INTRODUCTION

In the rich Chinese tradition of tales and legends that originated centuries ago and survives to this day, the story of Mulan, with its utter lack of supernatural demonstrations or interventions, is one of the most mundane. A heroine such as Meng Jiangnü successfully destroys the Great Wall with her tears of grief at news of her husband’s death; the White Snake takes human form to pursue a worthy scholar and is punished for her vainglory with eternal imprisonment in Thunder Peak Pagoda; and the thwarted lovers Zhu Yingtai and Liang Shanbo are transformed into butterflies after their deaths, so that they can be together forever in lepidopterous love. In contrast, the subject of this volume, Mulan, simply puts on her father’s armor and takes on a male identity to go to battle. Yet, the very feasibility of this action is what makes it so compelling, as well as revolutionary. Transformation is not about magic spells or divine intervention: it is about the deliberate and basic action of changing clothes.

Though the story of Mulan has been reiterated over the centuries, a few basic elements have remained constant. A young girl’s elderly and sickly father is called up in the draft. The family knows that he is too ill to go, but they have no alternative: they have a daughter (sometimes two), but women are excluded from joining the all-male military, and a son, who is too young to enlist. The father decides that he has no option but to go. Mulan tells her parents that she will serve in his place. To do so, she will need to disguise herself as a man. She goes to the market to buy the necessities for travel and battle, dons her father’s armor, and joins a group of young men heading off to war. For a dozen years, she fights side by side with them, preserving her chastity and hiding the fact that she is a woman from even her closest companions. She successfully leads a battle that decisively ends the war and is lauded by the emperor for her efforts. Instead of accepting an official post, she asks to return home to her parents. When she arrives, she returns to her old room, takes off her armor, puts on her dress and makeup, and effortlessly resumes her old life.

There have been variations in the story over the centuries, but they are comparatively minor ones. Different versions emphasize different motives. In some, Mulan is a filial daughter forced into the circumstances by her duty to her father; in others, Mulan is a fiercely patriotic fighter willing to risk her life for her country, where so few men will. Other versions add a romantic subplot: in Xu Wei’s version, Mulan returns home and is promptly married to her next-door neighbor, Mr. Wang, and in the 1930s film version, a troubled attraction between Mulan and a fellow soldier is swiftly resolved when she dresses up as a woman again at the end. The basic structure remains unchanged: a girl becomes a man out of necessity, fulfills the task that required her to change, changes back once the goal is accomplished, and seeks to return to her former life. This matter-of-fact transition from one identity to another is fascinating, and it draws our attention to how much role-playing is a part of life. The multiplicity of identities occurs on multiple layers. Within the Mulan story, of course, we see directly how Mulan takes on and sheds personae according to the various demands of her circumstances. As we will see in the versions in this volume, the story takes different emphases, perhaps influenced by the biases of the author or the cultural climate at the time of its production. Readers, too, project their own particular interests onto Mulan.¹

Because of this versatility, the legend of Mulan has endured for hundreds of years.² This is not to say that the legend’s popularity has been consistent since its arrival. Indeed, there is no documentation to suggest that the recognition that Mulan enjoys in the twenty-first century is an unbroken continuation from her appearance in the “Poem of Mulan” more than a millennium ago. The story, as modified to represent Mulan as a Han Chinese loyalist battling an encroaching barbarian outsider, became a neat allegory for growing concerns about national identity and collaboration in the early twentieth century. Likewise, the Annie Oakley aspects of our heroine captured the attention of twentieth-century Chinese women looking for native independent female role models, and those in the West who looked eastward for strong female characters. In the last few decades alone, Maxine Hong Kingston appropriated parts of the Mulan story in her novel The Woman Warrior; Disney chose Mulan for its first Chinese heroine in a feature-length animated film; and, at the time of this book’s writing, a new film version is in production by a Mainland Chinese studio, and another version is currently in development. Whatever the reasons, although Mulan may not have made much of an impression when she first arrived on the scene, she is now certainly the most recognized Chinese folktale heroine in the world.

I. The “Poem of Mulan” and “Song of Mulan,” from the Collected Works of the Music Bureau

The earliest recorded versions of the Mulan legend are two poems printed in the Collected Works of the Music Bureau (Yuefu shiji), an anthology compiled by Guo Maoqian in the twelfth century. The first work, “Poem of Mulan” (“Mulan shi”), is undated and anonymous, and it is followed by an imitation, translated in this volume as “Song of Mulan,” written by the Tang dynasty official Wei Yuanfu (mid-eighth century). The “Poem of Mulan” contains details, such as the reference to the ruler by the term “khan,” that suggest the northeastern conflicts of the Northern Wei period (386–533). Guo Maoqian claims that the poem is taken from the Musical Records, Old and New (Gujin yuelu), a text that is no longer extant and which dates from approximately the sixth century C.E.³ This dating was adopted by Xu Wei (1521–1593) as the setting of his influential play, which further secured the tradition of dating the poem to that time, but there is no external corroborating evidence for an exact date of composition. Already in the twelfth century we see a disparity between the two earliest versions of the Mulan legend. The “Poem of Mulan” gives us a final stanza marveling at the difficulties of telling apart male from female, with the image of two hares running together; this image will recur in Xu Wei’s play and in a 1939 film version. The “Song of Mulan” emphasizes Mulan’s extraordinary demonstration of filial piety and loyalty.

The “Poem of Mulan” begins with the image of Mulan performing the typically female task of weaving while lamenting her situation:

A sigh, a sigh, and then again a sigh—
Mulan was sitting at the door and weaving.
One did not hear the sound of loom and shuttle,
One only heard her heave these heavy sighs.
When she was asked the object of her love,
When she was asked who occupied her thoughts,
She did not have a man she was in love with,
There was no boy who occupied her thoughts.

