The first four volumes of King Gesar in Tibetan

The world-famous  King Gesar, a long and valuable heroic epic created by the Tibetan people over a considerable long period of time, is a rare literary treasure of China and the entire world. However, it has all along been passed down by folk artists orally.

To better protect it, the regional authorities set up special bodies in 1979 for the collection, research, editing and publishing of the Life of King Gesar. The state placed it on the key scientific research project lists of the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Five-Year Plans. After 20 years of effort, nearly 300 handwritten or block-printed Tibetan volumes have been collected.

Among them, except 100 variant volumes, about 70 volumes have been formally published in the Tibetan language, with a total print run of well over three million copies. Thus, this epic, which had for long centuries been known only to a few folk artists, has come out as a systematically complete literary masterpiece that is called " the king of world epics." In addition, over 20 volumes of the Chinese edition have been published, and some have been translated into English, Japanese and French, and distributed all over the world. This was an unprecedented achievement in protecting the Tibetan literary and art heritage, as well as in publishing history.

King Gesar is a mixed product of Tibetan mythology, legend, folk stories, folk songs and proverbs. It is full of power and grandeur with its rich content and magnificent structure. At present, the written version that has been collected and collated is available in over 100 volumes, totaling more than 1 million lines and 20 million characters, winning itself the title of the longest epic in the world.

Over the past five decades, the Chinese government has organized hundreds of experts and scholars to conduct on-the-spot investigations on the King Gesar. The investigations cover half the territory of China and some researchers have been to India, Nepal and Pakistan for academic survey. This is unprecedented in Tibetan cultural history and rare even in China's multi-ethnic cultural history.

Jambian Gyamco, chief editor of King Gesar in Tibetan,speaking at the meeting held to mark the publication of King Gesar in Tibet.

In the early 1950s, the government first started the collecting and collating the King Gesar work. The investigation yielded a number of books about Gesar. At the end of the 1970s, the salvage work resumed. Since 1983, the collection, compilation and research has been listed as the state's key scientific research project three times. In 1984, the State Nationalities Affairs Commission, the Ministry of Culture, the China Academy of Social Sciences, the Chinese Folk Artists Association and seven provinces and autonomous regions inhabited by Tibetans including Tibet, Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, Yunnan, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, jointly set up a work team to accelerate research on King Gesar.

As a result of these efforts, especially over the past decade, a King Gesar research team has been formed by specialists in talking and singing, collation, translation, publishing and academic research. Many academic papers and investigative reports have been published. In addition, a number of domestic and international seminars have been held.

In July 1997, Tibetan scholar Jambai Gyaco and Han scholar Wu Wei co-edited King Gesar, which was published by the Writers Publishing House. The first edition of the book containing over 700,000 characters was published 10 years ago. The second edition has maintained the essence of the epic while presenting readers with its major stories and plots. Consequently, it not only provides scholars with rich materials for research, but also appeals to ordinary readers. It is reported that China will publish 40 volumes of the epic in the coming five years. China has put down another 3.2 million yuan for the purpose.