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Chapter 2

From Mulan to Unicorn

The Ballad of Mulan

Anonymous

Click, click, forever click, click;

Mulan sits at the door and weaves.

Listen, and you will not hear the shuttle's sound,

But only hear a girl's sobs and sighs.

“Oh tell me, lady, are you thinking of your love,

Oh tell me, lady, are you longing for your dear?”

“Oh no, oh no, I am not thinking of my love,

Oh no, oh no, I am not longing for my dear.

But last night I read the battle-roll;

The Qaghan has ordered a great levy of men.

The battle-roll was written in twelve books,

And in each book stood my father's name.

My father's sons are not grown men,

And of all my brothers, none is older than me.

Oh let me to the market to buy saddle and horse,

And ride with the soldiers to take my father's place.”

In the eastern market she's bought a gallant horse,

In the western market she's bought saddle and cloth.

In the southern market she's bought snaffle and reins,

In the northern market she's bought a tall whip.

In the morning she stole from her father's and mother's house;

At night she was camping by the Yellow River's side.

She could not hear her father and mother calling to her by her name,

But only the song of the Yellow River as its hurrying waters hissed and swirled through the night.

At dawn they left the River and went on their way;

At dusk they came to the Black Water's side.

She could not hear her father and mother calling to her by her name,

She could only hear the muffled voices of Scythian horsemen riding on the hills of Yan.

A thousand leagues she tramped on the errands of war,

Frontiers and hills she crossed like a bird in flight.

Through the northern air echoed the watchman's tap;

The wintry light gleamed on coats of mail.

The captain had fought a hundred fights, and died;

The warriors in ten years had won their rest.

They went home; they saw the Emperor's face;

The Son of Heaven was seated in the Hall of Light.

To the strong in battle lordships and lands he gave;

And of prize money a hundred thousand strings.

Then spoke the Qaghan and asked her what she would take.

“Oh, Mulan asks not to be made

A Counsellor at the Qaghan's court;

She only begs for a camel that can march

A thousand leagues a day,

To take her back to her home.”

When her father and mother heard that she had come,

They went out to the wall and led her back to the house.

When her little sister heard that she had come,

She went to the door and rouged her face afresh.

When her little brother heard that his sister had come,

He sharpened his knife and darted like a flash

Toward the pigs and sheep.

She opened the gate that leads to the eastern tower,

She sat on her bed that stood in the western tower.

She cast aside her heavy soldier's cloak,

And wore again her old-time dress.

She stood at the window and bound her cloudy hair;

She went to the mirror and fastened her yellow combs.

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!

For the male hare has a lilting, lolloping gait,

And the female hare has a wild and roving eye;

But set them both scampering side by side,

And who so wise could tell you “This is he”?¹

On January 23, 1999, the Associated Press reported from Istanbul, in an article titled “Turkey Nationalists Protest ‘Mulan,’” that a Turkish nationalist party wanted to ban the Disney movie Mulan in Turkey, claiming, “This animated film distorts and blackens the history of the Turks by showing the Huns as bad and the Chinese as peace-lovers.”

As this chapter demonstrates, it is ironic that the very name of the heroine Mulan, much less the cultural background of the legend on which the Disney film was based, was not even Sinitic or Hàn Chinese to start with, but came from a nomadic and Turco-Mongol milieu. Furthermore, as the title of this chapter suggests, the true meaning of the name Mulan may turn out to be very close to that of another popular figure in animated cartoons. These facts are in addition to another, perhaps bigger, irony—namely that the dominating “Chinese” of the Mulan story were none other than the Tuoba, a Turkic group according to some linguists, ancient as well as modern.

The Name Mulan

The Mulan story comes almost entirely from a folk ballad, “The Ballad of Mulan,” of unknown origin and time, but generally believed to be of the Tuoba Wei (the Late or Northern Wei, 386–534) era. Parts of the poem, especially the following six lines, show traces of literati refinement of later periods, hence the speculation that the poem may also be from the time of the Tang dynasty (618–907):

A thousand leagues she tramped on the errands of war,

Frontiers and hills she crossed like a bird in flight.

Through the northern air echoed the watchman's tap;

The wintry light gleamed on coats of mail.

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 name, a cultural import likely related to Buddhism, for avoiding the gods' jealousy is also out of the question, as mulan in Chinese was anything but an unworthy object.

Conversely, two other sources, namely Bei Qi shu (History of the Northern Qi) and portions of Bei shi (History of the Northern Dynasties) that were not based on Zhou shu and hence not subjected to many political and cultural taboos that affected the latter, give us a clear picture that Mulan was simply the true or “native” name of Hán Xiong, who was born and raised in what later became part of the Northern Qi realm, but who revolted against the state and went to join the rival Northern Zhou regime. These two sources never even bothered with Hán's formal name Xiong, but always called him “Hán Mulan the prefecture resident,” or even “Hán Mulan the traitor.” Yet according to Zhou shu, Mulan was Hán's style, hence always a more respectful form than his formal Sinitic name Xiong.

