An epic waiting for its turn

The regional culture department puts Jangar beside the Gesar epic and Manas as China's three great heroic epics. It entered the national list of intangible cultural heritage in 2006. The form is oral: for centuries it has been told and sung on the grassland rather than read from a book. That distinction matters. A printed edition is a record of the epic, not the epic in use. The tourism department describes the subject as order and justice and the building of a good homeland, which is a programme for living delivered in verse.

Bayingolin held its first Jangar festival in August 2018 at Bayanbulak in Hejing County, under the slogan 'an appointment with the epic, a journey to the grassland'. The prefecture's tourism association organised it with the Bayanbulak Jangar home. In Bortala, the culture department reports a Jangar protection and transmission centre in Bole, on 61.4 mu of ground, built for 9.6 million yuan. The same reply records a national inheritor, Jiazhunai, in a state recording project, and lists Jangar singing in the annual naadam of both prefectures. These are two ends of one practice: a stage in a high pasture, and a building in a prefecture town.

Jangar is not a Chinese practice alone. The 2019 reply notes that the epic also circulates in Inner Mongolia and in Russia and Mongolia, and that Xinjiang joined a China-Mongolia mechanism for joint intangible-heritage protection in 2012 in order to advance a joint nomination. It also sets out the constraint: UNESCO's cycle runs two years, a country may put forward one item in a cycle, and China's candidate list is long. The reply therefore describes a file still in preparation. Two facts should be kept apart. Jangar has been on China's national list since 2006. Its international listing is a project, with a mechanism and a queue, and no inscription is claimed here.