Mojo, well below Disney’s expectations. The film was the subject of significant pre-release controversy, in three principal areas.

The first controversy was Liu Yifei’s 2019 social media post in support of the Hong Kong police. The post was widely shared by Chinese state media in 2019 and widely criticised by pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, and it became a focal point for the diaspora boycott movement that had grown around the Hong Kong protests. A number of Western and Chinese-language diaspora critics called for a boycott of the film on the grounds of Liu Yifei’s political stance. The boycott was small in commercial terms but loud in symbolic terms, and it set the political tone for the film’s reception in the West.

The second controversy was the film’s shooting in Xinjiang. The film’s credits include a “Special Thanks” to the publicity department of the Chinese Communist Party’s Turpan Municipal Committee and to other Xinjiang authorities, and these credits were read as a tacit endorsement by Disney of the Chinese state’s treatment of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang. The credits were widely criticised in the Western press and in the Uyghur diaspora, including in a Human Rights Watch report on the subject.

The third controversy was the reception of the film in mainland China. The Chinese-language critical reception was mixed to negative, with several leading critics and reviewers writing that the film was visually impressive but dramatically flat, that it had lost the comedic energy of the 1998 animated version, and that it had, paradoxically, made the Mulan story more Chinese in surface detail and less Chinese in dramatic substance. The Chinese film review site Douban gave the film a rating of about 4.7 out of 10, low for a major studio release in China, and the Chinese box office was below Disney’s expectations.

The critical reception in the West was also mixed. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times both gave the film mixed reviews, and the film was widely criticised in the press for the loss of the dragon Mushu, the loss of the songs, and the loss of the comedic energy of the 1998 animated version. Disney has not, since 2020, announced a sequel to the live-action Mulan, and the franchise is in a holding pattern. The 2020 Mulan is, in this sense, the most troubled of the major Mulan adaptations: a film that did not satisfy Chinese viewers, did not satisfy Western critics, and did not satisfy diaspora audiences, all for different reasons.

Other modern adaptations: stage, animation, and games

The 2010s and 2020s have seen a substantial expansion of Mulan adaptations beyond the Disney versions. The 2020 木兰：横空出世, Mulan: The Rise of a Hero, a Chinese animated film released in October 2020, was an explicit competitor to Disney’s live-action Mulan. The film was produced by the Chinese animation studio 功夫动漫, Kungfu Animation, and released in Chinese cinemas in October 2020, where it performed poorly against the Disney film. The Chinese animated Mulan is a useful example of the dynamics of the Chinese film industry in the 2010s: the Chinese state had begun to fund Chinese animated films as a strategic response to Disney’s dominance of the global animation market, and the Mulan story was an obvious target.

The stage musical tradition has continued to expand. The 2019 Beijing musical 木兰, produced by the National Centre for the Performing Arts, was followed in 2022 by a touring production that played in cities across China. The musical draws on the ballad, the Ming dramatic tradition, and the contemporary Chinese musical theatre aesthetic, with a score by the composer Qian Yi that incorporates Chinese folk music, the Peking opera tradition, and the Western musical theatre tradition.

The Mulan story has also been a consistent presence in the video game industry. The Dynasty Warriors, 真·三國無雙, series, produced by the Japanese company Koei Tecmo, has included Mulan as a playable character since Dynasty Warriors 3 in 2001. Mulan is a popular character in the Dynasty Warriors games, with a high-mobility fighting style that draws on the wuxia tradition, and she is one of the few non-historical characters in a game series that otherwise draws on the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history. Mulan also appears in the fighting game Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds, released in 2011, and in a number of Chinese mobile games. In the video game tradition Mulan is usually presented as a strong and independent warrior woman without a romantic subplot, in a way that is closer to the ballad than to the Disney versions.

The Mulan story has also appeared in a number of literary works in the West. The Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston‘s 1976 memoir The Woman Warrior includes a section called “White Tigers”, in which the narrator’s mother tells her a version of the Mulan story as a model for the Chinese-American woman of the late twentieth century. Kingston’s Mulan is a figure of the bicultural identity, and her version of the legend is one of the first Western literary appropriations of the Mulan story. There are also a number of children’s books and graphic novel adaptations. The Western literary Mulan is, in this sense, a figure of feminist and bicultural identity rather than a figure of Chinese national culture.

