Green Island

Green Island is both a necessary stop in Mulan’s search for a remedy and a place whose changed landscape becomes part of the story. The Jade Rabbit remembers it as a source of abundant Dragon Beard Grass; Mulan and her companions arrive to find the island barren, then leave as vegetation begins to return across its slopes. Its transformation links the immediate need for medicine with the island’s older history and the story’s recurring movement from loss toward renewal.

Setting and importance

The island first appears as a distant shape on the sea’s horizon, resembling a huge, mud-covered turtle shell. Its name promises greenery, but the Jade Rabbit immediately notes the contrast: the Dragon Beard Grass that once grew abundantly there no longer does. The island’s actual condition unsettles the travelers’ expectations before they set foot ashore. It is not simply a green storehouse of herbs; it is a place whose present landscape contradicts its remembered abundance.

That contradiction matters because the journey depends on what grows there. After the foxes steal the travelers’ supplies, the Jade Rabbit tells Mulan that the medicine needed for her sister’s hupo poison requires both Dragon Beard Grass and the Essence of Heavenly Majesty. He had carried the grass, but now has neither ingredient. The grass grows only on Green Island, where it was once plentiful, and they must find it before the new moon. The island therefore becomes a necessary destination under a strict deadline, while its changed condition threatens the purpose of the journey.

The search across the island

Lu Ting-Pin, the Jade Rabbit, and Mulan land and eat a quick meal of tea eggs and smelly tofu from a street peddler before going into the countryside. The Jade Rabbit recalls that blankets of Dragon Beard Grass had covered the slopes and extended toward the sea. Yet as they climb, they find no blades at all. The missing growth is not merely less abundant than expected: in the area they search, it is absent.

From a high point, Mulan can see their boat, its bright red sail marking the shore, and a cavern with what appears to be a statue at its entrance. The landscape thus contains more than the failed search for an herb: the distant stone forms become the focus of what Mulan discovers the following morning. The travelers’ immediate purpose is practical, but the island’s visible remains and the Jade Rabbit’s account give the place a history beyond its value as a source of medicine.

The Old Dragon and the island’s past

While resting in the heat, the Jade Rabbit begins a story about an Immortal who lived on the island many centuries earlier. The Old Dragon gathered plants and herbs in the hills and made medicines. People from the island village came to him for remedies, assistance, or advice; his knowledge and apparent wisdom led many to believe he was a dragon spirit in human form. Even those who did not share that belief called him the Old Dragon.

The story establishes the island as a place where healing and community life were once closely connected. Its inhabitants repeatedly sought the Old Dragon’s help, and his work depended on the plants he collected in the hills. The Jade Rabbit’s account begins with the Old Dragon announcing that he would leave, a decision that quickly drew the island’s people together. The supplied episode places that history beside the present scarcity of Dragon Beard Grass, but does not establish that the Old Dragon’s departure caused the island’s decline. The contrast instead gives the search a longer temporal frame: the travelers enter a landscape with a remembered history of healing, now unable to provide the remedy they need.

New growth and departure

The morning after the search, Mulan returns to the Stone Statue and the Odd-Shaped Rock. Both have crumbled into piles of dust and dirt. When she approaches the remains, wind scatters the dust; after it passes, she notices small green stalks growing where the stone forms had stood. The delicate shoots have crimson roots. She pulls several from the ground and runs to show them to Lu Ting-Pin and the Jade Rabbit, identifying the find as Dragon Beard Grass.

The grass secures a needed ingredient for the treatment, and the Jade Rabbit responds with relief while Lu Ting-Pin celebrates. Lu Ting-Pin gives Mulan a pouch made of specially treated leaves, with yellow oil, to keep the grass waterproof during the voyage. This practical care preserves the fragile harvest as they set out again.

Only after the boat has sailed away does the island’s broader change become visible. As they wave goodbye to Li Jing and her family, the travelers see Green Island take on a yellow-green covering that spreads over its peaks and rocks toward the sea. The return of the vegetation accompanies, but is not explicitly explained by, the crumbling of the stone forms and the appearance of the medicinal shoots. The island’s renewal is therefore both a concrete change in the landscape and a reversal of the journey’s initial expectation: the place that seemed unable to yield even one blade of grass becomes green again as the travelers depart with what they came to seek.