"The legend of King Gesar would be passed on, generation upon generation, even if some day, the galloping horses became withered wood, jokuls disappeared, rivers went dry and the sun and stars lost their glory..."

Samzhub's wrinkled, bony face radiates as he half sings and half narrates the Lliad and Odyssey type of epic, the crown of Tibetan folk literature.

At 86, his eyesight and hearing are weak. But the man wearing amusingly large glasses can sing endlessly when he's in the mood, beads in one hand and prayer wheel in the other.

Samzhub, one of China's 150-odd surviving King Gesar ballad singers, has completed verbatim recording of 45 episodes of the epic and 30 publications in the country's three-decade campaign to preserve the 1-million-line, 1,000-year-old Tibetan epic.

The epic, considered the world's longest, tells how the half-human, half-god Tibetan king conquered the devils of other tribes and sought to help ordinary people.

Samzhub shines in the glory of the epic as he sings the ballad and tells the legends of his own life in his home on the outskirts of Lhasa.

"GOD TAUGHT MASTER"

Like all other Tibetan epic singers, Samzhub's skills were acquired, or rather, "god taught".

Born to nomadic parents in Qamdo, he was an ordinary shepherd boy and never learned to read or write.

One day when he was nine, he was caught in a downpour and fell asleep while sheltering underneath a pine tree. When he woke up, he found he was stuck in a crevice beneath some rocks, and heard his parents crying out his name.

The boy was finally detected and pulled out of the rocks -- he remembered having slept for a while, but people said he had been missing for days.

After that adventure young Samzhub always felt jolly, but was constantly sick. When the village doctor couldn't treat him, he was taken to a monastery, where a Living Buddha saw in him signs of a "god taught" King Gesar ballad singer.

The Living Buddha read his pulse and soon enough, Samzhub was able to sing complete chapters of the epic.

By the time he was 13, he had stood out among all the local children with his eloquence, wisdom and vivid presentation of more than 60 chapters of the legend.

Samzhub narrowly escaped being murdered at 16, when serf owners rallied every man in the village to fight the monks. Amid the riots he was invited to a friend's house, but the friend, whose father was a serf owner, tried to kill Samzhub one night. He woke up in time to run away, and left his home village the very next day.

VAGRANT SINGER

Following the route of King Gesar, he traveled across Tibet, from Qamdo in the east to Nyingchi and Shannan in the south and all the way to Ngari in the far west. He visited ruins of historical wars along the Gangdise Mountain Range on China's western border to understand the epic better.

Wherever he went, Samzhub earned his food and clothing by singing the ballad. He made friends with many people, pilgrims, business people and beggars, some of whom followed him all the way to Lhasa.

"A vagrant singer is like a beggar that roams along the streets to earn his bread," he said through an interpreter. "But sometimes, he enjoys the prestige and luxury of aristocrats and senior lamas."

He was speaking of the five years he spent in the luxury home of an aristocrat in Shannan, a period he describes as his heyday. "It's a pity I didn't have any of my full-length singing dubbed in those days."

When Samzhub starts to sing, he feels he can see the vivid war scenes: how the king and his men fought, how their knives were wielded and how the swords flew.

After he left Shannan, he traveled to Lhasa, where he met the woman who was to become his wife.

The couple got their share of cropland and cattle after the Dalai Lama fled in 1959. The vagrant singer finally settled down in Gonggar, a county 80 kilometers from downtown Lhasa. In his spare time, though, he still traveled to the nomadic areas on horseback and shared the king's legend with the herders.

UNCHANGED MELODY

The "roof of the world" did not escape the "Cultural Revolution", which swept across China from 1966 to 1976.

The legend of King Gesar was banned alongside other traditional cultural phenomena. Samzhub was sent to work on a farm, but, in what he himself describes as "magic", he was always spared from hard labor and persecution. The group leaders would always assign easier jobs to him, such as cooking, and would invite him to their homes at night so he could tell them stories.

For 10 years, Samzhub dared not openly sing the epic, but the warring scenes and the melody always clung to him.

He was on the stage again in 1979. That year, Tibet's regional government also set up a taskforce to save the traditional art form from extinction, and listed Samzhub and at least 40 other surviving ballad singers as senior professionals.

The team has so far expanded to about 150 people, including Tibetans, Mongolians and some from the Tu ethnic group. The youngest ballad singer, Sitar Doje from Qamdo, is around 18.

To retain the original form of the epic, experts have made 4,800 hours of verbatim recordings of their singing and compiled 36 publications. The millennial epic has also given rise to a whole field of study referred to as "Gesarology".

Samzhub is known as the master of Gesarology and "Homer on the roof of the world". He gets free housing and medication and is subsidized 1,000 yuan (about 140 U.S. dollars) a month, plus 3,000 yuan (420 U.S. dollars) in royalties for every book he publishes.

The old man has his own worries: very few of his seven sons and daughters and 20 grandchildren have a stable job. Most of them still depend on him for a living.

Yet Samzhub believes the Buddha has chosen him as a master ballad singer out of a stroke of luck and "one cannot expect too much". He has chosen a "sky burial" site near Lhasa as his final resting place.

"I wish that everyone who reads my books and listens to the legend will be blessed by King Gesar himself," he said.

(Xinhua News Agency March 28, 2008)