Hua Mulan is depicted in the Wu Shuang Pu (無雙譜, Table of Peerless Heroes) by Jin Guliang.

In the story, after prolonged and distinguished military service against nomadic hordes beyond the northern frontier, Mulan is honored by the emperor, but she declines a position of high office.

[note 2] The historical setting of the Ballad of Mulan is usually the Northern Wei's military campaigns against the nomadic Rouran.

The Ballad of Mulan was first transcribed in the Musical Records of Old and New,[note 4] a compilation of books and songs by the monk Zhijiang in the Southern Chen dynasty in the 6th century.

[6] According to later books such as Female Mulan, her family name is Zhu (朱), while the Romance of Sui and Tang says it is Wei (魏).

[citation needed] Mulan's name is included in Yan Xiyuan's One Hundred Beauties, which describes a number of women from Chinese folklore.

[6] The Tuoba Xianbei took on the Chinese dynasty name "Wei", changed their own surname from "Tuoba" to "Yuan", and moved the capital from Pingcheng, modern-day Datong, Shanxi in the northern periphery of Imperial China, to Luoyang, south of the Yellow River, in the Central Plain, the traditional heartland of China.

The Northern Wei also adopted the governing institutions of Imperial China, and the office of shangshulang (尚書郎) the Khagan offered Mulan is a ministerial position within the shangshusheng (尚書省), the highest organ of executive power under the emperor.

[6] Northern Wei emperors considered the Rouran to be uncivilized "barbarians" and called them Ruanruan (Chinese: 蠕蠕) or "wriggling worms".

雄兔腳撲朔 雌兔眼迷離 雙兔傍地走 安能辨我是雄雌？ Chu Renhuo's Romance of the Sui and Tang [zh] (c. 1675) provides additional backdrops and plot-twists.

When the Khan agrees to wage war in alliance with the emergent Tang dynasty, which was poised to conquer all of China, Mulan's father Hua Hu (Chinese: 花弧) fears he will be conscripted into military service since he only has two daughters and an infant son.

[5] Xianniang's father is vanquished after siding with the enemy of the Tang dynasty, and the two sworn sisters, with knives in their mouths, surrender themselves to be executed in the place of the condemned man.

This act of filial piety wins a reprieve from Emperor Taizong of Tang, and the imperial consort, who was birth-mother to the Emperor, bestows money to Mulan to provide for her parents, as well as wedding funds for the princess, who had confessed to having promised herself to general Luó Chéng [zh] (Chinese: 羅成).

But before she dies, she entrusts an errand to her younger sister, Youlan (Chinese: 又蘭), which was to deliver Xianniang's letter to her fiancé, Luó Chéng.

This younger sister dresses as a man to make her delivery, but her disguise is discovered, and it arouses her recipient's amorous attention.

Some commentators have explained this as an anti-Qing message: the author supposedly wanted to suggest that "even a half-Chinese woman would prefer death by her own hand to serving a foreign ruler".

[18] In the novel, Mulan's mother was from the Central Plain of China, but her father was from Hebei during the Northern Wei dynasty[20] and presumably of Xianbei origin.