China is trying to list the Life of King Gesar, or King Gesar, the longest epic poem in the world, as an intangible cultural heritage of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

The epic research center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which worked together with seven provinces and municipalities in sorting out thousand-year-old epic, will submit the application materials to the China Ministry of Culture before June 10 for presentation to the UNESCO, said Jiangbian Gyatso, an expert on the epic.

The Tibetan epic is composed of 120 volumes in more than 1 million lines and more than 20 million words.

Telling the full story of a great ancient king who conquered the devils of other Tibetan tribes and made Tibet a stable, peaceful and happy place to live in, the King Gesar epic was created over 1,000 years ago and is the longest epic in the world, longer than the Greek epic Homer, and the Mahabharata, a famous Indian epic.

The Life of King Gesar was considered a 'living epic' and has spread for over 1,000 years orally. It is still alive in Tibetan regions.

"The most attractive point of the epic is that the whole story advocates justice and goodness while punishing evil doings," said Jiangbian Gyatso.

In old Tibet, the talking and singing artists could only live by begging and the miraculous art had been depreciated as "noises from beggars."

After 1979, China began to set up special institutes to save and compile the Life of King Gesar and listed the research work as a key scientific program of the national development plan.

Up to now, China has found over 140 artists who can speak or sing the epic, and they have received good care from the government. More than 3,000 audio tapes of the Life of King Gesar have been recorded, almost 300 hand-copied and block-printed editions of the epic have been collected, and 62 volumes of the epic in Tibetan have been edited and published, with a distribution in excess of 3 million copies.

Meanwhile, over 20 volumes of its Chinese edition have been published, and some of them have been translated into and published in English, Japanese and French.

"This is unprecedented in the protection of Tibetan ethnic culture," said Jiangbian Gyatso.

The expert is confident in the application for intangible cultural heritage. "The Life of King Gesar had been selected for millennial celebration activities by the UNESCO and has actually been recognized by the UNESCO as an important cultural heritage," said Gyatso.

The result of application is scheduled to come out by the end of this year.

At present, China only has two kinds of arts in the UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage list, which are Kunqu Opera and an ancient musical instrument.
 
(Xinhua News Agency June 7, 2004)