Let me note a few more points:

1. Hán was one of the “Barbarian” surnames at the time. This was documented in detail in Yao Weiyuan's study of these names.⁷ For instance, Bei Qi shu (24.294) has included a person named Hán Xiongnu, “Hán the Hun.”

2. Even among the “Chinese” Hán clans, the most important home origin was the prefecture of Changli, a frontier area in northeast China, which naturally led to the emergence of many “Barbarianized” Hán clan persons. For example, Hán Feng of the Northern Qi was such a figure from Changli, who loved to call other ethnic Hàn Chinese persons “Hàn dogs” (Bei shi 92.3053). The most famous native son of this frontier region during the Tang, by the way, was none other than An Lushan, a “Barbarian of mixed (Turco-Sogdian) origin,” who almost toppled the Tang dynasty.⁸ Although the celebrated Tang poet, essayist, philosopher, and statesman Hán Yü was from Dezhou in Henan, his ancestors hailed from Changli, and he advertised this fact by choosing Changli as his cognomen.

3. Hán Xiong came from a hereditary military family (Sui shu 52.1347), whose even more famous son Hán Qinhu, “Hán the tiger-catcher,” later was one of the two generals (the other was Heruo Bi of undisputed Xianbei descent) to conquer the Southern dynasty of Chen in 589, unifying China for the Sui for the first time since the collapse of the Western Jin in 316. Hán Qinhu's achievements were the stuff of legend, as related in Dunhuang manuscript S2144, which was written more than three centuries later.

4. The ultimate proof that Mulan was simply Hán Xiong's original name is nothing other than the remnant of his own tomb inscription dated, in lunar calendar, the eighteenth day of the eleventh month of the third year of Tianhe (December 22, 568), a rubbing of which is preserved in the municipal library of Beijing.⁹ This rubbing states that this general-in-chief of the (Northern) Zhou was simply named Mulan, period, without mentioning at all the Sinitic name Xiong in the officially sanctioned biography. As I noted in Chapter 1, this fits well the pattern that the Northern Zhou was in reality a more “Xianbei-ized” power among the two competing successor states of the Tuoba Wei, yet its official records have been subjected to much heavier sinification doctoring.

5. There was a deep-rooted custom of this epoch among the former “Barbarians” and “Barbarianized” Chinese, including the Sui and Tang royal houses, of keeping one's “Barbarian” name as a “style” or “childhood name,” as examined in the previous chapter. A good example of correspondence between a “Barbarian” style and a formal Sinitic name is the case of Hulü Jin. He was an able general of Turkic-Uighur origin of the Northern Qi and has left us with “The Song of Chile (Tölös?),”¹⁰ admired by many today as one of the best poems ever written in Chinese literary history. The late Peter Boodberg was the first to recognize his style Aliudun as the Turco-Mongolian word altun for jin, “gold.”¹¹

The evidence cited earlier clearly shows that the name of Hán Xiong, a.k.a. Mulan, was yet another case of a “Sinitic-name with ‘Barbarian’-style.” Therefore, the name Mulan under the Tuoba regime and its successors was in fact a “Barbarian” name, not a feminine appellation as one would expect based on its standard meaning in Chinese. That was why the name of Mulan, the heroine, which was most likely a surname rather than a given name, a conclusion based on further evidence revealed later, never betrayed her true gender to her comrades in the army. In addition, given the case of Hán Xiong, the Chinese namestyle correspondence rule would provide a good clue to what the “Barbarian” name Mulan actually meant, as will be elaborated later.

Variants of the “Barbarian” Name Mulan

Before setting forth to study the true meaning of the name Mulan, first I cite and examine other forms or transcriptions of that name. These forms further strengthen the inference that Mulan was indeed a “Barbarian” appellation. They may also help decode the original meaning of the name.

The most apparent variant is the Tuoba clan name Pulan¹² for the following reasons.

1. It is certainly the rule rather than the exception that a “Barbarian” name had several different transcriptions in Chinese characters. The previously cited superb study of “Barbarian” names by Yao Weiyuan contains numerous examples. In addition to the natural scenario that other versions might have been rendered in different Chinese dialects, or simply with individual taste, it may also reflect the variations among the “Barbarian” tongues.

2. The Middle Chinese pronunciation of Mulan is muk-lân, while Pulan was pronounced either b'uk-lân or b'uok-lân.13 The closeness of the two names is also vouched for by the fact that in modern southern Fujian dialect, which is also the prevailing local dialect in Taiwan, Mulan is still pronounced something like b'ok-lān.14

3. Cases of Middle Chinese transcribing a foreign b- sound by m- are too numerous to list. Two examples are the well-known medieval Chinese transcription moheduofor baγadur, “hero,” and the less known transcription mole for bäliq, the Turkic word for “fish.”¹⁵ Phonetically, it is easy to understand how b-/m- interchanges would have occurred, since both are nonplosive labials.