“Last night I saw the summons from the army,
The Khan is mobilizing all his troops.
The list of summoned men comes in twelve copies:
Every copy lists my father’s name!”

Reasoning that her brother is too young to take their father’s place, Mulan decides aloud that she will substitute for her father. She plans to get only a saddle and a horse, and there is no discussion about her change of clothes into male disguise:

The eastern market: there she bought a horse;
The western market: there she bought a saddle.
The southern market: there she bought a bridle;
The northern market: there she bought a whip.

Rather, the transformation into a man predominantly involves equipment, suggesting that it will be deeds that distinguish her. The ballad’s emphases are subtle, but significant: in the middle section, details of Mulan’s departure from home and her life as a soldier are expressed primarily through what is heard, whether it is the clacking of the shuttle, the girl’s sighs, the wind’s whistling, or the horses’ whinnying. With the exception of the cold light on her armor, it is not so much what she sees that captures the emotion, but what she hears.

When Mulan returns home, she changes back into her female clothes. Here, the poem describes the removal of her soldier’s garments and the steps she takes to return to her old self, moving from east to west in her chambers. Mulan takes off her soldier’s buffcoat and puts on her skirt and makeup.

The ballad ends with the hare analogy appended as a sort of moral to the story, describing the surprised reactions of her fellow soldiers:

“We marched together for these twelve long years
And absolutely had no clue that Mulan was a girl!”
“The male hare wildly kicks its feet;
The female hare has shifty eyes,
But when a pair of hares runs side by side,
Who can distinguish whether I in fact am male or female?”

The analogy is an intriguing one: there are concrete ways of telling apart male and female. The hares have specific gendered characteristics, but they are obscured by the activity natural to animals with a nervous spring and wandering eyes: they are always in motion, and when they are in motion, those characteristics are hard to see. Men and women, unlike hares, do not have different eyes or legs. They do have natural physical differences, and sometimes, as will be emphasized in Xu Wei’s play, culturally imposed physical differences like bound feet. These, too, can be obscured. Time and again, in Mulan’s case, the human analogy for the evasive effect of hares running side by side is clothing. When hares run, their physical difference is obscured; when people are dressed identically, their sexual difference is obscured.

When Mulan dressed as a male, her brave actions and her assertions were accepted without question as a man’s. Interestingly, it is female characteristics that are emphasized as being put on; little mention is made of dressing up as a man, with the exception of battle wear. As noted earlier, the transition into becoming a male soldier in the ballad is to get the appropriate equipment. Equipment is equally important in transforming a male civilian into a male soldier; the category is changed by clothing, but it is not a gender category. Sufen Lai writes about the contrast between the scenes of changing into a male and changing back into a female: “Such contrasting treatments in describing Mulan’s transforming herself and assuming different roles suggest that women’s cross-dressing was still a taboo subject even under the Confucian premise of filial piety; therefore, her transformation into a warrior is suggested with the purchasing of a gallant horse and its necessary gear, while her return to womanhood is detailed with feminine motions, objects and sentiments.”⁴ Lai’s suggestion that the ballad’s audience would not have been as accepting of a woman’s cross-dressing is convincing, but the conclusions reach beyond audience discomfort to suggest the possibility of a different way to read maleness and femaleness. Mulan had been introduced at the beginning of the ballad with the equipment of femaleness as well: the weaving shuttle that clicks its reminder of women’s work. But when the soldier’s buffcoat is taken off, and her hair is styled and makeup reapplied, it is not in response to a service or social role: she is putting on femaleness. Or, to put it the opposite way, femaleness is a kind of social role: it is an addition to the essential humanity of the male role. As the visual vocabulary and the hare metaphor seem to imply, gender, like a social role, is something that can be put on.

Wei Yuanfu’s “Song of Mulan” is not significantly different from the “Poem of Mulan” in basic content, but it presents a different emphasis. The author was a prime minister in the Tang dynasty (618–907), during the Dali period (766–779) following the An Lushan and Shi Siming rebellion (755–763), which resulted in the near collapse and severe weakening of the Tang dynasty. Neighboring nations in Mongolia and Tibet saw their opportunities for advantage, and for a time (in the year 763) the Tang capital, Chang’an, was occupied by Tibetan troops. Perhaps the contemporary circumstances weighed on Wei Yuanfu’s mind, as he incorporates Tibetan incursions into his version of the Mulan legend.

The poem begins with the same justifications for Mulan’s action (“My father has grown old, and worn by age; / How can he survive service?”). The “Song” provides the same details as the “Poem of Mulan,” describing Mulan washing away the powder from her face and then later removing “turban and gauntlet” when she returns to her parents. While the “Poem of Mulan” draws attention to the difficulties of telling male from female, the “Song” makes this distinction a pointed argument:

“Before, I was a hero among warriors,
But from now on I’ll be your darling girl again!”
Relatives bring wine in congratulations:
“Only now do we know that a daughter is as useful as a son!”

Mulan sings about her transformation back into her parents’ “darling girl” just as celebrating neighbors draw attention to their newfound appreciation of daughters. We should not assume, however, that here Wei Yuanfu makes a protofeminist argument about equality; the comparison is not made to emphasize the equal qualities of women to men, but rather to demonstrate how one exceptional woman reveals the inadequacies of most men:

If in this world the hearts of officials and sons
Could display the same principled virtue as Mulan’s,
Their loyalty and filiality would be unbroken;
Their fame would last through the ages—how could it be destroyed?

