China will apply to have one of its ethnic music forms, the Naxi ancient music, listed as one of the masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity, said the sources in Lijiang County, the only autonomous county of the Naxi ethnic group, in the southwest Yunnan Province .

Known as a "living fossil", ancient Naxi music originated from the Taoism music that dates back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907), and three types of the original music have been handed down orally to the 280,000 Naxi people living in Lijiang County today, said a local musician.

Today, Naxi people in the mountainous areas still practice the custom of singing and dancing around a bonfire to mourn the dead. This can be traced back to very early times, said the musician.

"The songs they sing on such occasions seem to have no rhythm or obbligato," he said, "They consist of bleating and shouting as they were originally composed to frighten away ghosts."

Another well-preserved ancient form of music is a grand orchestral piece composed over 700 years ago, 486 years before the symphonies of Joseph Haydn. It is an epic of the Naxi group that tells about wars between different tribes.

Classical music from the Tang and Song dynasties as well as Taoist pieces have also remained intact within the Naxi ethnic group despite the passage of time.

Studies into the history of Chinese music have found that most of the pieces played by Naxi musicians today are still what they were like over 1,000 years ago, and ancient musical scores that have long been discarded in central China are still being used by many Naxi musicians today.

The ancient music has gained a worldwide reputation in recent years, and it is on top of their agenda for most tourists to attend a live concert in Lijiang County.

Experts have called for increased efforts to retain and develop the music, which is praised as "orthodox and unpolluted classical Chinese music".

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization defines oral and intangible heritage as "the totality of tradition-based creations of a cultural community, expressed by a group of individuals and recognized as reflecting the expectations of a community."

Kunqu Opera, a form of Chinese folk art that originated in east China's Jiangsu Province, was honored by UNESCO last year as one of the six masterpieces of Asia. The next proclamation of masterpieces of the same kind will take place in May 2003.

(People's Daily March 19, 2002)