Hua Mulan, heroine of the Ballad of Mulan

The story of Hua Mulan (花木兰) comes from an anonymous poem, the Ballad of Mulan (木兰辞, also called 木兰诗). This is what it tells, in the text given by the Yuefu shiji anthology:

• Mulan sighs at her loom. The night before, she saw the call-up notices: the khan is raising an army, and on each of the twelve scrolls is her father's name. He has no grown son, she has no elder brother: she will go in his place;

• she buys a horse at the east market, a saddle at the west market, a bridle at the south market and a long whip at the north market;

• in the morning she leaves her parents; at night she camps by the Yellow River, then reaches the Black Mountain, where all she hears is the horses of the barbarian riders of the Yan mountains;

• the war is long: generals die after a hundred battles, and the brave come home after ten years;

• the Son of Heaven receives the soldiers and offers Mulan a high post at court. She refuses: all she asks for is a fast mount to take her home;

• her family welcomes her. She takes off her battle dress, does her hair and adorns herself at the mirror. Her comrades in arms are astonished: in twelve years together, they never noticed that Mulan was a woman.

The ballad gives no date or place, but several clues put it in north China under the Northern Dynasties. The ruler is called both "Son of Heaven" (天子), the Chinese title, and "khan" (可汗), the title of the steppe peoples' leaders. The emperors of the Northern Wei (北魏, 386-535), a dynasty founded by the Tuoba clan of the Xianbei (鲜卑) people, bore both titles.

The places named point the same way. The Black Mountain (黑山) is identified with a mountain southeast of today's Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, not far from the Yellow River, and the Yan mountains (燕山) with the Yanran mountains, today's Khangai range in Mongolia. In 429, according to the official history of the Wei, Emperor Taiwu led a campaign against the Rouran (柔然), a nomadic empire of the north, by way of the Black Mountain and on beyond the Yanran mountains. The ballad is therefore usually set in the wars between the Northern Wei and the Rouran.

Nobody knows whether Mulan really existed, or even whether she was Chinese: some think she may have been Xianbei, and that her name came from a word in a steppe language.

The earliest known mention of the ballad was in the Gujin yuelu (古今乐录, "Notes on Music Old and New"), compiled in the 6th century, under the Chen dynasty, by the monk Zhijiang (智匠). That book is lost. The text has come down to us through the Yuefu shiji (乐府诗集), the great anthology of sung poems compiled under the Song by Guo Maoqian (郭茂倩), who names the Gujin yuelu as his source.

Guo Maoqian files the ballad among the "Liang drum-and-horn songs" (梁鼓角横吹曲). These were military tunes that the northern peoples played on horseback, with drums and horns, and that the music bureau of the Liang dynasty had collected. A note in the anthology admits that no one knows from which era the Mulan song dates. It is followed by a second Mulan poem, which ends by praising her loyalty and filial piety.

The date is still debated. The note attributed to the Gujin yuelu names a Tang official, Wei Yuanfu (韦元甫), who is said to have "added" something, though it is not clear what; under the Song, one work credits him with the poem and others also make its author a Tang writer. But according to Chinese Wikipedia, most scholars today see it as a folk song of the Northern Dynasties, perhaps polished by Tang literati.

The ballad ends on an image, spoken by Mulan herself. The buck hare's feet are restless, the doe's eyes are blurred; but when the two hares run side by side, who could tell whether I am male or female? In other words, after twelve years on the march together, nobody could guess that Mulan was a woman.

The idiom 扑朔迷离 comes from these lines, made of the two words that describe the hares. As early as the Southern Song, a large encyclopedia, the Jinxiu wanhua gu (锦绣万花谷), gives it an entry of its own, citing the "Mulan song" as its source.

Today the idiom is no longer about hares. It describes something muddled and hard to untangle: a dictionary published on Wikisource lists it among the near-synonyms of 模糊, "blurred, unclear". For a learner of Chinese it is an example of a four-character expression whose image comes from an old text.

In the ballad the heroine is only called Mulan (木兰), with no family name. The surname Hua (花, "flower") was given to her under the Ming by the painter, poet and playwright Xu Wei (徐渭, 1521-1593), in his play The Female Mulan Joins the Army in Place of Her Father (雌木兰替父从军), one of his Four Cries of a Gibbon (四声猿): the heroine introduces herself there as "Hua Mulan". The name stuck; according to English Wikipedia, partly because it is poetic and goes well with Mulan, which means magnolia.

Other local traditions give her other surnames, Zhu (朱) or Wei (魏), and several towns and provinces claim to be her home. In the 17th century Chu Renhuo's (褚人获) novel Romance of the Sui and Tang (隋唐演义) sets her at the founding of the Tang and has her serve in the army of a Turkic khan; English Wikipedia notes that it invents a tragic end for her, found in no earlier story.

In the 20th century Mulan became a film heroine. In 1939, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, director Bu Wancang (卜万苍) made Mulan Joins the Army (木兰从军), written by Ouyang Yuqian.

In 1998 Disney made an animated feature, Mulan, directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft. The heroine is called Fa Mulan there: Fa is the Cantonese pronunciation of 花. The enemy is a Hun (Xiongnu) invasion. Released in the United States on 19 June 1998, the film grossed $304 million worldwide.

In 2020 Disney released a live-action version directed by Niki Caro, with Liu Yifei (刘亦菲) in the title role; the enemy there is the Rouran, as in the wars the ballad is usually linked to. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic it came out on 4 September 2020 on Disney+ where the service existed and in cinemas elsewhere. It drew several controversies, notably over the changes to the story and over filming partly in Xinjiang amid the persecution of the Uyghurs, and it received unfavourable reviews from Chinese critics.