Samzhub, 80, a Tibetan folk artist, is regarded as the master of talking and singing the epic portraying the legendary hero Gesser. The Tibetan edition of a five-part version of King Gesser, compiled according to Samzhub's telling of the story, will be published in June this year.

Some film producers are shooting films on Samzhub and others, recording the epic they tell and sing.

Samzhub, who can not read a single word, can tell 65 parts of the epic, totaling more than 20 million words. "He can tell the complete story of Gesser," said Cering Puncog, deputy director of the Nationalities Institute under the Tibet Autonomous Regional Academy of Social Sciences.

Cering Puncog disclosed that the academy plans to publish 45 parts of the epic sung by Samzhub in the coming five to eight years.

There are two different views about when the epic first came about. One is that the epic was produced in the period from the beginning of the Christian era to the 6th century, based on the story of a real tribal head who tamed such forces of evil as ghosts and goblins, and safeguarded the environment for the people.

The other is that the epic emerged between the 11th and 13th centuries, when Tibetans hoped that a hero would appear to unify the then separated Tibet.

The epic has more than 200 parts which have come down through oral singing and talking by folk artists.

The Chinese government set up a special organization to save and record the epic after 1979, and listed the research work as a major research program.

To date, more than 40 Gesser story tellers have been found in Tibet. Cering Puncog said that most of the story tellers cannot read and they do not know each other. But they tell basically the same story.

The Tibet Autonomous Regional Academy of Social Sciences and Tibet University are busy recording the epic told by local folk artists such as Samzhub. Later, they will compile the epic into books in accordance with the recorded materials.

Currently, Tibet has collected nearly 300 hand-written or woodcut copies of the epic. More than three million copies of the Tibetan version of the epic have been printed.

The epic has also been translated into Chinese, English, Japanese, French and other languages.

(People's Daily 05/01/2001)