The play primarily focuses on Mulan’s life as a woman.
One version of the manuscript even explicitly instructs the actress playing Mulan to change clothes in full view of the audience.
For example, the play included Mulan with bound feet… which is the ancient equivalent of having a woman soldier wearing sexy armor. Xu Wei took a lot of liberties with this play and wasn’t overly concerned with historical accuracy. An Illustration in a late woodblock reprinting of a collection of Xu Wei’s plays (Public domain). Mulan bids farewell to her family while two soldiers wait impatiently. Although this play was short (the unannotated manuscript is twelve pages), Xu Wei inserted reimagined the story in a way that would capture the imaginations of the common people. While a memorial erected during the Song dynasty suggests that this maiden warrior continued to captivate the hearts of a Taoist sect, it wasn’t until the Ming dynasty that Mulan’s story came into the public spotlight.Īround 1500 AD, Xu Wei wrote the play Mulan Joins the Army. After all, Mulan’s story has such a fantastic premise that it begs to be told in a more elaborate form.įor the next several hundred years, very little was written about Mulan. Due to the brevity of these accounts, later authors became fascinated with Mulan’s story and began embellishing it.
They provide enough information to verify that Mulan took her father’s place in battle, served for twelve or thirteen years without her femininity ever being discovered, and was rewarded by the emperor for her accomplishments. The early narratives about Mulan were are all very short. Around this same time, several authors ( Wei Yuanfu, Bai Juyi, Du Mu, and Li Rong) also wrote accounts verifying Mulan’s story. This copy of The Ballad of Mulan was written by Song dynasty calligrapher Mi Fu in 1094 AD (Public domain).įor over a hundred years, the Ballad of Mulan was passed down via oral tradition, until it was finally written down during the Tang dynasty. Regardless of the authenticity of the original tale, this amazing story went on to inspire one of the greatest legends ever told. Although modern historians now believe this poem to be fictitious, early historians (most notably, Zhu Guozhen) insisted that the Ballad of Mulan was an autobiography. It told of a young girl (most likely in her early teens) who made the momentous decision to take her father’s place in battle. Artwork by Stella Su.Īround 400 AD, a poem began circulating imperial China. Two modern depictions of Mulan stand in opposition to the title page of the Qing dynasty novel Fierce and Filial. The History Behind the Legend of Hua Mulan (400 AD Onward)Īncient texts from the past 1,500 years reveal the real history behind the legend of Mulan and how it developed into what we have today.