Mulan (木蘭) means "magnolia" in Chinese. *Hua Mulan is the legendary heroine of the Ballad of Mulan — a 6th-century Northern Wei dynasty narrative poem about a young woman who disguised herself as a man and took her ailing father's place in the imperial army, fighting for twelve years before returning home with honor. One of the most beloved figures in Chinese folklore, retold in Ming dynasty plays, Qing operas, and the 1998 Disney animated film that introduced the legend to a global audience. The poem's closing line — "Two hares running side by side close to the ground, how can they tell male from female?" — is among the most quoted in Chinese literature.*
Subject of countless adaptations across Chinese opera, film, and modern media.
Mulan does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Mulan reduce to 7, The Seeker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.