In the subtle variations from the “Poem of Mulan,” a shift in emphasis results in a new reading. When the story regained momentum nearly five hundred years later, it would include even greater elaborations and interpretations.

II. The Female Mulan Joins the
Army in Place of Her Father, by Xu Wei

The sixteenth-century play The Female Mulan Joins the Army in Place of Her Father (Ci Mulan ti fu congjun) was part of a quartet of plays called the Four Cries of a Gibbon (Sisheng yuan) written by the late-Ming dynasty man of arts Xu Wei.⁵ The Four Cries of a Gibbon are strikingly original comic plays that each elaborate on themes of identity, performance, disguise, and recognition. Xu Wei was famed for his talent in calligraphy, painting, and the literary arts, and he made his reputation with an unrestrained style that mirrored his eccentric life: his works of art sought to mimic spontaneous emotion rather than copy generic literary forms. As an artist and as a writer, he influenced later generations, who held him up as a model for the free and unrestricted individual style that they sought to emulate. The three plays that accompany The Female Mulan in the Four Cries of a Gibbon are all deeply invested in questions of who a person is and how that person portrays him- or herself to others.

After the two poems from the twelfth-century Music Bureau compilation previously discussed, there were no treatments of the story of Mulan until Xu Wei’s version. Xu Wei’s play, which introduced the surname Hua (meaning “flower”) to our heroine, may be credited for resurrecting the story, which became the popular subject of novel and play adaptations in the centuries that followed, up to this day. The play is concerned not with issues of historical accuracy but with entertainment: how did this girl carry out her transformation and how did she sustain her deception for a dozen years? Although there is unfortunately no documentation of performances of The Female Mulan, stage directions and the play itself allow one to easily imagine a performance that takes advantage of costume changes, including a scene of Mulan unwinding her foot bandages as part of her transformation into a man, staged battle scenes, and accompanying descriptive songs.

The play is divided into two acts. The first act begins with the protagonist, played by a young female lead (dan) introducing herself as Hua Mulan, and provides the setting of the play, among the Xianbei tribe in the Northern Wei. Mulan notes that all men of age are being conscripted to subdue the rebellion of a fictional bandit leader named Leopard Skin. Concerned that her father is too elderly to serve, Mulan decides to take his place. This decision is followed by an offstage shopping excursion that launches a series of songs about the various accessories she buys. The middle of the act is taken up with stage work, accompanied by descriptive songs. In the third aria, Mulan removes her footbindings. Although bound feet are anachronistic for a woman of the Northern Wei, a setting deliberately chosen by Xu Wei, the opportunity for such a scene must have been irresistible. One can easily imagine the titillating entertainment value of this action, and its potential for visual comedy. Mulan changes her feet back “into floating boats” (large, natural feet) but assures the audience that she will be able to return them to their golden lotus glory with the help of a secret family recipe. Having treated the audience to a “foot show,” she commences to change her costume, from her women’s clothes into soldier’s clothing. She demonstrates a soldier’s skill by performing martial arts with sword, staff, and bow and arrow, one after the other. She receives her parents’ blessings and leaves with two fellow soldiers, in search of Leopard Skin’s lair.

Act 2 begins in the heat of battle, with the commanding general, Xin Ping, employing “Hua Hu” (Mulan) to lead the raid on Leopard Skin. They successfully invade the bandit hideout and capture Leopard Skin. Hua Hu is singled out for his part in the capture and is given cap and girdle as symbols of a promotion to a position in the Imperial Secretariat. Hua Hu is thus sent home, still as a man, in the company of her two fellow soldiers, to await the new appointment. Hua Hu sings an aria about how the one who captured the bandit king was a fraud and therefore that the successes were not due to her work. As she travels with the soldiers, they comment on how strange it is that they have never seen Hua Hu use the toilet. “Hua Hu” mysteriously tells them about a statue in his village whose face changed to that of Chang’e.⁶ Returning home, “Hua Hu” first reapplies female makeup, then greets her family. She shares her successes with her parents, showing them the cap and girdle she has been granted, and then confirms that she returns to them as a “dogwood bud,” or virgin. After her amazed fellow soldiers leave, a young male lead (sheng) also wearing cap and girdle enters; he is Mr. Wang, the neighbor’s son who has succeeded in the exams. The two have been conveniently matched by their parents and are immediately married on stage. The wedding is also one of Xu Wei’s innovations to the inherited Mulan tradition. Luo Qiuzhao suggests that this reflects the influence of Ming dynasty plays, which conventionally end with a reunion scene or wedding.⁷ If Mulan cannot keep the cap and girdle, at least she ought to be married to one who can.

The play ends with Mulan singing the following song, which quotes the end of the “Poem of Mulan”:

I was a woman till I was seventeen,
Was a man for twelve more years.
Passed under thousands of glances,
Which of them could tell cock from hen?
Only now do I believe that a distinction between male and female isn’t told by the eyes.
Who was it really occupied Black Mountain Top?
The girl Mulan went to war for her pop.
The affairs of the world are all such a mess,
Muddling boy and girl is what this play does best.

Discussions of Xu Wei’s play have aligned with the readings of the ballad and do not make much of their differences; those scholars who do discuss the theme of cross-dressing in The Female Mulan mainly discuss either the terms of its place in the literary tradition, its incipient feminism in Xu Wei’s work, or its acquiescence to the patriarchy with Mulan’s return to womanhood and domesticity at the end. Written a few decades before the spectacularly traumatic end of the Ming dynasty, The Female Mulan does not make use of the female figure as a critique of the ineffectual male who could not act appropriately in service of his country. The transgressions in The Female Mulan are not really that transgressive: Mulan uses expedient means to carry out a task and, having succeeded, seems to return to exactly who she was when she began. Something strange occurs in this play; what is most affecting is not the obvious fact of the switching from female to male and then back again, but rather the complete disavowal of its strangeness. Xu Wei’s play, for all its apparent superficiality and inadequacies, does propose some fascinating questions about the performance of the self.

