King Gesser, a Tibetan epic about a legendary national hero, has been passed from generation to generation storytellers.

Now, however, the tale known as the "king of the world's epic chronicles" can be read in over 70 volumes containing nearly 300 collected hand-written and woodcut versions.

Three million copies of the legend have been published after the Chinese government established a special working group to collate the Gesser chronicles for prosperity.

Consistent government efforts to save ethnic culture

King Gesser is just one of the many projects in the drive to preserve the traditional culture of China's 55 ethnic groups over the past 50 years.

Many ethnic cultural treasures, including documents, dictionaries and ancient books, which were on the verge of being lost have been successfully saved and published. A great number have won state prizes for outstanding ethnic books.

China started establishing special organizations to save ethnic culture in the 1950s. To date, over 120,000 ancient ethnic books have been saved and more than 5,000 have been published.

Meanwhile, more than 400 books including brief histories of ethnic groups and annals of ethnic languages have been completed.

China has over 50 Tibetology research institutes with more than 2,000 researchers and a dozen Tibetology academic periodicals are in publication.

"There was no Tibetology research in the old Tibet, and the research only started after the peaceful liberation of Tibet in 1951," said Gaisang Yexe, of the Academy of Social Sciences of Tibet.

The central and Tibet autonomous regional governments have poured nearly 300 million yuan (US$36 million) into repairing and protecting Tibet’s important relics and sites including the famous Potala Palace.

More traditional cultural treasures of China's ethnic groups are stored in museums. There are over 50 museums featuring ethnic culture in the southwestern Guizhou Province, inhabited by a dozen ethnic groups.

( March 26, 2002)