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German philosopher Hegel believed that Chinese people had no national epic, because their way of observing and thinking was like prose. So China really has no national epic? The answer is yes.

In Shangsong (song lyrics mostly collected from the Shang Dynasty) and Daya (The Major Festal Odes) of The Book of Songs, one can find a good number of memorial songs to ancestors and odes to heroes who established the Shang (17^th- 11^th century BC) and Zhou (11^th century BC - 256BC) dynasties, such as Liezu, Xuanniao, Changfa, Ying Wu, Shengmin, Gong Liu, Wenwang, Daming, and so on. As ancient ballades produced in childhood of human beings that record the birth of one’s own nation or heroic exploits are called epics, the poems mentioned just now can be recognized as the earliest epics in China.

From Bianwen, Sufu, Ciwen in the Tang Dynasty (618-907), Guzici, Zhugongdiao, Qiatanci in the Song, Liao and Jin dynasties (960-1234), to Gushutanci in the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), after long period of development, long narrative poems (like Iliad and Odyssey) became mature.

Minorities had created numerous narrative ballads of folk legends since the Tang and Song dynasties (618-1279), some of which were real long national epics such as Mongolians’ King Gesar, Kirgizs’ Manas, Naxis’ Creation of the World, Mongolians’ Geser, and so on. Put in the grove of world’s classical literature, they are not second to any ancient Greek or Indian epics.

（Source: chinaculture.org）