Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages. Sanping Chen

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      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 if the name Mulan were to be taken in its standard Chinese, hence heavily feminine, context. This is the first indication that the name should not be taken as Hàn Chinese.

      Much stronger evidence exists to substantiate the contention that the Mulan of the ode was indeed not a Hàn name, much less a feminine one. In the Zhou shu (History of the Zhou, 43.776) biography of a noted Northern Zhou general, Hán Xiong, it is stated that “Hán Xiong's ‘style' was Mulan.…He was very brave while still a youngster and had extraordinary physical strength.” Let me first explain that a “style,” or zi, represents an alternative personal name in premodern China, usually expressing a desirable attribute closely related to the person's formal given name, usually by strengthening or contrasting the latter. As a matter of fact, the name-style relationship is one of the most striking and unusual features of Chinese high culture, observed throughout history from Confucius on down to Chiang Kai-shek and Mao. For example, the late Great Helmsman's style is Runzhi, “to moisten” (in the sense of nurturing plants and crops—an earlier form of this style, somewhat less refined, means “to moisten zhi [an auspicious plant]”), which relates to his given name Zedong, meaning, word by word, “marsh/lake east,” but more elegantly “to bestow rain and dew upon the east.” The name-style relationship can serve as a powerful research tool for studying, among other things, ancient Chinese linguistics. In general, the style was considered a more respectful and polite form than the given name in addressing an individual.

      Returning to the above Zhou shu passage, we see not only that Mulan was the style of a military man but also that it was coupled with the primary personal name Xiong, meaning primarily “male” but more frequently “grand,” “mighty,” “powerful,” as Hán Xiong's biography elaborates. It is simply impossible that the Chinese word mulan in the sense of a noble, fragrant, delicate, and mostly feminine notion was used here to contrast with Xiong's masculinity and prowess. The possibility that Hán Xiong's zi was an opprobrious childhood СКАЧАТЬ