Language has a strange place in the intangible cultural heritage safeguarding efforts of Chinese governments and UNESCO. Languages themselves are not recognized on UNESCO’s lists nor are there specific plans for their safeguarding. However, the linguistic expressions of different groups are available for safeguarding, and other traditions are often taught and transmitted in minoritized languages.
As such, even though languages are not explicitly safeguarded, they are implicitly part of the broader “heritage regime.”
This makes traditions recognized as heritage especially powerful in a moment of heavy pressure on the transmission and use of minoritized languages in the People’s Republic of China.
The Bards of the Gesar Epic
Lobzang sits on a tall chair at the front of a windowless room filled with benches and deep-backed Tibetan style sofas. He wears a pointed hat and a traditional Tibetan shirt, and sometimes he holds a white silk scarf in his hands (at other times it sits in his lap). The hat serves as a clear indication that he is a babdrung (བབས་སྒྲུང་།), an inspired bard of the Tibetan “national” epic, called by some the longest epic in the world.
The epic represents a rich distillation of Tibetan folk culture into a single, massive opus. It combines verse, prose, song, speech, and proverbs, drawing on Tibetan folk cosmology that extends well beyond the tangible world.
It tells of King Gesar’s incarnation, his difficult childhood, winning a horse race to ascend to the throne, and his victories over neighboring kingdoms. As a living epic, certain versions even include Gesar’s exploits against the Nazis. To many, Gesar is both a historical figure and a deity who can help with real-world concerns.
The Gesar Epic and Heritage
In the early years of the 1980s, as the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution slowly gave way to a new period of “Reform and Opening Up,” scholars and policymakers expressed concern that China lacked an epic. The Greeks have the Homeric epics. The Indians have the Bhagavad Gita. Intellectuals in Finland and Scotland compiled the Kalevala and Ossian to promote their national identities.
Lacking a meaningful epic for the Han majority, academics and officials in China looked to minority epics of the “Zhonghua minzu” (中华民族 , sometimes translated as “Chinese nation”) to help fill this cultural gap. This included the Gesar epic.
Between 1980 and 2020, the Gesar epic was mentioned as “one of the most important scientific research items at the national level” in several of the five-year plans through which the government lays out its strategic roadmap for the near and long-term future.
In 2003, the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage brought new life into oral and performance traditions across the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese government was among the first nations to ratify the Convention (by comparison, the U.S. and Australia still have not, while the U.K. only entered in 2024) and establish a multitiered system to identify and safeguard traditions nationwide.
In 2009, the Gesar epic, was officially inscribed on UNESCO’s list of the representative intangible cultural heritage of humanity.
Tibetan Language Visibility
For the epic, heritage recognition transforms a complex genre of folklore with a relatively limited audience into a symbol of the Chinese nation’s valuable cultural contributions to world culture.
In this way, cultural heritage in China has evolved into something of a “brand” that authorizes display of Tibetan traditions and languages, even in the current moment of heightened tensions and restrictions.
A number of new “complete” textual editions of the epic have been created by local governments, sometimes beautifully calligraphed, often with the assistance of bards. Painters have been employed to create traditional thangka paintings depicting different characters or scenes from the epic. In 2024, some local bards and cultural officials in Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture received a significant amount of funding from the government to create a website aimed at preserving the Gesar epic by establishing an online archive of epic performance to make it readily available to online audiences. Meanwhile, outside of government activities, bards livestream their performances on the popular application KuaiShou, sometimes reaching thousands of viewers at a time. Some also create informal publications about the epic as well.
In short, there is a veritable cottage industry of cultural production related to the epic.
Set against the background of global pressures of homogenization and tightening of the spaces for acceptable public expression in the Xi Jinping era, this support for Tibetan heritage seems particularly important.
Recently, government promotion of the concept “minzu gongtongti yishi 民族共同体意识” – translated in state media as “a sense of community for the Chinese nation” – has seen the imposition of new restrictions on religious practice, cultural display, and minority language education. In spite of this, the Gesar epic and its bards remain prominent and visible.
Heritage Recognition Authorizes Displays that Might Otherwise Be Difficult
Changes to Tibetan society, politics, and contexts of performance require bards to navigate the contemporary worlds of heritage and digital media as well.
In this way, the epic’s bards play a crucial role as its intermediaries, creating a place for the continued presence of Tibetan language and culture through epic performance, religious services to the local community, and working along with government to both preserve the epic and share it with the world. Crucially, this also includes government support of heritage.
The cynic might say that these bards and other culture workers are simply collaborating with the state. Yet, we might also recognize that these actors leverage available avenues to create space for Tibetan language visibility in contemporary China — an effort that could have significant implications for the future of Tibetan language in the PRC.
A longer version of this article was originally published by Melbourne Asia Review at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne.
