History Literature / TheBalladOfMulan

Adaptations of the story can be found [[DerivativeWorks/Mulan here]]. Entries from the Creator/{{Disney}} franchise can be found [[Franchise/MulanDisney here]].

Notable adaptations of the story include:
* The Xu Wei play ''The Heroine Mulan Goes to War in Her Father's Place'' (c. 1580). It did a lot to flesh out the very bare-bones story laid out in the original ballad, and elements that it invented have often been [[LostInImitation maintained in later adaptations]]. Perhaps most significantly, it was the first work to establish "Hua" as Mulan's surname.
* In the first two Cantonese dubs of ''Anime/NausicaaOfTheValleyOfTheWind'', [[DubNameChange Nausicaä's name was changed to Mulan]] [[InNameOnly despite the film having little to do whatsoever with the actual story of Mulan]]. Nausicaä's name would be restored in the Blu-ray redub.
* The animated Creator/{{Disney}} adaptation ''WesternAnimation/{{Mulan}}'' (1998).
** [[invoked]]The DirectToVideo animated sequel, ''WesternAnimation/MulanII'' (2004).
** The live-action Disney remake ''[[Film/Mulan2020 Mulan]]'' (2020).
* ''WesternAnimation/TheSecretOfMulan'' (1998), the UAV Entertainment {{Mockbuster}} version.
* The live-action Chinese adaptation ''Film/MulanRiseOfAWarrior'' (2009). There are several other Chinese film and television versions of the story, which do not as yet have pages on this wiki.
* ''The Magnolia Sword: A Ballad of Mulan'', a 2019 young adult novel by Sherry Thomas.
* ''Mulan: The True Story'', a historically accurate literary adaptation set in Northern Wei, with only a few errors in adapting, by Daniyar Z. Baidaralin

* AmbiguousTimePeriod: There is no explicit mention of the time period or what war Mulan is fighting in. Due to the geographic and cultural references, it's traditionally assumed that the poem is set during the Northern Wei dynasty, in which case the war would be fought against the Rouran tribes, whom the Wei regarded as barbarians. By extension, Mulan's ethnicity is very likely to be Xianbei as in Northern Wei, only the Xianbei people can become soldiers. The location reference also tells us that the campaign was the same one Tuoba Buri (AKA Tuoba Tao, posthumously known as Emperor Taiwu of Northern Wei) led against the Rouran Khaganate in 429.

* In the Cantonese dub of ''Anime/NausicaaOfTheValleyOfTheWind'', [[DubNameChange Nausicaä's name was changed to Mulan]] [[InNameOnly despite the film having little to do whatsoever with the actual story of Mulan]].

** HeroicLineage is probably a better-fitting trope, given the context of Mulan's homeland of Northern Wei. [[note]]In northern Wei, only the Xianbei people can be soldiers, and so it is common for generations of the same family/clan to fight in different wars over decades.[[/note]]

* OnlyOneName: Due to the standards of the day only referring to women by their surname, "Mulan" was her surname and she had no established given name. It was centuries later, during the Ming dynasty, that her surname was first given as "Hua" (or "Fa", in Cantonese pronunciation) by the playwright Xu Wei and her given name became "Mulan". Other sources have given her surname as "Zhu" or "Wei."

The story opens with Mulan at her loom. She is sad that her father has been drafted and has no grown son to serve in his place. She leaves home to take his place in the army herself. After fighting for ten years, Mulan is honored by the Khan[[note]]No, not the Emperor. In any case, during the era which the ballad could have originated, there was no one Emperor of all China; between the fall of the Han Dynasty and the unification of China by Sui in 589, China was either splintered among various regimes (apart from the last decade of Sima Yan's rule after unifying the Three Kingdoms), or fighting civil wars.[[/note]] and offered a high position, but she turns it down. She then returns home and resumes living the life of an ordinary woman. Seeing this, her old wartime comrades are shocked to discover that she was female all along. The poem ends by asking how you would be able to distinguish between two running rabbits which was male and which was female. [[note]]This is likely a reference to Mulan's role in the army as a cavalry(wo)man. In addition, the Chinese idiom "pu shuo mi li" (扑朔迷离; used to refer to something utterly puzzling) originates from here.[[/note]]

''The Ballad of Mulan'' (木蘭辭, Mùlán cí) is a Chinese poem written in (probably) the fifth or sixth century AD. It is the origin of the Mulan character, later known as Hua Mulan.[[note]]Her family name is portrayed as "Mulan" in the original poem, as women of the time were only referred to by their surname.[[/note]]

* WorkInfoTitle: Would you guess that this is a ballad?

* AmbiguousTimePeriod: There is no explicit mention of the time period or what war Mulan is fighting in. Due to the geographic and cultural references, it's traditionally assumed that the poem is set during the Northern Wei dynasty, in which case the war would be fought against the Rouran tribes, whom the Wei regarded as barbarians. By extension, Mulan's ethnicity is very likely to be Xianbei as in Northern Wei, only the Xianbei people can become soldiers. The location reference also tells us that the campaign was the same one Tuoba Buri (aka. Tuoba Tao, posthumously known as Emperor Taiwu of Northern Wei) led against the Rouran Khaganate in 429.

* HumbleHero: The Khan offers Mulan a government position for her service but she refuses, desiring to go home and reunite with her family after being away for twelve years.

* BarbarianHero: Mulan on a technicality. While composed in the Northern Wei, it was first transcribed in the Southern Chen dynasty, who saw the Northern Wei as "plaited barbarians" and thus, to them Mulan would have been a barbarian hero.