4. The m- ~ b- equivalence is also attested by the ancient Turkic transcription ban and bou of the Chinese words wan (Middle Chinese miwan) and wu (mau) respectively.¹⁶ This further became the main rule of sound correspondence between different Turkic dialects in al-Kašγarī's Divan, as summarized by Robert Dankoff.¹⁷

5. The view that the name Mulan in “The Ballad of Mulan” represented a clan name appeared very early and cannot be dismissed as a later fabrication. The long historic era from the two Jin dynasties (265–420) until the end of the Tang was known for its obsession with clan history and genealogical studies. Yet Mulan as a family name hardly ever was mentioned in all these references, much less leaving an attested instance.¹⁸ Meanwhile the surname Pulan (and its sinicized form Pu) has left numerous cases and records.

6. There are several different theories regarding Mulan the heroine's birthplace, with one thing in common: they all point to the region known as Henan (“South of the Yellow River”) in contemporary China, which was much greater in size than the modern province of Henan. It is intriguing to note that Henan was also where most Tuoba clans were ordered to settle as their new “native” place after Emperor Xiaowen moved the Tuoba capital from Pingcheng in the north to the ancient Chinese capital of Luoyang in 493–94. Further strengthening my case is the fact that not only Hán Xiong, a.k.a. Mulan, was from Henan, but so were the Pulan clans since Tuoba times.¹⁹

7. To the possible argument that Pulan was only a surname, whereas Mulan, at least in the case of Hán Xiong the general, was used as a given name, let me first note that the notion of a surname or clan name was a Chinese one that the Tuoba did not possess even after settling in China. For instance, a Tuoba courtier of Sinitic origin who wanted to dodge his southern compatriots' question regarding his identity made an interesting statement (Song shu 59.1600): “I am a [Tuoba] Xianbei, thus do not have a family name.” Second, Pulan was in fact also attested as a given name, assumed by none other than a Tuoba nobleman. According to Song shu (72.1857 and 74.1924) and ZZTJ (126.3979), there was a Tuoba nobleman named Tuoba Pulan. Careful comparison with Wei shu (4.104–5, 24.654, and 97.2140) reveals the nobleman's sinified name to be Zhangsun Lan.

All these points combined leave little doubt that Mulan and Pulan were the same item in the contemporary “Barbarian” onomasticon, used as both clan names and given names in northern China during the period.

Another possible transcription of the same root is the popular given name Fulian (b'iuk-liän). This name was widely attested, from Tuoba generals to even a qaghan of the Tuyuhun,²⁰ a nomadic people who had migrated from northeast China to the grassland bordering modern Tibet. In transcription data, the character fu is frequently interchangeable with bu (b'uo), fo (b'iust, primarily for transcribing “Buddha”), and so on, a subject I visit again. According to Louis Bazin,²¹ for transcribing “Barbarian” names the character lian (liän) represents an original län. This is attested by the case of the “Barbarian” name Youlian, which was said to mean “cloud,” or Mongol ä'ülän.22

This probable form provides us with another interesting name-style correspondence. According to Bei Qi shu (20.283), an important “Barbarian” figure of the Northern Qi, namely Kudi (or Shedi) Fulian, had a style Zhongshan, “amid the mountains.” The relevance of this name will be demonstrated shortly.

Preliminary Notes on the Meaning of Mulan

More than half a century ago, Louis Bazin had already tried to identify the original Altaic word for the name Pulan (b'uk-lân or b'uok-lân), which as I have shown was just a variant of Mulan. His solutions ranged from boq, “excrement,” and buq, “bad temper,” to boγ, “bag for clothes”—hardly satisfactory, as Bazin himself acknowledged. Even with much expanded historical data at our disposal, such identification remains a difficult task.

One has to first narrow the scope of the search. Given the two name-style correspondences cited earlier, and the strong cultural tradition among the Altaic people, many of whom roamed the Steppes with the herds, or hunted animals in the forests, I submit that the name Mulan/Pulan is most likely to have come from the animal kingdom, in sharp contrast to its meaning in Chinese.

Let us look at the second character lan. Bazin took it as representing the Turkic plural suffix -lar, which, while phonetically not impossible, was unfortunately not substantiated by any Chinese transcription data regarding the Tuoba. In my opinion, a generic animal suffix -lān, to be further examined later, is the most likely interpretation in this case. A less likely possibility is an -n suffix in the Tuoba language with unknown grammatical function suggested by several other cases.²³

This last possibility leads to a root b ‘uk-lâ of the name Mulan/Pulan in Middle Chinese, suggesting an Old Turkic word buγra, “camel stallion.” But this solution, except for the fact that it meets the “male, mighty” name-style correspondence, has several difficulties, both major and secondary, and is therefore hard to sustain.

