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TV Series on Tibetan Epic
A 30-part TV series on King Gesser, a Tibetan folk epic portraying the legendary hero Gesser, has drawn increasing attention of participants in the ongoing Eighth Shanghai TV Festival, which opened Wednesday.
The series, titled "About King Gesser," is the world's first comprehensive TV documentary about the 10-million-word epic and also China's longest TV documentary.
The series, produced by the Chinese Nationalities Audio-Video Publishing House and several other organizations, tells about the life of King Gesser, the creation of the epic, the relationship between the epic and Tibetan Buddhism, the influence of the epic on culture and other background.
King Gesser narrates the history of the unification of ancient tribes on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. It is considered the most important literary work for studying the social, cultural and historical development of the Tibetan ethnic group.
For generations in the past, stories about Gesser had usually been told in ballads sung by folk artists.
To protect the ballads, the Institute of Minority Cultures under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences formed a leading group specializing in saving the "Gesser" in the early 1980s.
The group organized more than 40 experts and scholars to visit minority-inhabited areas and collected more than 100 handwritten and wood-carved versions of the tale told in Tibetan and Mongolian languages.
More than 60 ballad singers have recorded thousands of tapes of their singing for further research.
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