The three major heroic epics of China's ethnic minorities have attracted increasing international attention as the government continues to sponsor their collection and study, folk epic experts say.

According to the government white paper on ethnic minorities released on February 28, in the early 1950s and again since the late 1970s the central government assigned large numbers of personnel and significant material resources to establish special institutions to save and study the Tibetan Gesar and the Mongolian Jangar and Kirgiz Manas, China's three best-known heroic epics of the minorities.

The 20-million-word Gesar, sometimes referred to as the Asian Iliad, has been a major field of study in the fields of philosophy and social sciences for the past 20 years.

Special offices to preserve the ancient work have been set up in seven provincial regions, including Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Sichuan.

"The move is unprecedented in the history of Tibetan culture and is rare in the history of China's multinational cultures," said Gyambian Gyaco, a noted expert on the epic. 

China has published more than 100 versions of Gesar in Tibetan for a total of 4 million copies, one for every Tibetan adult.

Professor Zager of the Inner Mongolia Normal University said, "Although China started its collection and study on the multivolume epic Jangar pretty late, it has achieved a lot in the field."

Two new versions of Jangar in Chinese have just been published in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, according to Zager, who, like many Mongolians, uses only a single name.

China has published nearly 10 versions of Jangar since the late 1970s. A special working group that was organized in Xinjiang in 1980 visited more than 100 Jangar ballad singers over four years to record the epic.

China sponsored a census on the Mongolian epic ballad Manas in the 1960s and has identified more than 80 singers.

In recent years, China has sponsored several international conferences on the three epics.

According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of Ethnic Literature, the story of King Gesar is known in about 40 countries and regions. Jangar has been translated into German, Russian, Japanese and other foreign languages and Manas has been translated into Russian, Japanese and English, among others.

In 2001, UNESCO designated 2002 and 2003 as the years to celebrate the millenary of the creation of the epic Gesar. China is preparing to apply for inclusion of the epic on UNESCO's world cultural heritage list.

(Xinhua News Agency March 8, 2005)