8. Chu Renhuo also described Mulan’s death
Mulan appears in The Romance of Sui and Tang in an extended sub-plot, which focused on the activities of the Han Chinese and her relationship with her captors. Mulan appeared with her captor, Princess Xia, (the pair adopted each other as sisters) before the Emperor to plead for the life of the princess’s father. The emperor, impressed with the women’s willingness to offer their own lives in the captive’s place, allows the father to go free. Later, Mulan carries a letter to a soldier fighting the Chinese to whom the princess is secretly engaged. Mulan learns on her journey of the death of her father, and her secret of being a woman in man’s clothing becomes known to all, including the emperor. When the emperor attempts to place Mulan in his harem, she commits suicide.
The story in Chu Renhuo’s novel contained little of the simple folk tale first presented hundreds of years earlier in the ballad. It also placed Mulan as more integrated within Han society. Mulan’s younger sister, called Youlan in the text, also features prominently in the novel, including a deception in which she assumes the attire and bearing of a man. Mulan is depicted as sympathetic to the Han Chinese, half-Chinese in ancestry, and willing to give up her life rather than submit to the tyrannical behavior of a “foreign” emperor. She is less of a warrior and general, and more of a freedom fighter, another change to her legend which some submit is based on historical fact.