First, if we take the name Fulian as another form of the same root, then Kudi Fulian's style Zhongshan, “amid the mountains,” is difficult to reconcile with fulian, since that is a camel and not a forest animal.

Second, there are both spatial and temporal problems with the “camel” solution. The early camel name attestations in the Altaic milieu, most prominently that of the Karakhanid Bughra Khan,²⁴ and several persons from the Western Türk Empire,²⁵ were not only of later periods but also from a region much to the west in Central Asia, where the camel was of great importance, whereas the Tuoba originated in forest regions in northeast China.

However, the principal difficulty with the “camel” solution is cultural. As has been previously stated, after the collapse of the Western Jin, various nomad and former nomad groups dominated the political arena in northern China for many centuries, well into the first half of the Tang. During this long period, the Steppe cultures made enormous inroads into the Central Kingdom. Despite the stubborn sinocentric tradition of Chinese historiography and the heavily biased records, the fact that the descendants of the Tuoba and their northern brethren had dominated the Chinese world until at least the end of the Song, according to the Yuan dynasty historian Hu Sanxing, is bound to betray many of these northern traits, some of which were elaborated in the previous chapter. Chinese onomastics provides another good example, as it contains not only the “Barbarian” elements but also the strong influence of the Iranians and other Western Regions peoples, who had been an almost perpetual ally of the Steppe powers vis-à-vis China, a little studied subject for the Tuoba era. The sudden appearance and popularity of various theophoric personal names as examined in a later chapter is a particular case.

This is where the primordial problem with a “camel” interpretation of Pulan/Mulan lies. Animal origin proper names, a cultural tradition enormously popular with the Altaic people, were widely attested in Chinese nomenclature during that time, reflecting the political dominance of the nomadic groups in northern China. Even animals abhorred or despised in Hàn Chinese culture but respected by the northern people, such as wolf and dog, were attested in the contemporary Chinese onomasticon, not just in surnames, but more importantly among given names (see cases cited in Chapter 3). To this author's knowledge, the camel, with a neutral or even positive cultural image in China and mentioned in “The Ballad of Mulan” (“She only begs for a camel that can march a thousand leagues a day”), was never attested in personal names in northern China during the entire period. The only suspicious case was the old Chinese surname Luo. The character meant a white horse with black mane but later became part of the word luotuo, “camel.” In Wei shu (113.3308) a “Barbarian” clan name Taluoba (t'â-lâk-b'uât) was sinified to Luo. In addition to the fact that a single character luo was never attested as referring to “camel” during that period, the original name cannot be linked to any Altaic word for “camel” unless one assumes that the middle character (luo) was an erroneous insertion and should be dropped. There is no evidence whatsoever for such a contention. The name conversion here follows the standard sound-based pattern of shortening a multicharacter “Barbarian” name to one of its original characters.

As for the “camel” names borne by Turkic personalities of later periods, I am of the opinion that they were the result of Iranic influence. Moreover, I submit that camel personal names originated with the ancient Iranic groups, attested by such early cases as Zarathuštra, the presumed founder of Zoroastrianism. Mary boyce, among others, interprets the name as “he who can manage camels,” based on the Indo-Iranian root *uštra for “camel.”²⁶

A Cervid Alternative

A more likely Altaic cognate to Pulan/Mulan, in my opinion, is bulān (with phonetic variants like pulan, bolan, bülän, etc.). In various Altaic languages it means “elk,” “stag,” “moose,” “deer,” and so forth.²⁷ The most striking meaning is certainly al-Kašγarī 's definition of “a large wild animal…with one horn.”²⁸ The last interpretation is very important, because, as examined by Denis Sinor, it makes bulān the only “native” Altaic word for “unicorn.”²⁹ But this word's original meaning, as most scholars seem to agree, has to be “elk,” or a large, likely male, member of the Cervidae family.

Semantically, these meanings would fit the name Pulan/Mulan perfectly regarding the two name-style relations revealed earlier, namely “male, mighty” and “amid the mountains.” No less important, the “unicorn” or “elk,” “deer” interpretation also solves the aforementioned main difficulty with the “camel” solution, namely attestation in the contemporary Tuoba onomasticon.

