The Chinese heroine Hua Mulan is one of the oldest and most
enduring examples of a woman who becomes a warrior because of her role as a
daughter.
Scholars have argued for centuries over whether or not Mulan
was a historical figure. At some level, it doesn’t matter as far as piecing
together her story is concerned. The available information about her life is
scarce to nonexistent, even by the often-shaky standard of what we know about
other women warriors of the ancient world.
Our oldest source for her story is the “Poem of Mulan,”
which appears in a twelfth-century poetry anthology compiled by Guo Maoqian,
who attributes it to a sixth-century collection that no longer exists. The poem
is anonymous, undated, and three hundred words long. A few details, such as the
use of the title “khan” rather than “emperor,” suggest the poem dates from the
Northern dynasties period (386–581 CE).
For the most part, I chose not to discuss the stories of
mythical women warriors, because there are plenty of historical examples to
consider. But Mulan is a special case. She is as well known in China as Joan of
Arc is in the West. Despite the absence of biographical details in the original
source, several regions of China claim her as their own folk heroine.
Mulan’s story is familiar to American audiences thanks to
the 1998 Disney film Mulan. But the Walt Disney Company is simply one in a long
tradition of Mulan adapters, and by no means the most fanciful in its
interpretation. Over a period of 1,500 years, Mulan’s story has been told in
Chinese operas, plays, folk tales, and now video games.
While the versions differ in the details, the basic
structure of the story remains the same: Threatened by invaders from the north,
the emperor (or the khan) conscripted soldiers to defend the country. Because
her father was too old to fight and her brother too young, Mulan purchased a
horse, weapons, and armor; disguised herself as a man; and joined the army to
fulfill the family’s conscription obligation.
The original poem gives us a brief, vivid impression of
Mulan’s life as a soldier, but no details:
She did not hear her
parents’ voices, calling for their daughter,
She only heard the
whinnying of Crimson Mountain’s Hunnish horsemen.
Myriads of mile: she
joined the thick of battle,
Crossing the mountain
passes as if flying.
Winds from the north
transmitted metal rattles,
A freezing light shone
on her iron armor.
A hundred battles and the
brass were dead;
After ten years the
bravest men returned.
This is war from the common soldier’s viewpoint, stripped
down to misery and poetry. Later versions of the story fill this space with
heroic deeds, gender-problematic romances, and, in the Disney version, a
smart-mouthed dragon sidekick.
At the end of their tour of duty, Mulan and her comrades met
with the emperor, who offered them honorary ranks, appointments at court, and
rewards “counted in the millions.” (In one late version, the emperor discovers
her gender and offers to make her his consort. She tells him she would rather
die.) Mulan refused everything; all she wanted was a fast horse (or sometimes a
camel) to take her home. Once there, she went into the house and put on a
woman’s clothing and makeup. When she came back out, her army buddies were
flabbergasted by the truth. During the ten (or sometimes twelve) years she
served in the army, none of her fellow soldiers suspected she was a woman.
In Mulan’s story, the link between being a daughter and
becoming a soldier is direct and irrefutable. Chinese readers/listeners/viewers
would understand her action as an extreme act of filial piety. In fact, in one
version of the story she receives the posthumous title Filial-Staunchness.
Filial piety—respect for and obedience to one’s parents—is the foundation on
which Confucian society stands. Children are loyal to their parents. Wives are
loyal to their husbands. Subjects are loyal to the ruler. The ruler is loyal to
the kingdom itself. If everyone performs their duties to those above them in
the hierarchy, society flourishes. If duties are not faithfully performed,
chaos reigns, the emperor loses the mandate of heaven, and dynasties fall. It
is an alien concept for those of us who grew up in a culture defined in terms
of rights rather than social duties. But it is as powerful a fundamental social
principle as “all men are created equal.”
Seen through this lens, Mulan became a warrior in order to
protect her father, her family, and the social order as a whole. She preserved
society’s norms by stepping outside them.
