Two brothers are planning to preserve the legend of King Gesser, the Tibetan hero whose story has been passed down by oral telling generation after generation, by inscribing some classic chapters on stone.

Liu Yi and Liu Xiao, both nationals of Han ethnicity from the southwestern Sichuan Province, have presently set up a studio in Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region, where they are studying the Tibetan language in order to inscribe the epic in its original language.

The Liu brothers have been "writing" with knives on stone sheets for more than a decade and have completed three "stone books", including two classics on ancient Chinese strategies and tactics and a collection of famous poems from the Tang Dynasty, a period of rapid social and cultural development that lasted from 618 to 907 AD.

The sheets they use are made of quality stones and are sliced with a unique splitting technology to resemble papers. "An ordinary stone sheet is as thick as a business card and the thinnest is only 0.02 centimeter thick," said Liu Yi.

The brothers said they got the inspiration to compile stone books from a TV series sometime in the 1990s. "It said officials in Tibet were having problems in preserving a Tibetan Buddhist sutra, one that was inscribed in pieces of stone," said Liu Yi. "So we decided to inscribe texts on very thin stone pages and bind the sheets into books the way ordinary books are made."

He said they had applied to the State Intellectual Property Office for the technology to be patented.

Despite their earlier success, the brothers said inscription and compilation of the Tibetan epic would be far more challenging.

"The Tibetan language is dainty and elegant and each character is like a picture," said Liu Yi. "The cultural and historical connotations of the legend makes the work even more challenging."

To familiarize themselves with the underlying culture, the brothers have visited museums and lamaseries in Tibet and exchanged views with local artists to learn more about Tibetan frescos and sculpture.

"King Gesser" was written about 1,000 years ago in Tibet and soon spread around the Himalayan mountains region. It tells the story of an ancient Tibetan king who conquered the devils of other Tibetan tribes and made Tibet stable.

Noted as the world's longest and only surviving epic, "King Gesser" has been translated into a couple of languages, including English, French, German, Russian and Indian and has spread to more than 40 countries and regions worldwide.

The epic in 200 verses has been orally handed down by ballad singers for 1,000 years in China.

Presently China boasts about 100 Gesser ballad singers, mostly elderly people of ethnic Tibetan or Mongolian groups living in outlying areas with poor access to traffic or modern communications.

To retain the original form of the epic and protect it from the impact of modern society, experts in China have started making recordings of the balladeers' singing, which will be compiled into more versions of the masterpiece.

Currently, Tibet has collected nearly 300 handwritten or woodcut copies of the epic. More than 3 million copies of the Tibetan version of the epic have been printed.
 
(Xinhua News Agency May 27, 2004)