The Female Mulan engages questions of gender in a much more complicated manner than the “Poem of Mulan.” The play clearly presents a case of performance, and a performance that is crucial both domestically and nationally to Mulan; yet, the character who carries out that performance dismisses her actions completely. Mulan uses the strategies of costume and speech to create a self, mocks the belief that sight can be trusted, and leaves the audience with a conundrum when considering the entire performance. If actions in battle scenes were as if performed by someone else, to whom do we direct our appreciation? Similarly, in watching a play, what constitutes our experience of what happens onstage? Does acting nullify all actions performed under cover of disguise? The Female Mulan suggests that questions of gender or loyalty are not primary considerations. Rather, the play points to more profound questions about how we define ourselves in general: aren’t we all simply playing parts? If we are, how do we keep hold of our “true” selves?

III. Mulan in Drama and Prose in the Qing Dynasty

After Xu Wei, adaptations of the legend of Mulan proliferated during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). The non-Han Chinese Manchus, neighbors from the north, established the Qing dynasty, which replaced centuries of consecutive Han Chinese rule during the Ming. This change of regime, emphasized by marked changes in language, costume, and hairstyle, among other things, appears to have had some effect on the Mulan version we encounter during this period. Whereas Xu Wei took liberties with historical detail for the sake of entertainment, making up a bandit king named Leopard Skin as the enemy and inserting anachronous footbinding for dramatic effect (and titillation), these later versions returned to emphasizing filial piety and patriotism, this time with a specifically ethnic cast to the story. With Mulan, the writers found an opportunity to present a heroine who embodied their vaunted qualities of loyalty to a ruler against an invading, outside force. Summaries of the lengthy Mulan plays and novels of this period are supplied in the appendixes at the end of this volume.

We see here the preoccupations with emphasizing chastity and loyalty, with the trope of suicide. In contrast to the previous versions we have encountered, here Mulan is driven to committing suicide to express the pureness of her heart. Winning battles and coming home unscathed and virginal are no longer heroic enough. The widely popular hundred-chapter Historical Romance of the Sui and Tang (Sui Tang yanyi; c. 1675), compiled by Chu Renhuo (c. 1630–c. 1705), includes a version of the legend of Mulan in chapters 55 through 61 (see Appendix 2). The action of the story is set during the final years of the Sui dynasty (581–618 C.E.), when rebellions had broken out all over China, and the Turks had joined in the warfare. Mulan is portrayed as the daughter of a Turkish father and a Chinese mother; when the khan conscripts her father, Mulan goes in his place. The familiar elements of the story are expanded with many secondary characters, including the formidable woman warrior Dou Xianniang who first captures Mulan but later comes to admire her and take her on as a personal attendant. At the novel’s end, the defeated but pardoned Mulan returns home to find that her father has died and that the khan wants to take her into his harem. Rather than submit, Mulan commits suicide, entrusting her sister to carry out a mission in male dress.

In The Story of the Loyal, Filial, and Heroic Mulan (Zhongxiao yonglie Mulan zhuan), likely dating from some time in the late eighteenth century, the action is set somewhat later, beginning with the end of the Sui and taking place during the reign of Tang Taizong (599–649) (Appendix 2). In this novel, Mulan is now surnamed Zhu and is a Chinese maiden from Hubei. In this lengthier version, Zhu Mulan is given three generations of back story. The novel also inserts many supernatural elements, such as mystical and secret fighting techniques given to Mulan’s grandfather, Zhu Ruoxu. Mulan learns the doctrines and techniques at her grandfather’s knee and receives all his books when he dies. Mulan continues to train in the arts of warfare, in addition to the feminine arts of spinning and weaving, and successfully defeats a fox spirit who reappears to challenge Mulan again in battle. Eventually, Mulan triumphs and is rewarded with titles. When she reveals that she is a woman, Taizong makes her a princess, and she returns home to raise her now orphaned brothers. Taizong repeatedly entreats Mulan to return to the capital, but she respectfully refuses in order to stay at home to care for her brothers. Eventually, Taizong falls prey to gossip and summons Mulan for a third time, with the intent of murder. This time Mulan again refuses and underscores her sincerity by committing suicide. Taizong, overwhelmed with remorse, constructs monuments in Mulan’s memory, and she is later given a posthumous title. As in the Historical Romance of the Sui and Tang, Mulan has to go to the extremes of suicide to make her mark in history.

