Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages. Sanping Chen
her yellow combs.
She left the house and met her messmates in the road;
Her messmates were startled out of their wits.
They had marched with her for twelve years of war
And never known that Mulan was a girl!
For the male hare has a lilting, lolloping gait,
And the female hare has a wild and roving eye;
But set them both scampering side by side,
And who so wise could tell you “This is he”?1
On January 23, 1999, the Associated Press reported from Istanbul, in an article titled “Turkey Nationalists Protest ‘Mulan,’” that a Turkish nationalist party wanted to ban the Disney movie Mulan in Turkey, claiming, “This animated film distorts and blackens the history of the Turks by showing the Huns as bad and the Chinese as peace-lovers.”
As this chapter demonstrates, it is ironic that the very name of the heroine Mulan, much less the cultural background of the legend on which the Disney film was based, was not even Sinitic or Hàn Chinese to start with, but came from a nomadic and Turco-Mongol milieu. Furthermore, as the title of this chapter suggests, the true meaning of the name Mulan may turn out to be very close to that of another popular figure in animated cartoons. These facts are in addition to another, perhaps bigger, irony—namely that the dominating “Chinese” of the Mulan story were none other than the Tuoba, a Turkic group according to some linguists, ancient as well as modern.
The Name Mulan
The Mulan story comes almost entirely from a folk ballad, “The Ballad of Mulan,” of unknown origin and time, but generally believed to be of the Tuoba Wei (the Late or Northern Wei, 386–534) era. Parts of the poem, especially the following six lines, show traces of literati refinement of later periods, hence the speculation that the poem may also be from the time of the Tang dynasty (618–907):
A thousand leagues she tramped on the errands of war,
Frontiers and hills she crossed like a bird in flight.
Through the northern air echoed the watchman's tap;
The wintry light gleamed on coats of mail.
The captain had fought a hundred fights, and died;
The warriors in ten years had won their rest.
But this self-imposed controversy about the exact date of the poem would seem not only a moot issue but also largely a sinocentric idiosyncrasy from a “nomadic perspective,” because as examined in the previous chapter, both the Sui and Tang houses were the Tuoba's political and biological heirs and were called Tuoba/Tabγach by contemporary nomadic people. The problem of dating is therefore of little interest to the present discussion.
The background of the poem was clearly the wars between the Tuoba/Tabγach and their former nomadic brethren, most likely the Ruanruan (Juanjuan, Rouran), who remained on the Steppe. As Victor Mair has commented, even the ballad itself may be “first conceived in one of the languages of that land of nomads.”2 The Ruanruan was often identified as the same as, or closely related to, the Avar people in Western sources. This group would later become the oppressors and foes of the early Türks. Therefore, if we take the view that linguistically the Tuoba represented a so-called l/r Turkic language (versus the majority of Turkic tongues belonging to the s/z group),3 the Mulan story would become part of the general conflict between the Ruanruan, widely believed to be a proto-Mongol people, on one side, and the “Chinese” and early “Türks” on the other side. This would make the claim that the Mulan story was against the ancient Türks a true irony.
Incidentally, as discussed in the previous chapter, the Mulan story also reflects Steppe women's traditionally strong social role, something not unnoticed in Chinese historiography. It was, furthermore, not at all uncommon for the women of many Steppe groups to go into battle along with their menfolk.
In the poem, a girl named Mulan disguises herself as a man to serve in the military in her father's place when the Qaghan/Son of Heaven mobilizes his army to fight the enemy in the north, because, as the poem says, “My father's sons are not grown men / And of all my brothers, none is older than me.” After having served in the north for many years, she is offered a high government post by the Qaghan/Son of Heaven. She turns down the offer in favor of going home and living a peaceful life with her family. After she returns home, she puts back on her lady's clothes and shocks her fellow soldiers, who didn't know that she was a woman during the time on the battlefield.
It is of particular interest to note that in the poem the “Son of Heaven” was referred to repeatedly as kehan or Qaghan, but never the authentic Chinese epithet huangdi, “emperor.” Given that it was originally a folk ballad, the usage demonstrates that at the time even ordinary Chinese-speaking folk in northern China were addressing the emperor as qaghan, an interesting custom hardly noticeable from reading the official historiography. But this observation is supported by the rediscovered inscription of 443 at the Tuoba ancestral cavern that used the same royal epithet qaghan, not the authentic Chinese title huangdi. In addition, it also testifies to the avoidance of the official Chinese term huangdi for “emperor” by the Northern rulers of the epoch, which supports my thesis that the Steppe heritage of sacral kingship was not simply a copy of the Chinese counterpart, a topic examined in a later chapter.
The focus of this chapter is the name of the famous heroine, Mulan, as she is called in the poem. This name has presented a perennial controversy regarding what it represented: a family name, a given name, or both? The Disney movie adopted the folk belief that Mulan was a given name, of someone surnamed Hua (“flower,” Cantonese pronunciation fa, as adopted by the Disney movie). This popular belief has little historical substantiation and comes very likely from the mere fact that mulan in standard Chinese stands for some fragrant flower plant. The great ancient poet Qu Yuan (ca. 340 to ca. 278 BC) in his immortal poetic autobiography Lisao (Encountering Sorrow) first introduced this plant name, which has since figured prominently in numerous literary works. Many people interpret it as representing magnolia, or magnolia liliiflora, the term prevailing modern meaning, but the true scientific identity or identities of this ancient plant name have remained a controversy.
This fact, namely that mulan in literary Chinese traditionally means a gentle, pure, fragrant, and delicate flowering plant, becomes the starting point of my study. As such, and in addition to the long influence of “The Ballad of Mulan,” the notion that Mulan is intrinsically a feminine name is beyond any doubt in China today.
I go further to observe that the character lan by itself has traditionally been a popular choice for naming girls in China, when used in its original general meaning of “fragrant plant,” covering a wide variety of species ranging from orchid and cymbidium to magnolia.4 The earliest example was perhaps the name Lanzhi, “sweet grass,” in the folk ballad “Southward Flies the Peacock,”5 presumably based on a true Romeo and Juliet tragedy in the Jian'an era (196–220) of the Later Hàn (25–220; also known as the Eastern Hàn). The popularity of this female name is attested in a Western Jin tomb inscription dated the twenty-fifth day of the fourth month of the first year of Yongkang (May 29, 300), of a concubine, née Zuo, of the first emperor of the dynasty.6 Similar female -lan names were attested in tomb inscription data of the Tuoba Wei era too.
In other words, it can be argued that in a typical Chinese milieu during medieval times, let alone the modern era, a given name like Mulan would be very likely regarded as a feminine name. But this was apparently not the case in the milieu in which the Mulan story first emerged. “The Ballad of Mulan” states unmistakably that, after Mulan has revealed her true gender,
She left the house and met her messmates in the road;
Her messmates were startled out of their wits.
They had marched with her for twelve years of war
And never known that Mulan was a girl!
This scenario would have been hard to explain