Audio reading of the original text of Mulan Poetry: Web link
"Mulan Poetry" is a Yuefu folk song sung during the Southern and Northern Dynasties in China. Guo Maoqian's "Yuefu Poetry Collection" is included in "Hengchui Songs·Lianggujiao Hengchui" "Qu", together with "The Peacock Flying Southeast", are collectively known as the "Twin Jewels of Yuefu". This is a long narrative poem that tells the story of a girl named Mulan, who disguised herself as a man, joined the army for her father, made meritorious deeds on the battlefield, and did not want to be an official after returning to the court but only wanted to be reunited at home.
He enthusiastically praised this woman’s brave and kind-hearted character, her enthusiasm for defending her home and country, and her heroic and fearless spirit. The whole poem uses "Mulan is a girl" to conceive the legendary story of Mulan, which is full of romance; the detailed arrangement is very ingenious. Although it is about war, it focuses more on life scenes and the moods of children, which is full of life flavor; The characters' moods and psychology are described using techniques such as character question and answer, elaboration, parallelism, parallelism, and intertextuality, which are vivid and detailed, full of spirit, and have strong artistic appeal.
There are different opinions on the era when "Mulan Poetry" was produced, but according to the earliest record of it in "Gu Jin Yue Lu" written by Chen Shizhijiang, it can be proved that the era of its production is no later than Chen. The emperor is called "Khan" in the poem, and the battle locations are all in the north, so the place where they were born is in the Northern Dynasties. In the poem, there are lines such as "I bid farewell to the Yellow River in the morning and arrived at the top of the Black Mountain in the evening" and "I heard the chirping of the wild horses in Yanshan Mountain".
Heishan is Shahu Mountain, located southeast of Hohhot City, Inner Mongolia, not far from the Yellow River. According to this, the war in "Mulan Poetry" should have occurred between the Northern Wei Dynasty and Rouran. Rouran is a large nomadic country in the north. During the 158 years since its founding (394-552), it had many wars with the Northern Wei Dynasty, the Eastern Wei Dynasty and the Northern Qi Dynasty.
The most important battlefield is the Heishan and Yanshan areas mentioned in the poem. In the second year of Shengen of the Northern Wei Dynasty (429), Emperor Taiwu of the Northern Wei Dynasty made an expedition to the north of Rouran. He "drove out of the east road and headed for the Black Mountains" and "passed the Yanran Mountains in the north, three thousand miles from north to south" ("History of the North: Biography of Xixue", Xixue is Rouran).