The “unicorn,” or qilin, in Chinese (cf. Japanese kirin), transcribed into Old Turkic as kälän,³⁰ was a highly respected symbol and semimythic token of auspiciousness since ancient times in China. Confucius was said to have waited for the coming of the unicorn as the sign of the advent of a sage ruler. Other legends associating Confucius with the unicorn developed in later times. Nonetheless, direct use of the full word as a personal name was not attested until the Southern and Northern dynasties. It was certainly more a popular, almost vulgar, name for the common folk rather than a refined and elegant appellation for the educated gentry class,³¹ and hence it was rarely observed in standard histories. It is therefore interesting to note that the name Qilin seemed particularly popular among the Tuoba and its ethnic subjects, with at least four direct attestations (Wei shu 40.917, 60.1331; Zhou shu 19.311, 27.453). Three of them had unmistakable “Barbarian” surnames: Lu (short form of Buliugu, related to the ethnic name Buluoji), Chigan, and Yuwen. The fourth, Hán Qilin, interestingly had the same surname as Hán Mulan and was clearly recorded as hailing from a frontier region with a self-claimed Hàn ancestry, a standard euphemism for an actual “Barbarian” origin. It may not be farfetched to conjecture that Hán Mulan had to be given a different Chinese name, Xiong, because he and Hán Qilin were contemporaries living in the same region.

In addition, a single character lin was frequently attested in “Barbarian” names. Without further evidence, it is difficult to ascertain whether the character stood for “unicorn” or merely transcribed some foreign sound. There were, however, near certain examples to show that it was indeed a “unicorn” name. For example, a certain Murong Lin took a reported sighting of a qilin as an omen for his imperial ambitions. There was also a Murong Pulin whose name (Middle Chinese pronunciation p'uo-lien) came very close to being a variant of bulān (Jin shu 127.3164; Wei shu 15.374).

Table 2.1. Number of Officially Recorded Appearances and Sightings of Unicorn

The cultural background here is the previously little noted fact that the Tuoba were particularly obsessed with the unicorn. The following summary, whose statistics cover five dynasties of the period, based on an extensive examination of the respective official histories, namely Jin shu, Song shu, Nan Qi shu, Liang shu, and Wei shu, clearly demonstrate the point. In Table 2.1, the first four regimes were southern and Sinitic (Hàn), and the Tuoba Wei was the ethnic power in the north. Because all were regional dynasties, sightings outside their respective realm were not counted.

Among other things, this lopsided table reflects the fact that the cervids were, and still are, often considered sacred animals in Altaic cultures.³² Such beliefs were widespread in ancient Eurasia, extending all the way to northern Europe. The vast range of ancient cervid images and symbols on the Old Continent has led to the notion of a “cosmic deer.”³³ One may even further infer that this tradition shared with the Chinese qilin (“unicorn”) worship a common origin that dates back to before the advent of a deep cultural divide epitomized by the Great Wall, when intensive farming had completely taken over China's economy, a process largely completed during the last five hundred years BC.

In addition to these statistics, there are other examples that demonstrate the “cervid cult” among the ethnic groups in northern China at the time, exemplified by the Tuoba par excellence.

• The Tuoba emperor Taiwu (Tuoba Tao) used the reign title Shenjia (428–31), “sacred/godly (female) deer.” This was the only reign title in Chinese history figuring a cervid.

• In addition, there were only three other reign titles in Chinese history that used the character lin, “(female) unicorn,” as a qualifier. The first two were both Linjia, “auspice of unicorn,” first (316–17) used by the self-proclaimed Xiongnu leader Liu Cong of the Former Zhao, and then duplicated (389–95) by the Di/Tibetan leader Lü Guang of the Later Liang. The third was Linde, “virtue of unicorn” (664–65), by the early Tang emperor Gaozong (Li Zhi). The Tang imperial house was in fact the Tuoba's political and biological heir, as I have shown.

• The Tuoba had an intriguing early legend, recorded prominently twice in Wei shu (1.2 and 112b.2927), about their tribes in the process of coming out of the forest region in northeast China, probably during the second or third century AD, being guided by a mysterious sacred animal with “a body like a horse and the voice of a cow” to the rich grassland that had been the “old Xiongnu country.” One recalls immediately the celebrated doe that led the Huns across the Cimmerian Bosporus into the Crimea,³⁴ as well as the famous giant unicorn, “with the body of a deer and the tail of a horse,” who stopped Genghis Khan from entering India, directing him to march home instead.³⁵

• In sharp contrast to the Chinese tradition of regarding the unicorn as a sign of peace and exhortation against killing, the Tuoba introduced a martial or military dimension of the unicorn symbol by installing forty qilinguan, “unicorn officers,” to guard the royal palaces (Wei shu 113.2974). This, in my opinion, was the likely origin of the Tang's adoption of the unicorn icon, together with the tiger, lion, eagle, and leopard, as the standard insignia for the military uniform (Jiu Tang shu 45.1953; see also Tong dian 61.1725.). This new “warrior” role of the unicorn, while conflicting with the Sinitic belief, fit perfectly with the ancient deer images on the Steppe and in Siberia.³⁶

In the final analysis, behind the façade of the Tuoba's royally decreed sinification were deep-rooted Steppe cultural traditions among the former nomadic people in China, a parallel “Barbarian” nomenclature being one of the traits, exemplified by the “Barbarian” style or “childhood name” born by the Northern aristocracy, including the Sui and Tang imperial houses. Therefore, the Tuoba's unicorn worship and widely attested qilin names must have had a “Barbarian” original. Moreover, Denis Sinor's study “Sur les noms altaiques de la licorne” shows that qilin as a Chinese loanword did not appear in Altaic languages until after the Uighurs left Mongolia and settled in the Central Asian oases. Let me refer again to his conclusion that bulān was the only native Altaic word for “unicorn.” Besides, its use as a personal name was attested by that of a Khazar king,³⁷ much earlier than the case of the Karakhanid Bughra Khan.

