Mu Gui-Ying 穆桂英
In the legends of the generals of the Yang clan, Mu Gui-Ying first opposes them and takes one of them captive. In other stories, she is already trusted to lead the Yang army into battle. The opera also tells of how she takes command in her old age, when the Song court once again turns to her family for help.
The legends of the Yang family are rooted in the wars between the Northern Song and the Khitans. Yang Ye and his son Yang Yan-zhao did indeed serve the Song court, while Mu Gui-Ying (穆桂英) appeared in later tales about their clan. In the 1606 novel she is the daughter of the master of Muke Fortress. When Yang Zong-bao approaches the fortress with the Yang army, Mu Gui-Ying takes him captive. Afterwards they marry, and she joins the very family she had just been fighting.
She is especially often credited with breaking the Tianmen, an enemy formation that the Yang commanders had been unable to overcome. She is also known from the opera Mu Gui-Ying Takes Command. In the version prepared by Ma Jin-Feng and the playwright Song Ci in 1953, Mu has long since retired when the court asks her to lead the army once more. In The Women Generals of the Yang Family, it is the women of the clan, forced to take the place of the fallen men, who fight against the Western Xia.
In the Hong Kong film The Woman General Mu Guiyung (1949), the lead was played by Chun Siu-Lei. In The Legendary Amazons (2011), Mu, played by Cecilia Cheung Pak-Chi, goes into battle alongside the other women of the Yang clan after her husband's death. And in the series Mu Guying Command (2012), with Miao Pu, her story begins with her meeting Yang Zong-bao.
