Click the "Customize" button next to your name below to start your personalized Hua Mulan calligraphy artwork...
花木蘭 is the name of the famous Chinese woman warrior Hua Mulan.
She was made famous in the west by Disney's animated movie, “Mulan.”
Most of the historical information about her comes from an ancient poem. It starts with a concerned Mulan, as she is told a man from each family is to serve conscription in the army. Her father is too old, and her brother is too young. Mulan decides to take the place of her father. After twelve years of war, the army returns, and the best warriors are awarded great posts in the government and riches. Mulan turns down all offers and asks only for a good horse for the long trip home. When Mulan greets visiting comrades wearing her old clothes, they are shocked to find the warrior they rode into battle with for years is actually a woman.
木蘭 is a general term for the magnolia (magnolia liliflora) or lily magnolia in Chinese and Japanese.
This can refer to any of the flowering plants or trees in the Magnolia genus.
In Chinese, this is also the name Mulan, as in Hua Mulan, the legendary woman warrior and folk hero of fifth-century China.
In Japanese, this can also be the female given name Mokuren.
華佗 or Hua Tuo was a Chinese physician who lived during the late Eastern Han dynasty.
The historical texts Records of the Three Kingdoms and Book of the Later Han record Hua Tuo as the first person in China to use anesthesia during surgery.
Hua Tuo used a general anesthetic combining wine with a herbal concoction called 麻沸散, literally, “cannabis boil powder.” This was in the second century AD, almost 1700 years before western medicine had any form of anesthesia (1846).
The following table may be helpful for those studying Chinese or Japanese...
Title | Characters | Romaji (Romanized Japanese) | Various forms of Romanized Chinese | |
Hua Mulan | 花木蘭 花木兰 | huā mù lán hua1 mu4 lan2 hua mu lan huamulan | ||
Magnolia | 木蘭 木兰 | mokuren | mù lán / mu4 lan2 / mu lan / mulan | |
Hua Tuo | 華佗 华佗 | huá tuó / hua2 tuo2 / hua tuo / huatuo | hua t`o / huato / hua to | |
In some entries above you will see that characters have different versions above and below a line. In these cases, the characters above the line are Traditional Chinese, while the ones below are Simplified Chinese. |
All of our calligraphy wall scrolls are handmade.
When the calligrapher finishes creating your artwork, it is taken to my art mounting workshop in Beijing where a wall scroll is made by hand from a combination of silk, rice paper, and wood.
After we create your wall scroll, it takes at least two weeks for air mail delivery from Beijing to you.
Allow a few weeks for delivery. Rush service speeds it up by a week or two for $10!
When you select your calligraphy, you'll be taken to another page where you can choose various custom options.
The wall scroll that Sandy is holding in this picture is a "large size"
single-character wall scroll.
We also offer custom wall scrolls in small, medium, and an even-larger jumbo size.
Professional calligraphers are getting to be hard to find these days.
Instead of drawing characters by hand, the new generation in China merely type roman letters into their computer keyboards and pick the character that they want from a list that pops up.
There is some fear that true Chinese calligraphy may become a lost art in the coming years. Many art institutes in China are now promoting calligraphy programs in hopes of keeping this unique form
of art alive.
Even with the teachings of a top-ranked calligrapher in China, my calligraphy will never be good enough to sell. I will leave that to the experts.
The same calligrapher who gave me those lessons also attracted a crowd of thousands and a TV crew as he created characters over 6-feet high. He happens to be ranked as one of the top 100 calligraphers in all of China. He is also one of very few that would actually attempt such a feat.
Some people may refer to this entry as Hua Mulan Kanji, Hua Mulan Characters, Hua Mulan in Mandarin Chinese, Hua Mulan Characters, Hua Mulan in Chinese Writing, Hua Mulan in Japanese Writing, Hua Mulan in Asian Writing, Hua Mulan Ideograms, Chinese Hua Mulan symbols, Hua Mulan Hieroglyphics, Hua Mulan Glyphs, Hua Mulan in Chinese Letters, Hua Mulan Hanzi, Hua Mulan in Japanese Kanji, Hua Mulan Pictograms, Hua Mulan in the Chinese Written-Language, or Hua Mulan in the Japanese Written-Language.