I take special note of the Eurasian and Steppe tradition of associating the cervids with maleness. For instance, Enn Ernits's recent study of the Sami reindeer myths in the Kola Peninsula concludes, “In Sami folk religion, the reindeer is associated with male lineage.”³⁸ In addition, though Esther Jacobson in her book on deer worship in ancient Siberia tries hard to establish the existence of a deer goddess, she acknowledges that the huge number of so-called deer stones found in many places on the Steppe represent an image that “unquestionably refers to a human male” such that “the male reference of the stone is beyond doubt.” She also cites other scholars' studies from which “the assumption that the antlered deer image referred to the male progenitor of the nomadic people and the conclusion that the deer image of the Scytho-Siberians refers to totem, tribal ancestor, male warrior, and maleness have been derived” (all italics in the quotations here are added by me).³⁹ Such intrinsic maleness of the deer image on the Steppe resonates naturally with the Mulan-Xiong name-style correspondence cited earlier.

Chinese Transcription Notes

Despite the strong evidence for the existence of a “Barbarian” unicorn name in the Tuoba realm, a phonetic difficulty for linking Pulan/Mulan to this name is the Middle Chinese ending -k in the first character. It is therefore legitimate to question whether the Chinese forms could have been a transcription of bulān or its variants, which does not seem to show any trace of a velar.

The two Chinese characters of concern, namely pu and mu, belonged to the old rusheng, “entering tone,” category, characterized by a final stop (-t, -k, -p), which still exists today in several southern dialects, especially Cantonese. Nearly fifty years ago Edwin Pulleyblank published a study⁴⁰ demonstrating the wide use of “entering-tone” characters to represent a single consonant in a foreign consonant cluster or a single final consonant. An additional conclusion of his is that the Chinese name Tujue may have simply represented Türk, not the commonly assumed Mongolic plural form *Türküt ever since the time of Joseph Markwart and Paul Pelliot, prompted by the final -t in the Chinese transcription.

This last conclusion faces a technical difficulty that, in all Pulleyblank's well-substantiated examples of foreign consonant clusters, the rusheng character always transcribed the first consonant rather than the final as the case of Türk would require. This point notwithstanding, his general contention that such a character so often transcribed a single consonant is certainly valid. What I propose is to advance his observation one step further. If a rusheng character could represent only its initial consonant in transcribing a foreign word, it would seem no less natural that it could also represent its initial consonant plus the vowel, that is, the full syllable minus the final stop.

A careful study of the vast Chinese transcription data confirms that such uses of rusheng characters, which, by the way, cannot be easily explained by assimilation or other types of absorption into the next syllable, indeed abound. Space considerations prevent me from listing many more than a few illustrative cases most pertinent to my study. Unpronounced final stops are highlighted in boldface. To avoid extensive notes, except as otherwise indicated, the Sanskrit transcription data are based on the several Sino-Sanskrit glossaries in the Taishō Tripitaka and P. C. Bagchi's two-volume study of Sanskrit-Chinese transcriptions.

• The ancient Central Asian city transcribed as Mulu (muk-luk) (Hou Han shu 88.2918 and Xin Tang shu 221b.6245) has been identified by almost all scholars (F. Hirth, E. Chavannes, P. Pelliot, etc.) as the modern city of Merv, known as Mûlu in ancient times.⁴¹

• The Sanskrit name Bhuţa for Tibet (Bod) was transcribed as Puzha (b'uk-ta)42

• Here is a sample of cases from Taishō Tripitaka (Chinese transcription < Sanskrit word):

◊ boqifu (puât-kiət-b'iwak) pakva, “cooked, ripe.”

◊ yutaimo (jiu-t'âi-muât) < utma, “high.”

◊ shejiedi (siät-kiät-tiei) < çakti, “spear.”

◊ salishabo (sät-lji-şat-puâ) < sarşapa, “mustard.”

◊ nalameluo (nâp-lât-muâ-lâ) < duravala/durbala, “weak.”⁴³

◊ naqu (nâp-kiwo) < dukha, “pain, hardship.”

