China is working to preserve the Tibetan folk story, King Gesser, an epic legend that has been handed down through generations of oral history.

The Chinese government set up a special organization to record the epic in 1979, and has listed the research work as a major research program in every five-year plan since.

Thousands of hours of tapes of the story have been recorded, and filming of performers reciting the tale of King Gesser is also underway.

As many Tibetan folk story-tellers are becoming very old, China must step up its efforts to protect King Gesser, said Puncog Cering, director of the ethnological institute of the local academy of social sciences.

The 200 part Tibetan epic portraying the legendary hero Gesser has come down as oral works of Tibetan folk artists, exceeding in length even the ancient Greek epic, Homer, and the Mahabharata, a famous Indian epic.

Samzub, a 82-year-old Tibetan folk story-teller, is regarded as the master performer of King Gesser. The folk artist, who can not read a single word, can tell 65 parts of the epic, totaling more than 20 million words.

"Each part told by Samzub comprises an average of 14,800 lines. So the length is much greater than the Mahabharata which consists of 207,000 lines," said Cewang Jungme, director of the local academy of social sciences.

According to Puncog Cering, the story told by Samzub is not only complete, but also beautiful, for many of the words used by the illiterate old man are the spoken language of Tibetan herdsman and many proverbs are adopted in the telling.

"From Samzub's recital, we have learned many details about the early Tibetans, which do not exist any more and are usually not found in history books," said Cewang Jungme.

"Our academy will cooperate with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to publish a 45-part edition of Samzub telling King Gesser in the next 5 to 8 years," said Puncog. "It will be an unprecedented project."

The Tibetan edition of a 15-part King Gesser, compiled according to Samzub's recital, will be published at the end of the year.

Moreover, the local government has invested 900,000 yuan (about US$108,434) to record the live performance of the old folk artist.

So far, 46 tapes lasting 2,500 hours have been recorded, and a live performance of Samzub is also being shot by film makers.

There are different views about the birth of the epic. Some say the epic was produced in the period from the beginning of the Christian era to the 6th century, based on the story of a real tribal chief who subdued ghosts and goblins, and safeguarded a stable world for his people.

Some hold that the epic emerged between the 11th and 13th centuries, when Tibetans hoped for a hero to unify the then separated Tibet.

China has discovered more than 140 folk story-tellers of King Gesser. These folk artists, who had to make a living by singing and begging in the past, have lived a comfortable life with the support of the government.

Currently, Tibet has collected nearly 300 handwritten and woodcut copies of the epic. More than 3 million volumes of 70 copies of the Tibetan version of the epic have been printed. And the epic has also been translated into Chinese, English, Japanese, French and other languages.

"Such a large-scale campaign in Tibetan folk cultural heritage protection is without parallel in history," said Puncog Cering.
 
(Xinhua News Agency December 15, 2003)