Warrior daughters fought for a variety of reasons. Some,
like Mulan, fought to preserve their society. Some fought to overturn it. Some
fought simply to escape the narrow framework of what society expected of women.
But whatever their reasons, most historical warrior daughters shared one common
characteristic: they went to war as a result of their relationships with their
fathers.
The warrior daughter is not an obvious outcome of the
father-daughter relationship in most traditional societies, in which the male
head of the family, extended or nuclear, exercised political, social, and
economic power over other family members. While the details varied in different
times and places, the basic outlines of the roles of fathers and daughters are
remarkably consistent across those preindustrial societies for which data
exists. Marriageable daughters were the ultimate trade good of the gift
economy—an idea that survives in residual form in the ritual of “giving away”
the bride. Royal families exchanged daughters to cement power alliances or to
establish peace between hostile nations. (In medieval England, such women were
called “peace-weavers.”) Wealthy merchants, cattle farmers, and plantation
owners exchanged daughters to seal business alliances, consolidate holdings, or
gain access to new markets. Well-to-do peasants and their urban counterparts
included their daughters in the complex economic calculus that drove the
exchange and/or acquisition of land, cattle, or other property. Whether
payments took the form of a dowry, in which a bride brought goods or money into
the marriage, or a bride-price, in which the groom’s family paid the bride’s
family for a bride, at base these transactions treated women as commodities to
be exchanged/given/taken/traded, based on their potential to produce children,
food, status, connections, or domestic services. In such societies, daughters
were more apt to be “daddy’s little asset” than “daddy’s little girl.” Even in places
where the literal exchange of a daughter was a thing of the past, her legal
identity was often an extension of her relationship first with her father and
then with her husband. (As late as 1972, tennis star Billie Jean King could not
get a credit card without the signature of her husband—an unemployed law
student.)
By comparison, in traditional societies, past and present,
sons have value in and of themselves. Families needed sons to carry on the
name, the family business, the dynasty. (Henry VIII of England, who married and
remarried in his desire to father a male heir, is perhaps the most famous
example of how far this perceived need could drive a man.) Men desired sons to
perform religious rites in honor of ancestors, or carry on blood feuds to avenge
a family’s honor, or inherit the family farm.
In the absence of a son, a daughter could be used to
“purchase” a son-in-law to serve as his successor. Or a nephew, cousin, or
brother could step into the role that would otherwise be filled by a son. But in
some cases, the lack of a son opened up opportunities for daughters. The chance
to receive an education. To inherit a business. To inherit a kingdom. In
extreme cases, a son-shaped hole allowed, or forced, a woman to step outside
her expected roles and go to war in place of her father, by the side of her
father, or in emulation of her father.
PLUCKY PRINCESS LEADS A BAND OF REBELS
Several hundred years after Hua Mulan, or perhaps a
generation or two depending on which date you accept for the “Poem of Mulan,” a
woman warrior led a rebel army against the Chinese empire on her father’s
behalf and helped found the Tang dynasty, which is considered China’s cultural
and artistic golden age.
Princess Pingyang (ca. 598–623 CE) took up arms in the reign
of the Emperor Yangdi, second (and last) emperor of the Sui dynasty.
Yangdi took the throne in 604, after assassinating his
father and older brother. By 613, his ambitious and expensive imperial
projects—including building the Grand Canal, expanding the Great Wall, creating
a secondary capital in the western empire, and launching repeated military
expeditions into Vietnam, Tibet, Central Asia, and Korea—made him unpopular
with peasants and nobles alike. Disastrous military expeditions in 612 and 613
against the kingdom of Koguryo, in what is now North Korea and southern
Manchuria, were two foreign wars too many for China’s overburdened, overtaxed
citizens. Peasants rose in revolt across the empire. The revolt soon spread to
members of the aristocracy, many of whom controlled large personal armies. By
615, every province of the empire was in turmoil and the imperial army was
engaged on a dozen fronts.
