A Cervid Alternative
A more likely Altaic cognate to Pulan/Mulan, in my opinion, is bulān (with phonetic variants like pulan, bolan, bülän, etc.). In various Altaic languages it means “elk,” “stag,” “moose,” “deer,” and so forth.27 The most striking meaning is certainly al-Kašγarī 's definition of “a large wild animal…with one horn.”28 The last interpretation is very important, because, as examined by Denis Sinor, it makes bulān the only “native” Altaic word for “unicorn.”29 But this word's original meaning, as most scholars seem to agree, has to be “elk,” or a large, likely male, member of the Cervidae family.
Semantically, these meanings would fit the name Pulan/Mulan perfectly regarding the two name-style relations revealed earlier, namely “male, mighty” and “amid the mountains.” No less important, the “unicorn” or “elk,” “deer” interpretation also solves the aforementioned main difficulty with the “camel” solution, namely attestation in the contemporary Tuoba onomasticon.
The “unicorn,” or qilin, in Chinese (cf. Japanese kirin), transcribed into Old Turkic as kälän,30 was a highly respected symbol and semimythic token of auspiciousness since ancient times in China. Confucius was said to have waited for the coming of the unicorn as the sign of the advent of a sage ruler. Other legends associating Confucius with the unicorn developed in later times. Nonetheless, direct use of the full word as a personal name was not attested until the Southern and Northern dynasties. It was certainly more a popular, almost vulgar, name for the common folk rather than a refined and elegant appellation for the educated gentry class,31 and hence it was rarely observed in standard histories. It is therefore interesting to note that the name Qilin seemed particularly popular among the Tuoba and its ethnic subjects, with at least four direct attestations (Wei shu 40.917, 60.1331; Zhou shu 19.311, 27.453). Three of them had unmistakable “Barbarian” surnames: Lu (short form of Buliugu, related to the ethnic name Buluoji), Chigan, and Yuwen. The fourth, Hán Qilin, interestingly had the same surname as Hán Mulan and was clearly recorded as hailing from a frontier region with a self-claimed Hàn ancestry, a standard euphemism for an actual “Barbarian” origin. It may not be farfetched to conjecture that Hán Mulan had to be given a different Chinese name, Xiong, because he and Hán Qilin were contemporaries living in the same region.
In addition, a single character lin was frequently attested in “Barbarian” names. Without further evidence, it is difficult to ascertain whether the character stood for “unicorn” or merely transcribed some foreign sound. There were, however, near certain examples to show that it was indeed a “unicorn” name. For example, a certain Murong Lin took a reported sighting of a qilin as an omen for his imperial ambitions. There was also a Murong Pulin whose name (Middle Chinese pronunciation p'uo-lien) came very close to being a variant of bulān (Jin shu 127.3164; Wei shu 15.374).
Table 2.1. Number of Officially Recorded Appearances and Sightings of Unicorn
The cultural background here is the previously little noted fact that the Tuoba were particularly obsessed with the unicorn. The following summary, whose statistics cover five dynasties of the period, based on an extensive examination of the respective official histories, namely Jin shu, Song shu, Nan Qi shu, Liang shu, and Wei shu, clearly demonstrate the point. In Table 2.1, the first four regimes were southern and Sinitic (Hàn), and the Tuoba Wei was the ethnic power in the north. Because all were regional dynasties, sightings outside their respective realm were not counted.
Among other things, this lopsided table reflects the fact that the cervids were, and still are, often considered sacred animals in Altaic cultures.32 Such beliefs were widespread in ancient Eurasia, extending all the way to northern Europe. The vast range of ancient cervid images and symbols on the Old Continent has led to the notion of a “cosmic deer.”33 One may even further infer that this tradition shared with the Chinese qilin (“unicorn”) worship a common origin that dates back to before the advent of a deep cultural divide epitomized by the Great Wall, when intensive farming had completely taken over China's economy, a process largely completed during the last five hundred years BC.
In addition to these statistics, there are other examples that demonstrate the “cervid cult” among the ethnic groups in northern China at the time, exemplified by the Tuoba par excellence.
• The Tuoba emperor Taiwu (Tuoba Tao) used the reign title Shenjia (428–31), “sacred/godly (female) deer.” This was the only reign title in Chinese history figuring a cervid.
• In addition, there were only three other reign titles in Chinese history that used the character lin, “(female) unicorn,” as a qualifier. The first two were both Linjia, “auspice of unicorn,” first (316–17) used by the self-proclaimed Xiongnu leader Liu Cong of the Former Zhao, and then duplicated (389–95) by the Di/Tibetan leader Lü Guang of the Later Liang. The third was Linde, “virtue of unicorn” (664–65), by the early Tang emperor Gaozong (Li Zhi). The Tang imperial house was in fact the Tuoba's political and biological heir, as I have shown.
• The Tuoba had an intriguing early legend, recorded prominently twice in Wei shu (1.2 and 112b.2927), about their tribes in the process of coming out of the forest region in northeast China, probably during the second or third century AD, being guided by a mysterious sacred animal with “a body like a horse and the voice of a cow” to the rich grassland that had been the “old Xiongnu country.” One recalls immediately the celebrated doe that led the Huns across the Cimmerian Bosporus into the Crimea,34 as well as the famous giant unicorn, “with the body of a deer and the tail of a horse,” who stopped Genghis Khan from entering India, directing him to march home instead.35
• In sharp contrast to the Chinese tradition of regarding the unicorn as a sign of peace and exhortation against killing, the Tuoba introduced a martial or military dimension of the unicorn symbol by installing forty qilinguan, “unicorn officers,” to guard the royal palaces (Wei shu 113.2974). This, in my opinion, was the likely origin of the Tang's adoption of the unicorn icon, together with the tiger, lion, eagle, and leopard, as the standard insignia for the military uniform (Jiu Tang shu 45.1953; see also Tong dian 61.1725.). This new “warrior” role of the unicorn, while conflicting with the Sinitic belief, fit perfectly with the ancient deer images on the Steppe and in Siberia.36
In the final analysis, behind the façade of the Tuoba's royally decreed sinification were deep-rooted Steppe cultural traditions among the former nomadic people in China, a parallel “Barbarian” nomenclature being one of the traits, exemplified by the “Barbarian” style or “childhood name” born by the Northern aristocracy, including the Sui and Tang imperial houses. Therefore, the Tuoba's unicorn worship and widely attested qilin names must have had a “Barbarian” original. Moreover, Denis Sinor's study “Sur les noms altaiques de la licorne” shows that qilin as a Chinese loanword did not appear in Altaic languages until after the Uighurs left Mongolia and settled in the Central Asian oases. Let me refer again to his conclusion that bulān was the only native Altaic word for “unicorn.” Besides, its use as a personal name was attested by that of a Khazar king,37 much earlier than the case of the Karakhanid Bughra Khan.
I take special note of the Eurasian and Steppe tradition of associating the cervids with maleness. For instance, Enn Ernits's recent study of the Sami reindeer myths in the Kola Peninsula concludes, “In Sami folk religion, the reindeer is associated with male lineage.”38 In addition, though Esther Jacobson in her book on deer worship in ancient Siberia tries hard to establish the existence of a deer goddess, she acknowledges that the huge number of so-called deer stones found in many places on the Steppe represent an image that “unquestionably refers to a human male” such that “the male reference of the stone is beyond doubt.” She also cites other scholars' studies from which “the assumption that the antlered deer