Mulan

[Drunk Monk]

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Den did edit out a paragraph. I get the edit - it was tangential. I fell in a research rabbit hole there. 

I'll share it here, just for fun.

As live action Disney princesses go, Mulan is the elder. Alice, another marginal Disney princess like Mulan because neither were quite crowned, was published in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. Beauty and the Beast maybe a ‘tale as old as time’ but it was based on a fairy tale first published in 1740 by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve. Sleeping Beauty, which became a Disney fractured fairy tale with the two live action Maleficent films, dates to 1330 in an anonymous collection titled Perceforest. Cinderella could be considered older than Mulan if traced to the ancient origins of her tale, a Greek legend of Rhodopis. That’s a story of a slave girl who married a king that finds her by her sandal which was magically delivered to him by an eagle. There’s a Chinese pauper-to-princess-via-sandal tale from 860.  Known as Ye Xian, her story adds an evil stepmom and a fairy spirit although it’s a magic fish, not a godmother. However, Cinderella isn’t specifically named until the 17th century Italian fairy tale collection Pentamerone (her name in Italian is Cenerentola). So Mulan predates Ye Xian, but not Rhodopis.