In the eighteenth century, we see an expansion of The Female Mulan by Xu Wei into a forty-scene chuanqi by the Manchu prince Yong’en (1727–1805), who gave his play the title A Couple of Hares (Shuangtu ji) and opted to keep the happier ending of a wedding (Appendix 1). As a member of the Manchu aristocracy, Yong’en may well have found the Northern Wei a convenient historical parallel to the Qing dynasty. His play can be read as a celebration of Han Chinese loyalty to their Manchu rulers. Yong’en had to come up with many new characters and episodes in order to fill his forty scenes, and, to conform to the conventions of chuanqi, he greatly expanded the role of Mulan’s fiancé from childhood, now given the full name of Wang Qingyun. He also gave Leopard Skin a younger sister, who falls in love with Mulan and is willing to betray her brother for the opportunity to marry the handsome enemy officer. In the play we are also treated, as we are in the expanded novelizations, to supernatural intervention, although again not in Mulan’s case. Her special skills are mundanely earned, but they are powerful enough to either inspire supernatural occurrences or else defeat them. In this case, the apparition of Guanyin (a female manifestation of an originally male bodhisattva) comes and goes, reminding the viewer that shape and identity shifting is a key element in Mulan’s successes. Yong’en’s play may have had some impact on the way Mulan was portrayed on the Peking opera stage of the twentieth century, which continued to use the Northern Wei for its setting. It also provided Mulan with impassioned speeches about the exceptional behavior that she commits as a woman, delivered as a challenge to all men. Here, rather than posing as her father, Mulan identifies herself as Hua Hu’s son, also going by the name Hua Hu, a variation that recurs in some of the later adaptations. The actual scenes of battle are engaged with some detail here, with introductions to Xin Ping, the commander in chief, and Niu He, the unworthy and lecherous superior who lusts after “Hua Hu” and fails miserably in battle. Here, too, Yong’en inserts other memorable characters, including the bandit king’s stepsister, who falls in love with “Hua Hu” and agrees to defect. The play ends happily with Mulan taking her leave to return home to her village, where her parents are ennobled and her fiancé receives a title. On her way home, Mulan again sees her childhood pets, a pair of rabbits running toward her, and she changes back into female dress to her companions’ surprise.

Yong’en’s play appears to have been the direct source for one more vernacular novel, An Extraordinary History of the Northern Wei: The Story of a Filial and Heroic Girl (Bei Wei qishi guixiao; 1850) by Zhang Shaoxian (Appendix 2), which appeared as the Manchu Qing was beset by foreign and internal foes, when models of filial piety and loyalty to a barbarian dynasty were in short supply. The forty-six-chapter novel, like the Historical Romance of the Sui and Tang and The Story of the Loyal, Filial, and Heroic Mulan, takes advantage of the length allowed by novels to expand the story. Unlike the other two novels, the Mulan story here is, true to Yong’en and Xu Wei, returned to the Northern Wei. The story adds political intrigue and the infighting that occurs even between members of the same side: Mulan is betrayed by her superior, Niu He, who jealously refuses to acknowledge her achievements to the generalissimo Xin Ping. This novelization also introduces other female characters: Lu Wanhua, a concubine who becomes a sworn sister; and the bandit leader’s wife, Miao Fengxian, who is a formidable warrior finally defeated by Mulan. Mulan fights side by side with her former concubine and sworn sister, Lu Wanhua, and successfully defeats the bandits. Mulan and Wanhua have sworn to marry Mulan’s childhood sweetheart, Wang Qingyun, and the novel is ended with a celebratory wedding with titles distributed all around. To allay any remaining doubts about Mulan’s commitment to her female duties, the consummation of the wedding is also described.

In the final years of the Qing dynasty, as China faced increasing pressure from imperialist powers, playwrights turned again to Mulan. The first scenes of Hua Mulan, a chuanqi play in sixteen scenes by Chen Xu (1879–1940), were published as early as 1897 (Appendix 1). More scenes followed later, but its first complete printing was not until 1914. Interestingly, the changing character of Mulan in this play seems to reflect its long gestation period. In the opening scenes, Mulan is still depicted as the perfect filial daughter who supports her aged and sickly father by her diligent weaving. As in Yong’en’s play, Mulan goes to war as Hua Hu’s son. By the end of the play, Mulan, supported by “good fellows from the green forests,” is fighting foreign foes and swears not to come home before she will have defeated these barbarians for good. If the opening scenes reflect a traditional morality and seem to present Mulan once again as an example of filial piety and loyalty, the final scenes seem more inspired by the events of the Revolution of 1911. Indeed, as we shall see, Mulan’s references to her political action become more strident as she enters the early twentieth century.

IV. Mulan as Opera: Mu Lan
Joins the Army⁸ and Beyond

By the time of Mu Lan Joins the Army (Mu Lan congjun), a Peking opera script first published in 1903, the emphasis on Mulan’s patriotism had come to the forefront: the filial daughter has been clearly transformed into a feminist patriot. No author is mentioned, and none has been identified in later scholarship. The genre of the text is not specified either, but in view of its structure, the text was most likely intended to be performed as a Peking opera.⁹ Unfortunately, there is no information on the performance history of the play, if there ever was any.¹⁰ One can easily imagine, however, Mu Lan Joins the Army as a very lively play in performance, and the stage directions make clear that our anonymous author very much wrote it with the intent of performance.

The action of the play is moved to the reign of Emperor Wu (r. 140–87 B.C.E.) of the Han dynasty, who pursued a policy of aggressive expansion in Mongolia and Central Asia with the aid of generals such as Huo Qubing and Wei Qing. This struggle between the Han and the Xiongnu (in earlier scholarship often identified with the Huns) is portrayed as the righteous war of the Chinese against the barbarians, who are chased back by Mu Lan and Wei Qing as far as the Northern Ice Sea. In the first part of the play, Mu Lan eagerly jumps at the opportunity to join the army once her cousin, despite his devotion to the martial arts, turns out to be too much of a coward to do his duty. Her primary motivation now is not filial piety, but “to shame those men” and to serve as a model for women. She is not shown weaving at all, and to the extent that filial piety is mentioned, it is only as an afterthought. In the second part, Mu Lan is ordered to meet up with Wei Qing and arrives just in time to save the general from an imminent defeat at the hands of the Xiongnu.¹¹ A note in the text points out that Wei Qing’s distress has to be highlighted in order to stress the main theme of the play. At the end of the second part, Mu Lan explicitly declares that her actions have not been inspired by loyalty to a single person or a single dynasty, but by concern for the nation and the race. Pointedly, the play does not depict her return home.