While his generals battled to contain the rebels, the
emperor purged his government of any nobles whose loyalty he questioned.
Pingyang’s father, Li Yuan, was one of the nobles the emperor feared most. Li
Yuan was a successful general and a powerful warlord. He controlled the region
of modern Shanxi, a strong tactical position from which to attack the Sui
capitals at Chang’an and Lo-Yang. That was sufficient reason for the
beleaguered emperor to suspect treason, but the main reason the emperor feared
him was less rational. In 614, a ballad that predicted the next emperor would
be named Li became popular throughout China. In 615, a soothsayer took up the
thread and warned Yangdi that someone named Li would soon become emperor. In
617, the increasingly paranoid emperor began to execute people with the Li
surname—a step that ensured the prophecy was fulfilled. After Yangdi ordered
the execution of another high-ranking general named Li, Li Yuan decided his
best chance of survival was rebellion. He sent secret messengers to his son and
to Pingyang’s husband, Cai Shao, asking them to join forces with him to
overthrow the emperor.
Li Yuan did not ask for help from Pingyang. He got it
anyway.
Pingyang and her husband lived in the primary Sui capital,
Chang’an, where Cai Shao was head of the Sui dynasty equivalent of the Secret
Service, responsible for protecting the crown prince. When he received Li
Yuan’s message asking for his help, Cai Shao hesitated. On the one hand, he
feared taking Pingyang with him would cause suspicions in the royal court and
end the rebellion before it began. On the other hand, he feared that if he left
Pingyang behind she would be in danger once the emperor learned he had joined
the rebellion. Pingyang, however, had no doubts about what they should do. She
told her husband to join her father. She could take care of herself.
After Cai Shao left to join forces with her father, Pingyang
fled to her family’s estate in Shanxi. She found the region suffering from a
severe drought and widespread starvation, which the imperial officials were
either unwilling or unable to alleviate. She fed the starving from the family
granaries, then sold what remained. With the family’s wealth turned into hard
cash, she assembled an army. Members of the families she had fed were the first
recruits who joined what came to be called the Army of the Lady. After arming
her newly formed peasant force, she made alliances with groups of dissidents, bandits,
and neighboring warlords, one of whom brought a personal army of ten thousand
troops to fight under Pingyang’s banner. Eventually she commanded a force of
seventy thousand.
Dynastic histories emphasize that Pingyang kept strict
discipline over her troops. Unlike many historical military leaders, she
forbade looting, pillaging, and rape by her troops and punished offenders with
a heavy hand. When her forces took control of a new area, she distributed food
to the local people, ensuring they greeted her army as liberators rather than
conquerors.
After repeated victories against the emperor’s armies in
Shanxi, Pingyang joined up with her father and her husband. Together their
forces encircled the Sui capital, which they captured within a year.
Yangdi fled the city and was later killed by his own men. Li
Yuan became the first emperor of the Tang dynasty, which would rule China for
three hundred years. Her father gave Pingyang the official title of princess,
the honorific title zhao, meaning wise, and the military rank of marshal, which
gave her the right to military aides and staff. Despite the rank and honors,
she retired from military life, presumably because the national crisis had come
to an end.
Pingyang does not reappear in the dynastic histories until
her death in 623 at the age of twenty-three. According to the official
accounts, the struggle to win the throne for her father had exhausted her. Her
grief-stricken father, now the Emperor Gaozu, broke with tradition and insisted
her funeral procession include a military band and other martial honors. The
official in charge of court ceremonies remonstrated with the emperor because a
military band at a woman’s funeral was not an accepted practice. The emperor
put him in his place, saying, “A military band plays military music; since the
princess raised and commanded armies in the past in response to the righteous
calls of dynastic change, she earned military merits. . . . The Princess’s
achievements matched those of a minister, and she should not be compared to
ordinary women. How could her funeral have no military band!” He then increased
the size of the band to make his point.
