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This article is about a person named Hua Mulan who might be historical or fictional. See "Mulan" for the Disney film based on this person.

Hua Mulan (simplified Chinese: 花木兰; traditional Chinese: 花木蘭; pinyin: Huā Mùlán) is the heroine who joined an all-male army described in a famous Chinese poem known as the Mulan Poem. The poem was first written in the Musical Records of Old and New from the 6th century, the work is no longer extant, and the existent text of this poem comes from another work known as the Music Bureau Collection, an anthology of lyrics, songs, and poems, compiled by Guo Maoqian during the 12th century. The author explicitly mentions the Musical Records of Old and New as his source for the poem. Whether she was a historical person or whether the poem was an allegory has been debated through centuries. One thing for certain is that her original identity is lost forever. (It could have been simply from some peasant chanting away about the story of the heroine.)

Overview

In the story, Mulan disguised herself as a man to take her elderly father's place in the army. She disguised herself as a soldier and was offered a government post by the emperor himself after her service was up. She turned down the position to return to her family. Later, when her former comrades visited her at home, they were shocked to see her dressed as a woman.

The story was expanded into a novel during the late Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). On June 5, 1998, Disney released an animated movie entitled Mulan loosely based on the story.

Name

The word "mulan" means "magnolia." ("Mu" by itself means "wood" and "Lan" means "orchid"). The heroine of the poem is given many different family names in the various versions of her story. According to History of the Ming, her family name is Zhu, while the History of the Qing say it is Wei. The Ballad of Mulan gives her family name to be Mu. The Ming scholar Xu Wei offers yet another alternative when, in his play, he gives her the family name Hua (meaning "flower"). This latter name has become the most popular in recent years. Her complete name is then "花木蘭", transcribed as Huā Mùlán in Pinyin and Hua Mu-lan in Wade-Giles.

The Disney film popularised the version "Fa Mulan". This "Fa" is presumably Cantonese. However, the Cantonese transcription of "花木蘭" is actually Fa Muk-laan or Fā Muhk-laàhn. This modern Cantonese rendering of her given name is likely to be very similar to the pronunciation of the Middle Chinese that was spoken around the time of the poem's writing (for example, 木 is reconstructed as muk by the sinologist Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin ), though we cannot be fully certain of any reconstructed form.

Miscellaneous

• Hua Mulan crater on Venus is named after her.

• Mulan's hometown is Dazhouzhuang village, near the Henan city of Shangqiu. The village contains a temple dedicated to the heroine, among other Mulan-related landmarks.

• Maxine Hong Kingston re-visits this tale in her text, The Woman Warrior.

• A character inspired by Hua Mulan is the mascot of the FIFA Women's World Cup 2007 in China.

External links

• The poem in Chinese calligraphy by Mi Fei
• The poem in printed Chinese, with hyperlinks to definitions and etymologies
• An English translation of the poem
• The female individual and the empire: A historicist approach to Mulan and Kingston's woman warrior.

• Chinese people in history
• Female wartime crossdressers