• Even the famous Buddhist pilgrim-scholar Xuanzang (600–664), well known for having mastered the Sanskrit language and for his rigor in translating Buddhist sutras (as well as for likely being responsible for translating a sutra from Chinese back to Sanskrit)⁴⁴ left many such cases. Two examples are juduo(k'iuk-tâ) for gupta in many personal names (the Pali form gutta cannot reconcile with the final -k of the first character either), and biboluo (piët-puět-lâ) for pippala, “pepper.”⁴⁵

• The “Nine (Uighur) Tribes” as recorded in the two official Tang histories⁴⁶ provide us with a telling pair: Yaoluoge (iak-lâ-kât) and Yaowuge (iak-miuat-kât). The first was attested in the Saka portion of the famous Staël Holstein scroll as yah:idakari and in Uighur Runic inscriptions as yaγlaqar. The second, however, was rendered as yabūttikari in the Holstein scroll. W. B. Henning, for one, already wondered how the same Chinese character yao (iak) could be used in rendering both yaγ and ya.⁴⁷

• Pelliot⁴⁸ has identified the Pa-lan-ba Sum-pa people (-ba is a suffix) mentioned in the Tibetan version of the Inquiry of Vimalaprabha with the Bailan (b 'vk -lân) tribe in Chinese records.

It should be noted that the first two examples were about the same initial characters as in the name Pulan/Mulan, whereas the last example is a striking parallel to our contention that Chinese b'uk-lân ~ Altaic bulān.

What may be more revealing is a group of “Barbarian” tribe names with known variants:⁴⁹

1. Chili (tsiet-lji) ~ Chilie (tsiet-liät).

2. Qifu (k'iat-b'iu) ~ Qibu (k'iat-b'uo) ~ Qifo (k'iat-b'iuat) ~ Qifu (k'iat-b'iuk).

3. Pugu (b 'uk-kuo') ~ Pugu (b 'uk-kuat).⁵⁰

4. Dabu (dât-b'uo) ~ Dabo (dât- b'uat).

5. Hesui (γâ-zwi) ~ Heshu (γâ-dz'iuět).

6. Mozhe (mâk-tsia) ~ Mozhe (mâk-tśiât).⁵¹

At first glance, the forms with a final -t would seem to strengthen the old Markwart-Pelliot theory that the Chinese name Tujue for Türk represented some (proto-)Mongol plural form *Türküt. But after closer examination, in addition to the equivalent forms with an open final syllable, a (proto-)Mongol intermediary cannot be substantiated in most cases, much less accommodate the difficulty with the -k endings and the Qiang/Tibetan names (6). On the contrary, these variants lend strong support to the contention that a rusheng's final stop corresponded to an open syllable in many a Chinese rendition of foreign words. The frequent -t ending can easily be explained by the simple fact that, among the rusheng characters, this type is more numerous, at least in transcriptions. One may note, for instance, that one “Barbarian” clan name was recorded by two different dynastic histories as Fulugu (b'iuk-luk-ku) and Buliugu (b'uo-luk-ku) respectively,⁵² a cognate of Bulgar, the name of the people who founded the medieval Bulgarian kingdom, as we shall see. The avoidance of initial consonant clusters by the Altaic languages makes it clear that the first character in these two Chinese renditions must be transcribing more than just a consonant b-. Incidentally, these cases and the Saka form bākū for the tribe name (3) Puku (b 'uk-kuat) strongly support Clauson's seemingly idiosyncratic reading Türkü as the Old Turkic form of the name Türk, a notion heavily criticized by, among others, Pulleyblank.⁵³

The clan name transcription Fulugu, by the way, reminds me of the use of the first character fu (b'iuk) as a frequent alternative, especially in Buddhist theophoric names, to the character fo (b'iuat), the standard transcription of “Buddha.” The final stop -k in the former, therefore, had to be silent in such transcriptions.

My thesis that, in transcribing a foreign word, the medieval Chinese “enteringtone” characters often have a silent final stop is in fact not new. After examining similar data, J. Harmatta also reached the conclusion that the Chinese rusheng syllables “must have had two phonetic variants” (CVC and CV), so that “[these] two phonetic realizations of the [rusheng] syllables permitted their alternative use for representing both foreign syllables with final stop and those without it.”⁵⁴

In addition, more than sixty years ago, while studying the Uighur translation of the biography of the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, Denis Sinor uncovered the same phenomenon from the opposite direction, namely that Chinese rusheng characters could be transcribed into Old Turkic without the final stop. Interestingly, in three cases documented by Sinor, we have Chinese final -k ~ Old Turkic zero.⁵⁵

Between Camel and Unicorn

The above discussions demonstrate the plausibility of a “unicorn” interpretation of the name Pulan/Mulan by the word bulān. Yet one has to admit that phonetically the word buγra also sounds like a plausible solution. A comprehensive exposition of the Mulan question, therefore, cannot be closed without reviewing some additional material or old controversies in Altaic linguistics in this regard.

