Culture and art develop in all-round way
( 2005-10-26 )

The Central People's Government and the People's Government of the Tibet Autonomous Region have all attached great importance to the inheritance and development of Tibetan culture and art.

As early as the 1950s, a group of literary and art workers from different ethnic groups went to Tibet to collect music, dance, folk stories, proverbs and folk songs with their Tibetan counterparts, and edited them for publication. One fruit of their labors was the book, "Tibetan Folk Songs." Beginning at the end of the 1970s, the state conducted a large-scale systematic survey, collection and edition of Tibetan folk cultural and art heritage. Since the 1980s, a group of region-, prefecture- and city-level institutions have been set up to save, collect, research, edit and publish Tibetan folk literary and art heritage, on a scale without parallel in history. The regional government has assigned survey teams to go to the towns, villages and monasteries to make extensive investigation and collection of this heritage. These efforts have resulted in the collection of about 30 million words of written materials in the Han Chinese and Tibetan languages, the making of a large amount of videotapes and the taking of nearly 10,000 pictures. On this basis, the History of Chinese Operas and Story-telling Ballads: Tibet Volume, Collection of Chinese Folk Songs: Tibet Volume, Collection of Folk Dances of Chinese Ethnic Groups: Tibet Volume, and Collection of Chinese Proverbs: Tibet Volume have been published, and a series of collections of Tibetan ballads, folk songs, opera music and folk stories are now under compilation and will be published very soon. The editing and publishing of these books reflects the regional government's achievements in the protection of the fine aspects of traditional Tibetan culture and folk literature and art.

The world-famous "Life ofKing Gesar," a lengthy and valuable heroic epic created by the Tibetan people over a considerable length of time, is a rare literary treasure of China and the whole of mankind. However, it has only been passed down orally by folk artists. To better protect it, the regional authorities set up special bodies in 1979 for the collection, research, editing and publishing of the tome. The state placed it on the key scientific research project lists of the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Five-Year Plans. After 20 years of effort, nearly 300 handwritten or block-printed Tibetan volumes have been collected. Among them, except 100 variant volumes, about 70 volumes have been formally published in the Tibetan language, with a total print run of well more than 3 million copies. Thus, this epic, which had for long centuries been known only to a few folk artists, has come out as a systematically complete literary masterpiece that is called "the king of world epics." In addition, some 20 volumes of the Chinese edition have been published, and some have been translated into English, Japanese and French, and distributed all over the world. This was an unprecedented achievement in protecting the Tibetan literary and art heritage, as well as in publishing history.

Modern Tibetan literature and art have developed greatly in the process of combining with the traditional formats, styles and characteristics. After the peaceful liberation of Tibet, a group of literary and art workers from different ethnic groups went into the thick of life in Tibet to explore and inherit the fine aspects of the local literature and art tradition. They created a lot of poems, novels, songs, dances, fine art works, films and photos, introducing new literary and artistic ideas and creation experience to the then closed or semi-closed parts of Tibet. A large body of Tibetan intellectuals loving literature and art joined the new ranks of literary and art workers, and created a batch of modern works with distinctive ethnic features. Particularly after the Democratic Reform in 1959, a number of excellent literary and art works emerged in Tibet and, to a certain degree, influenced people both at home and abroad. These works include the songs "On the Golden Hill ofBeijing" and "Liberated Serfs Sing," the song with actions "Strolling Around the New Town," the song-and-dance combination "Washing Clothes," the dance epic with music "Emancipated Serfs Turn Toward the Sun," the drama "Princess Wen Cheng" and the movie "The Serfs."