Mulan Illustrated: a literary theme in the art of the People's Republic of China in the 1940s and 1950s

Abstract

The Ballad of Mulan has undergone a long process of metamorphosis over the last millennium, not only in its transposition to the West, but also within Chinese culture itself. Its enduring popularity is explained by its narrative interest and the permeability of the story to different system of values. In this work, as part of a broader study on the avatars of the Mulan myth, we examine a set of iconographic representations of the character of Mulan in Chinese illustrations from the 1940s and 1950s. Such illustrations must be framed in the Chinese cultural context of those years. It is demonstrated that a function of these illustrated representations of the Ballad of Mulan is to disseminate ideological values of the communist regime. Likewise, these representations do not archaeologically reproduce the uses of the time when the Ballad was composed (5th century AD), but partly reflect the aesthetics of the time in which they were published (modern China of the People's Republic of China).