Let us take another look of the word buγra. It is noted that this gender-specific word was not, and still is not, the primary term for “camel” in Altaic languages, as the Turkic word tevē and its numerous variations and cognates in other tongues have an undisputed claim in this regard.⁵⁶ This leads me to question the original meaning of buγra.

Even today within the Turkic family, buγra does not universally mean “a camel stallion.” In Yakut, the cognate word būr stands for “male (deer).” The similar meaning (“male elk”) is found in several other Turkic languages.⁵⁷ This, plus the Suomi-Finnish word peura, “game animal,” has led Matti Räsänen to state that “buγra does not mean, originally, male camel, but a male reindeer.”⁵⁸In other words, similar to bulān, “unicorn,” buγra also had a cervid origin. Gerhard Doerfer appears to accept the possibility of such a “semantic change (Bedeutungswandlung)” while disallowing Räsänen's Suomi-Finnish cognates.⁵⁹

Whether Räsänen's conclusion is correct or not, it would seem natural to assume that ancient people might not be overly concerned about the taxonomic accuracy regarding the Cervidae and the Camelidae, or for that matter among many herbivore ruminants. What Räsänen has mentioned is but one example of this disregard of scientific rigor. One can also cite the Yakuts' use of the word taba, a cognate of the general Turkic word tevē, “camel,” for “reindeer.”⁶⁰ This mix-up of the Cervidae and the Camelidae is also reflected in the Chinese name tuolu, “camel-deer,” for Alces alces, a large cervid. According to an eleventh-century source, this large member of the deer family, and presumably its name too, was from the “Northern Barbarians.”⁶¹ I also cite the Chinese character luo for luotuo, “camel,” which originally had nothing to do with Camelidae, but meant a “white horse with black mane,” adding an equestrian angle to this linguistic jumble of herbivorous quadrupeds. It may be noted that the meaning of the word bulān in Caucasian languages becomes “bison” (e.g., Chechen bula, “bison”).⁶² The original meaning of the English word “deer” may be another example. According to the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “deer” originally meant “beast: usually a quadruped.” The German cognate Tier, “animal,” certainly attests to this general meaning.

It would not therefore seem farfetched to further Räsänen's theory regarding bγra to include also the Tuoba, who originated in a forest region where camels would, to say the least, hardly be a daily concern. Even today we see many seemingly redundant expressions such as bγra tävä in Ottoman Turkish, which supports the thesis that the meaning “camel” for bγra was not the original. This can also be compared with the Iranian-origin mäjä, widely borrowed into Turkic, meaning generally “female animal” and in particular “she-camel.”⁶³

At this point, a certain parallel if not cognitive relationship can be observed among the Altaic words bγra, “camel stallion”; buγu, “deer stag”; and buqa, “bull,” as has previously been both suggested and rebuked by Altaic linguists, and may continue to be debated in the future.⁶⁴ A distinct common thread in these words, however, is undeniable, in that all three primarily refer to a male ruminant quadruped.

Finally, let us examine the word bulān again. The short vowel length in the first syllable seems to have excluded any possibility of a preexisting velar. Its etymology, befitting a “unicorn,” has remained a mystery. After all, according to Chinese tradition, a unicorn is a combination of many animal characteristics, including that of a deer, a horse, a buffalo or bison, and so on. W. Bang, while acknowledging the ambiguous etymology, suggests that the form bulān may have been influenced by qulān, “wild ass.”⁶⁵ It is Gerard Clauson who points out that -lān appears to be a generic animal suffix.⁶⁶ There are at least seven such names listed by al-Kašγarī: pulān, “elk”; qulān, “wild ass”; arslān, “lion”; burslān, “tiger”; aplān, “rat”; yamlān, “rat”; and yilān, “snake.”⁶⁷ I can further add baklān, “a particular kind of lamb,”⁶⁸ and qaplān, “tiger.”⁶⁹ Because these names cut across several animal groups—carnivore, herbivore (both ruminants and rodents), and reptiles—it is very tempting to ascribe the suffix to possible personification or deification of totemic animals. In any case, the real signifying root of bulān would have to be bu-. As such, its primary meaning of “a large male cervid” would put this word into the same general “stag/bull” category discussed earlier.

Indeed, in his excellent Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages, Sergei Starostin proposed an Altaic root *mula, “a kind of deer,” with Tungusic *mul- and Proto-Mongolian *maral, “mountain deer,” and Proto-Turkic *bulan, “elk.”⁷⁰ This root, especially the Proto-Turkic form, would be a near perfect fit for the Tuoba name Mulan.

In conclusion, it is difficult to determine with certainty the original form for any word in the ancient Tuoba language, which has been dead and lost for over a millennium. But it is fairly safe to infer that the name Mulan, transcribing either bulān or buklān, once belonged to the same “stag/bull” word group in the Altaic family that included, inter alia, the only native Altaic word for “unicorn.”