Millennium Symphony of Heroes (Field Notes on the Epic Tradition of the Oirat Mongols)

Author: Chao Gejin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-01-01
Features: Along the towering foothills of the Tianshan Mountains, there lives a Mongolian group known as the "Oirat." Today, though their population is merely over ten thousand and they are not widely known to the outside world, the historical "Four Oirats"—the Junggar, Khoshut, Durbet, and Torghut—once rose to prominence in the vast region of Central Asia, soaring through the clouds, renowned far and wide, with their power extending from the Xing'an Mountains in the east to the Altai Mountains in the west, reaching Lake Balkhash and the Pamirs, stretching northward from the Angara River and Lake Baikal, and reaching south to the deserts. They were known as the "Oirat Alliance" or "Western Mongolia" in history. The era of a nation's rise is also an era of heroes emerging. Among the Oirat Mongolians, for thousands of years, a grand epic has been sung about a legendary hero—Jangar and his valiant cavalry—telling of the great achievements and historical deeds of their ancestors in defending the beautiful and prosperous ancestral homeland of "Bombo." This series of oral epics, titled after the hero's name, constitutes one of the "Three Great Epics of China's Ethnic Minorities," titled Jangar.
For years, the author has tracked and studied the Mongolian epic singing tradition, repeatedly delving into the northern and southern regions of the Tianshan Mountains to seek epic singers and the heroic songs passed down through generations by the Oirat pastoralists. With his scattered yet fluent narrative style, he has written these vivid, documentary field notes and ethnographic interview reports, which radiate the persistent epic passion of a Mongolian scholar, conveying direct insights and academic reflections on the pursuit of heroic traditions, and condensing the grandeur left by a great and ancient epic singing tradition amidst the dust of history.