The characterization of Mulan as a female patriot, or perhaps even a feminist patriot, was very much in tune with the times. As the political situation of China rapidly deteriorated following its defeat by Japan in 1895, Han Chinese turned more and more against the Manchus. At the same time, China’s treatment of its women came increasingly to be seen as one of the major causes of its backwardness; this same period witnessed the rise of a strident feminism, which hailed Mulan (often compared to Joan of Arc) as one of the native models for the new Chinese woman, who would participate on equal footing with male citizens in building a new and strong nation. Patriots and feminists, both male and female, changed the meaning of the Mulan legend “from filiality to fearlessness, from a dutiful daughter’s return home to an ethnic Han nationalist’s heroic struggle against threatening foreign—read Manchu—forces.”¹² Many career women who grew up in the early decades of the twentieth century have testified to the enormous influence the model of a modernized Mulan exerted on them.¹³ The debates on the future of China were not limited to the printed page but rather moved onto the stage. The theater, especially the Peking opera of Beijing and Shanghai, was very much a part, if not a driving force, of the intellectual ferment of the times.¹⁴

The overlap of history with a literary model is best expressed in the case of Qiu Jin (1875–1907). In 1904, the youngest daughter of a well-to-do family left her husband and young children to go to Japan, where she studied fencing and archery and experimented with various styles of dress, using Mulan as her role model. Qiu Jin is celebrated to this day as one of the first martyrs of the revolution against the Qing imperial government; upon returning from Japan, she edited a newspaper on women’s issues and taught at a school in her native Zhejiang. In 1907, she attempted an uprising against the Qing but was captured and summarily executed. Qiu Jin’s interest in the sartorial creation of her identity is evident in the photographic history she left behind: she alternatively appears in Japanese women’s dress (specifically, that of a Japanese woman warrior, with sword drawn), Manchu male dress, and Western male dress. Her patriotic poems seek to emulate Mulan’s example, as they are insistently nostalgic for a Han era before the entrance of the “barbarian” Manchus. Qiu Jin became an outspoken opponent of footbinding, that corporeal marker of gender that Xu Wei’s Mulan dismisses and regains with ease. The resonances between the real-life revolutionary who poses in various (and often male) costume and the literary heroine whose abilities are released by changes of clothes are nearly too perfect.¹⁵

Both cases demonstrate how easily identities could be tried on and discarded at will; a persona could be put on just as simply as a costume. Both cases also demonstrate the consequences of that ease; what remains underneath when so much ends up being surface? Does a body matter? When Qiu Jin was surrounded by Manchu troops and captured for treason in 1907, she reportedly refused to speak. She was then given a brush in order to write her confession. She wrote instead: “Autumn rain and autumn wind: the sorrow kills one.” Qiu Jin plays on her surname, Qiu, which also means autumn, in these final, unspoken words. Instead of speaking her words, she wrote them down. Instead of inscribing her confession, she inscribed her biography. Instead of writing her life story, she took her life and made it into lyric.

Mulan’s popularity endured and increased in the early twentieth century; her character was one of the roles taken on by the immensely popular and celebrated Peking opera star Mei Lanfang (1894–1961) in 1917. Mei was a world-famous star, who specialized in the role of the dan, or young female lead. The fact that he was a female impersonator was hardly atypical for an actor in Peking opera, but it lent itself to Mei’s argument for equality between the sexes. Mulan’s strength is contrasted with that of all the people of the country, not just women, and the blurring of gender is emphasized by the fact that this woman impersonating a man is played by Mei, a man impersonating a woman.¹⁶

In the 1917 interpretation of Mulan Joins the Army (Appendix 1), cowritten with Qi Rushan, Mei chose the patriotic Mulan over the virtuous and filial Mulan. Here again, Mulan was to take on a symbolic role of patriot. The emphasis here is on the significance of political action, made especially heroic by the fact that it is carried out by a woman. The script emphasizes that it is a natural duty—and one not restricted by gender—to act on behalf of one’s state. One’s motives should not be personal but rather should consider the state’s best interest; if the state were to collapse, private relationships would not be able to exist, either. The undated text for On Campaign in Place of Her Father (Appendix 1), an alternative title for the Mei and Qi collaboration, focuses more on the additional character He Tingyu, who is the commander in chief of Hua Hu (really Mulan in her father’s guise). The emphasis here is on military strategies and specific battles, but the resolution is the same: Mulan is heroic in battle but does not accept any appointments, choosing instead to return home to her life as a woman. Several other plays followed this one, continuing to emphasize the theme of women shaming men into accepting their political duty. In Pifu’s one-act play, Joining the Army: On the Road (Appendix 1), Mulan declares: “Since ancient times those who live in the inner compartments would not leave the gate, but how can the past be a model for the present, now that the country is in chaos?”

Mei took advantage of his role as an actor to demonstrate onstage how Mulan’s gender switching emphasized the importance of political action: by making the actions of valor more important than whether they were performed by a man or a woman, Mei implicated every citizen in civic duty.¹⁷ Offstage as well, he employed gender difference to express political objection. He pointedly withdrew from performing in Mainland China during the Japanese occupation. One of his ways of marking this protest was to grow a beard, physically emphasizing his gender and thus eradicating the female persona that was essential for his métier.

