[Photo provided to China Daily]

"He was a very established dong lang, and his death is a big loss to the tradition," Chen says of Huang.

These days, some funerals of Miao ethnic people still have parts of the song but not all of it.

"I am afraid the tradition will be dead someday," Chen says. "I spent my whole life translating those songs. For me, they are priceless. I hope to pass them to the young generation."

There are around 3,000 dong lang among the 300,000 people in Western Guizhou's impoverished Mashan area, says Yang Zhengjiang, director of King Yalu Cultural Research Center founded by the Ziyun government in October 2009.

The tradition of dong lang has persisted in the area for centuries.

Yang started researching King Yalu after he graduated from Guizhou Minzu University in 2002.

Since 2009, the 32-year-old ethnic Miao has interviewed around 3,000 dong lang, including Huang, to record video and audio about King Yalu.

The old man left a deep impression on Yang by singing King Yalu for five days straight.

"Most dong lang are very old. Once they are gone, the history of King Yalu and even Miao culture will be forgotten," says Yang.

In 2009, the epic King Yalu was included on the State-level Intangible Cultural Heritage list. In 2012, with the help of the Chinese Folk Literature and Art Society, King Yalu was published in written form for the first time.

By 2014, Yang had helped set up 17 teaching and learning centers to protect the folk epic in five towns in Ziyun. He hopes to do more in the future to preserve the past.

Yang Jun contributed to the story