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Christine Lee
The story of Mulan, a young woman who disguises herself as a man to fight for the emperor of China, has become one of the most well-known and beloved stories in the world, thanks in large part to Disney. The 1998 animated film The Mouse House, Mulan, raised $ 304 million worldwide and garnered Golden Globe and Oscar nominations. The next live-action release, delayed due to the pandemic, appears to outperform that performance when it finally launches. (It is currently scheduled for July 24, 2020.)
Mulan was long thought to be based on royal warriors from Xianbei, an ancient nomadic people in present-day Mongolia and northeast China. Now anthropologists believe they may have found physical evidence of such female warriors in skeletal remains found in that region.
The Chinese legend of Mulan first appears in various ancient texts, and eventually becomes a popular song. “The Ballad of Hua Mulan “, transcribed sometime in the 6th century. It tells the story of a young woman in the northern Wei era, spanning 386-536 CE, although some details were added later, around 620 CE, during the Tang dynasty. She takes her father’s place when each family is required to provide a man to serve in the emperor’s army. Hua Mulan serves for 12 years without any of his fellow soldiers suspecting his true gender. Later versions of the legend appeared in the late Ming dynasty, followed by a 1593 work by Xu Wei, and the Sui Tang Romance, a tragic novel from the seventeenth century by Chu Renhuo. In that, Mulan has a younger sister and is united with a fellow warrior named Xianniang.
Christine Lee is an anthropologist at California State University, Los Angeles, and specializes in the East Asia region. She had hosted a full symposium at the now canceled (thank you coronavirus!) Conference of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, called “The Hidden Life of Women,” which examines archaeological evidence of skeletal remains in hopes of obtaining an image. more accurate of historical roles. Of woman. “Historically, archeology has been a male-dominated field,” Lee told Ars, resulting in a possibly biased traditional interpretation (wives and mothers) of what women’s lives were like.
YouTube / Disney
Lee’s contribution to the symposium focused on female warriors, specifically nomadic women who lived north of the Great Wall of China thousands of years ago. The Xiongnu lived in the region 2,200 years ago, only to be displaced by the Xianbei about 1,850 years ago. The Xianbei in turn were displaced about 1470 years ago by Turkish populations.
Lee is well acquainted with the ancient poems, songs, and legends that celebrate the exploits of rumored female warriors, including Mulan’s ballad. Even the written records of the later Khitan period (around 900 CE) and the later Mongol medieval period mention queens who had their own armies. “I was thinking, if there are all these stories, why hasn’t anyone found these women?” she said. “It was just because no one was looking. I thought it was time to look.”
During his years of fieldwork, Lee has collected quite a bit of information from China and Mongolia. Along with his colleague Yahaira González, he re-examined the skeletons of 29 ancient Mongolian burial sites for evidence of arthritis, trauma, and certain musculoskeletal markers. By New scientist:
Three of the skeletons belonged to Xianbei women, and two were potentially warriors. Lee and González reached this conclusion in part due to the nature of the marks left on the bones where the muscles once attached. The markings are larger if the muscle was used heavily, and the pattern of markings on the skeletons of both women suggests that they had routinely worked the muscles that someone on horseback would use. There were also indications that they practiced archery.
This was a pleasant surprise for Lee. “It is a small sample size, only 29 burials, and there are two women who qualify,” she said. “That’s really a lot. I didn’t expect to find any.” This expanded role for certain women could be related to the political instability of that time, which was affected by outbreaks of violence for several hundred years after the collapse of the Han dynasty of China in 220 CE. In contrast, the skeletons of three Turkish women showed no evidence of archery, and only minimal signs of horsemanship.
Lee found no evidence of trauma, but this could be because the remains probably belonged to members of the elite class, due to their presence in the burial mounds, which are more like tombs, about 20-30 feet deep with various rooms. “It may be that the elite were not allowed to engage in close combat at this time,” Lee said, as other skeletons from China and Mongolia show signs of having been in battle.