V. The Film Mulan Joins the Army

The 1939 film Mulan Joins the Army was produced by Zhang Shankun for Shanghai’s Xinhua Film Company during the Japanese occupation, when most of the film world had fled to Hong Kong. Written by the playwright Ouyang Yuqian, directed by Bu Wancang, and starring the actress Chen Yunshang (Nancy Chan) in the title role, this film ran for a record-breaking eighty-three days beginning on the first day of the Chinese lunar year. Chen Yunshang was an instant hit. Her public identity was promoted as a contrasting alternative to other popular film actresses of the day; she was a thoroughly “modern” girl: athletic, vital, and “Western.” This film, released in a Shanghai that was besieged by rivalries between Nationalist agents and agents of puppet regimes supported by the Japanese, tapped into the popular anxieties about occupation, collaboration, and domination.¹⁸ Mulan Joins the Army is a thinly veiled allegory for the cause of resistance in the name of national pride and love of country. Ouyang also rewrote the play in 1942 as a Guilin-style opera (Guiju); it has some modifications and omissions that appear to have been made to adapt to the different performance requirements of a staged rather than a film version (it is summarized in Appendix 1).

The Mulan of Mulan Joins the Army is a patriotic heroine whose filial actions are only an extension of her profound sense of duty to her country. Mulan repeatedly scolds fellow soldiers for failing to unite against the barbarian enemy, and she comes against obstacles in the military leadership: she discovers that her leader is being led astray by an adviser who collaborates with the enemy. Undeterred, Mulan does her best to protect the leader while leading the troops to success against the foreigners. The film ends with Mulan declining the emperor’s rewards and returning home to her parents where she reveals that she is a woman to her army companion. The two of them are united in marriage.

The film balances the weightier task of political criticism with the comic elements of Mulan’s situation. Scenes make light of the differences in gender, often emphasizing how much gender is a performance. In one memorable scene, Mulan and Liu Yuandu go on a secret mission to explore enemy terrain; they not only travel in mufti, but Mulan dresses as a woman, encouraged to do so because “he” is already feminine. There is a lot of flirtation between Mulan and Liu Yuandu, even as Mulan is perceived to be a man, making for comedy to an audience that knows Mulan is a woman. The comedy serves to underscore the political allegory, however; how is it that this woman is the most successful soldier in the battalion? What is the matter with Chinese men?

Mulan Joins the Army opens with a scene that recalls the “Poem of Mulan” and The Female Mulan. We see Mulan in a hunting costume on horseback with bow and arrow, shooting and retrieving birds. She then sets her sights on a rustling in the bushes:

( … From among some bushes, there is a rustling, and Mulan draws her bow and shoots at it. Striking her target, she suddenly hears a cry of pain. It is in fact another hunter who had been concealed in the bushes. In pain he jumps up, sees Mulan, and recognizes her.)

LI: Wang, what were you calling out about again? Did you shoot something?

WANG: No, I didn’t shoot anything; instead, I got shot by someone! Take a look …

(He demonstrates to them where he was hit)

ZHANG: Hey, isn’t that a daughter of the Hua family?

(Mulan rides over to the group)

LI: That’s right!

ZHANG: Pretending to be mad but actually scheming, she’s come over to our village to hunt—and flaunt the rules!

LI: That’s right!

MULAN: Big Brother Wang, I am truly sorry. I thought you were a rabbit. I didn’t think you would have been crouching there.

We are returned here to the now centuries-old comparison of telling apart the male and female hare. Mulan mistakes Wang for a rabbit in the bushes, insulting him on multiple levels. Not only has she mistaken a man for an animal and struck him with an arrow, she tells him that she has mistaken him for a rabbit. By comparing him to a rabbit in particular, contemporary slang for a homosexual, she impugns his masculinity. Of course, this is the subtext of Mulan Joins the Army. Mulan is more “masculine” than any of the young braves in the film, inasmuch as masculinity is defined by courage, loyalty, and fearlessness in battle. Certainly, the young men of the village are portrayed as hapless and ineffectual, and neither Wang nor his shooting companions go off to battle at all.

In the country’s time of need, it is only Mulan who can step forward to do what is right for her compatriots. Unthreatened by foreign incursion, unswayed by selfish greed, she outperforms the men. Yet, her exceptional behavior is simply that: exceptional. She stands out, but only as a role model, a symbol of what every man should strive to be. Once she has proven her potential, and demonstrated what can be accomplished with the right motives, she quickly steps down from present and future positions of power and marries the man who had been her subordinate throughout the many years of war: all’s well that ends well. Mulan is ultimately not a role model to women, who are expected to stay at home to serve the family as her sister does, but a role model to men.

VI. Conclusion

Through the twentieth century into the twenty-first, the story of Mulan gained momentum, and it was adapted in opera and film versions over the decades. We have, for example, versions of Mulan written after the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 that make her a native of Yan’an, birthplace of Communist heroes. Mulan was a popular figure in Hong Kong films as well, especially in Cantonese-style Yue opera versions. She is called “Fa Muk Lan” according to Cantonese pronunciation and was a popular hit in the 1964 Cantonese opera film titled Lady General Hua Mulan (Fa Muk Lan).

