![]() Even the kids at our local swim club put on an elaborate pageant glorifying the pseudo-Chinese heroine fighting against the evil northern barbarians! And there must be hundreds of other similar fake history stories being written and plays being performed about Mulan each year all around the world. The world is so indoctrinated by Chinese propaganda - going back centuries before the PRC (but it's much worse now) - that everybody thinks Mulan is the Chinese version of Joan of Arc. In any event, the Xianbei weren't "Chinese" and they didn't speak "Chinese" / Sinitic. A Historical-Comparative Study of the Serbi or Xianbei Branch of the Serbi-Mongolic Language Family, with an Analysis of Northeastern Frontier Chinese and Old Tibetan Phonology (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017), with a just published review of it by András Róna-Tas in Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 24 (2018): 315-335. See now: Andrew Shimunek in Languages of Ancient Southern Mongolia and North China. Louis Ligeti already wrote about this in 1970: "Le Tabghach, un dialect de la langue sien-pi” Mongolian Studies, ed. Most scholars think that the Xianbei spoke a Proto-Turkic or Para-Mongolic language more or less closely related to Khitan (see here). She was of Xiānbēi (Wade-Giles Hsien-pei) 鮮卑 (*Särbi ) extraction - for the etymology, see here. ![]() I hope that everyone reading this post realizes that Mulan was not even Chinese (Sinitic / Han). Click on the title to read it if you have time and interest. " The Mulan trailer is a dismal sign Disney is bowing to China's nationalistic agenda: Mulan has been transformed from life-affirming epic to patriotic saga, showing Hollywood is prioritising box office success", Jingan Young, The Guardian (7/8/19) Groups of the Xianbei moved down into what we now know of as Northern China and, over a period of several centuries, founded a number of statelets, kingdoms, and dynasties there. Mulan was supposed to have lived during the Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534), which was ruled over by the Tuoba (Tabgach) clan of the Xianbei, a people having nomadic origins on the Eurasian Steppe (more about the ethnolinguistics of the Xianbei below). The people and places in the ballad are all from the far northern borderlands of China, and it is likely that this remarkable work was first conceived in one of the languages of that land of nomads. She is often compared with Joan of Arc, although the two do not share much more in common than the fact that they were both women warriors. This celebrated ballad tells of her resolve to take her father's place in fending off the encroaching Jou-jan nomads. Mulan (old pronunciation Muklan) was a member of the Särbi (Hsien-pei) people. Mair, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. ![]() Fundamentally, what we know about Mulan comes from an anonymous, medium-length (65 lines in the translation of Arthur Waley ) ballad dating to around the 5th-6th century. There's precious little historical evidence concerning Mulan upon which to base all the stories, plays, and now full-length films about her. A small minority of scholars are disappointed that the heroine is untrue to ethnic and linguistic reality. Westerners are upset that the film is pandering to PRC nationalism. Chinese viewers are complaining that the current Mulan is full of Oriental stereotypes. It seems that this movie is going to be much worse even than the previous animated film about the heroine, which was bad enough. Called tǔlóu 土楼 ("earthen structures") and mostly dating from the second half of the second millennium AD, these houses are situated far away in time, space, and culture from the northern, scrubby borderlands whence came non-Sinitic Mulan a millennium earlier. There is much hullabaloo over the new "Mulan" trailer:Īfter watching Mulan gallop across the horizon for a couple of seconds, the very first thing we see is something that really bothered me: a mammoth Hakka ( people, language ) round house in mountainous, heavily wooded south China.
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