Mulan as a cultural symbol: feminism, nationalism, diaspora

The Mulan story has been used, in the last fifty years, as a symbol of three different but related political projects. The first is the Chinese national project. From the 1930s, when the Mei Lanfang stage Mulan became a national allegory of Chinese resistance to the Japanese, through the Communist period, when the ballad became a fixture of the school literature curriculum, to the 2010s, when the Chinese state funded a Mulan animated film as a strategic response to Disney, the Mulan story has been an important resource for Chinese national self-representation. The Mulan of the Chinese national tradition is a filial daughter, a national hero, and a moral exemplar.

The second is the Western feminist project. The ballad’s closing couplet has been read, since the 1970s, as a proto-feminist statement. The reading is not without its problems, since the couplet is doing more rhetorical work in the original Chinese than a straight feminist declaration, but the reading has been enormously influential. The Mulan of the Western feminist tradition is a figure of female agency, of gender as a performance, and of the way in which the institutions of war and state can be bent to female ends. The 1998 Disney Mulan was, in this sense, a useful text for the Western feminist tradition: it gave the tradition a popular icon and gave the tradition’s reading of the ballad a mass-audience vehicle.

The third is the Chinese diaspora project. The Mulan story has been an important figure for the Chinese diaspora, particularly the Chinese-American and Chinese-British diasporas, in part because the story of a daughter who leaves home, goes to a foreign place, performs heroic acts there, and returns home in triumph lends itself to diasporic identification. Maxine Hong Kingston’s appropriation of the Mulan story in The Woman Warrior is a key text in this tradition. The 2020 live-action Mulan, with its casting of Liu Yifei, who had been raised in the United States, was a more complicated symbol for the Chinese diaspora, and the boycott campaign around the film was largely a diaspora campaign. The 2020 Mulan is, in this sense, the moment at which the diaspora reading of the legend became politically active.

The three projects overlap, and they are not always compatible. The 1998 Disney Mulan was welcomed by the Chinese diaspora as a moment of mainstream visibility and criticised by the Chinese state for its handling of Chinese culture. The 2020 Disney Mulan was welcomed by the Chinese state as a recognition of Chinese cinema and criticised by the diaspora for its handling of Hong Kong and Xinjiang. The legend’s openness, which is what has allowed it to be claimed by so many, is also what has made it a flashpoint in the cultural politics of the early twenty-first century.

Conclusion

The Mulan story has travelled a long way from the sixth century folk song of the Northern Wei frontier. It has been a folk ballad, a Tang dynasty legend, a Ming dynasty dramatic tradition, a Qing dynasty folk cult, a Republican era national allegory, a Communist era school text, a Disney animated film, a Beijing musical, a video game character, a flashpoint in the cultural politics of the Hong Kong protests, and a strategic asset of the Chinese animation industry. The Mulan of the original ballad is a young woman of the frontier, a soldier, a daughter who has served her father, a hero who has served her Khan, and a figure who has refused, in the closing couplet, to be defined by any of these. The Mulan of the Disney animated film is a tomboy who becomes a soldier and a love interest. The Mulan of the 2020 Disney live-action film is a martial arts warrior who is tested by a witch. The Mulan of the Beijing musical is a Chinese national heroine. The Mulan of the video game is a fast-moving warrior woman. The Mulan of the Chinese diaspora is a figure of bicultural identity.

All of these are legitimate readings of the original ballad. The ballad is short, plain, and refuses to specify its era, its setting, or its heroine’s name. It is an unusually open folk text, and the openness is what has allowed it to be claimed by so many different constituencies over so many centuries. The closing couplet is one of the most quoted lines in Chinese literature for a reason: it is a more effective way of saying what it says than any number of more explicit statements would be. The ballad’s claim is the claim that gender is performance and that performance is, in some sense, all there is. It is a claim that resonates, for different reasons, with the Chinese national tradition, the Western feminist tradition, and the Chinese diaspora tradition. It is the claim that has kept the ballad alive for fifteen hundred years, and that will, in all likelihood, keep it alive for fifteen hundred more.

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