It is this Cantonese pronunciation of Mulan’s surname that came to the English-speaking general audience when Maxine Hong Kingston published her novel The Woman Warrior: A Girlhood among Ghosts in 1989. Kingston took liberties with the Mulan legend, weaving into her interpretation threads of other stories and legends that she said were learned from hearing her mother’s stories. Kingston’s Fa Mu Lan was a critique of the oppression Kingston herself felt as a Chinese-American woman, and one of the reminders of that oppression to the protagonist is a series of grievances tattooed onto her back by her parents (a reference to the male hero Yue Fei). The narrator girds the memory of this fierce warrior, who is braver than any man, against the reality of her girlhood in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where she finds herself being belittled for the fact that she is a girl. The novel uses the figure of Mulan to voice the grievances of a Chinese-American girl who grows up hearing the tales of a fierce role model but is expected to live out traditional roles. Instead of viewing the novel as a personal rumination on one girl’s crises of identity set against a pastiche of partially observed notions of handed-down ethnicity, the Asian-American author and activist Frank Chin furiously objected to what he perceived as Kingston’s re-Orientalizing of China to pander to a white audience. Kingston’s best seller became, to Chin, a deliberate corruption of the Mulan legend for the sake of selling women’s oppression in traditional China. Mulan resurfaced again in the 1990s, with the 1998 Disney animated movie Mulan, the first Chinese story to receive the Disney treatment. This Mulan was generally well received, and it plays the most significant role in Mulan’s name recognition to popular audiences in the West.¹⁹

In recent years, Mulan has continued to be a popular subject for Chinese plays and films, both in Mainland China and in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In 2003, Li Liuyi produced an avant-garde stage adaptation of Hua Mulan. In 2008, a hybrid “Chinese opera” version of Mulan debuted at the Vienna State Opera House with music by Guan Xia played by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. At the time of this book’s writing, a film of Mulan starring Zhao Wei as the lead is currently in production.

Over the last millennium, Mulan has been transformed in the hands of writers and directors, as much as she transformed herself. Mulan’s superiority as a woman committing acts of daring beyond the abilities of men, morally or martially, should not be immediately interpreted as evidence of a willingness to valorize women over men, however. The reader must consider that arguing for Mulan’s moral superiority—preserving her chastity while defying expectations in filial or national gestures—may just be another way of arguing for the necessity of keeping her contained within the safe and protected confines of the domestic sphere. Though the interpretations and variations of the legend of Mulan may differ, Mulan herself endures: she is, after all, no stranger to change.

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¹ Joan Judge has chronicled the push and pull of Mulan as patriot versus Mulan as filial girl from the late-imperial period to the early twentieth century (2008, pp. 143–86).

² There is to our knowledge no evidence of a historical Mulan. Sanping Chen has argued, however, that the name “Mulan,” which means “magnolia” in Chinese, is derived from a foreign word meaning “bull” or “stag,” was a “style” or courtesy name adopted by military men in the fifth and sixth centuries, and was used as a surname by non-Han Chinese families (2005, pp. 23–43).

³ Wei, 1979, pp. 373–5.

⁴ Sufen Sophia Lai, “From Cross-Dressing Daughter to Lady Knight-Errant: The Origin and Evolution of Chinese Women Warriors,” Presence and Presentation: Women in the Chinese Literati Tradition, ed. Sherry Mou (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), p. 86.

⁵ The reader should be reminded that until the twentieth century, what we call a “play” in Chinese literature was actually a sung drama, more akin to a Western opera or Broadway musical, with alternation between arias set to existing tunes, and recited speeches, than to spoken-word plays. The Female Mulan is a zaju, a short dramatic form of four or five acts from the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368). By the time The Female Mulan was written in the late Ming dynasty, the genre rules were significantly loosened: the plays of Four Cries of a Gibbon range in length from one to five acts.

⁶ The goddess of the moon.

⁷ Luo, 1996, p. 76.

⁸ In most other accounts of the legend of Mulan of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the name “Mulan” is treated as a single word, and Mulan is provided with a surname, either Hua or Zhu. In this play, however, it appears that the syllable mu is treated as a surname “Mu.” For instance, in speaking to Huo Qubing, Mu Lan often refers to herself as “Mu lang,” which literally means “a young man surnamed Mu.” For this reason, the name of the heroine of the play is transliterated here as Mu Lan.

⁹ Yan Quanyi mentions Mu Lan Joins the Army as one of the earliest examples of reformist Peking opera, in his Qingdai jingju wenxue shi (2005, p. 439). Also see Zhongguo jingju shi, shang juan, 2005, p. 325.

¹⁰ For instance, there are no references to Mu Lan Joins the Army in Wang Zhizhang, Zhongguo jingju biannian shi, 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 2002), for the final years of the Qing.

¹¹ All Chinese readers of the play probably will be reminded of the story of Li Ling, who failed to meet up with his commander, bravely fought the Xiongnu, but eventually, when out-numbered, surrendered to them.

¹² Judge, 2008, p. 143. Judge’s comments are in particular inspired by a commentary on Mulan by Xu Dingyi in 1906. She discusses the various interpretations of the character of Mulan during the final decade of the Qing in more detail on pp. 151–162 of her study.

¹³ Wang, 1999.

¹⁴ Goldstein, 2007, esp. ch. 3, “The Experimental Stage” (pp. 89–133).

¹⁵ For more on Qiu Jin and her work, consult Idema and Grant, 2004, pp. 767–808.

¹⁶ While Mei’s performance of Mulan was quite a success, he would prefer in following years to portray female warriors who fought as women.

¹⁷ In an interesting gender twist, during the 1930s in occupied Shanghai, Mulan was a popular subject for the all-female casts of Zhejiang-style Yue “opera play” (yueju) performances. Jin Jiang writes about the opera play Hua Mulan as the first patriotic play of that type, one version an adaptation of Mei Lanfang’s Peking opera. See Jiang, 2009, pp. 92–5.

¹⁸ On this topic, consult Poshek Fu’s Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas (2003). The book is a detailed study of the historical period and the role of films, and this film in particular, in addressing these anxieties.

¹⁹ See Lan, 2003.