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The Ancient Origins of the Chinese People | Story of China w/ Michael Wood | Full Episode 1 | PBS — Transcript

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0:07- [Michael Voiceover] We've all got an image of China today.
0:11The one-party state.
0:13The biggest nation on Earth.
0:16The huge economic growth of the last 30 years,
0:20pushing its power and influence across the world.
0:23(soft music)
0:25But there's another China.
0:27(gong rings)
0:30A civilization that goes back thousands of years.
0:36It's the oldest continuous state on Earth.
0:39- China's the country that we all want to know about today,
0:42but if you want to understand China now,
0:45you need to know about its history.
0:49- [Michael Voiceover] And it's a history
0:49of amazing drama and creativity,
0:53triumphs and tragedies, and deep humanity.
0:59It's an epic tale of continuity
1:02which passed down China's oldest beliefs
1:04for more than 3,000 years, (singing in foreign language)
1:07until the start of the 20th century.
1:10Since then the Chinese people have gone through
1:12foreign invasion, civil war, and violent revolution.
1:17Their culture was devastated.
1:20Their ancient traditions, like this temple festival,
1:23were lost, it seemed, forever.
1:32But now China is rising again and the Chinese people
1:36are rediscovering the meaning of their history.
1:40It's a great time to look afresh at the story of China.
1:45(dynamic music)
1:50(soft music)
1:54(people speaking indistinctly)
1:58- [Michael Voiceover] Every year in springtime,
2:0010s of millions of Chinese people
2:02set off of the journey home.
2:09They're going back for the Qing Ming Festival,
2:12the Festival of Light,
2:14to do one of the most important things in Chinese culture,
2:18to honor the ancestors.
2:21- I'm heading down to the city of Wuxi
2:24for a very special occasion, a family reunion.
2:28(gentle music)
2:32- [Michael Voiceover] For the last 30 years,
2:33the Chinese people have grown up in a consumer society.
2:39After the break
2:40with Chairman Mao's brand of revolutionary communism,
2:43China has been on a headlong rush into the future.
2:49But as new freedoms beckon, (dynamic music)
2:52and as their world changes before their eyes,
2:55the Chinese people are reaching back
2:57to the age-old beliefs that have sustained them for so long.
3:03- Sometimes the new proves less enticing
3:07than was first thought
3:09and the old far more durable than anyone had ever imagined.
3:15- [Michael Voiceover] And for the Chinese people,
3:17what matters most is the family.
3:25This is Wuxi.
3:26With eight million people it looks like any modern city,
3:29but it's as old as Rome.
3:32And it's the home of the Qin family.
3:34(people speaking indistinctly)
3:43(birds chirping)
3:46Dawn on the Day of the Ancestors,
3:50what the Chinese call Tomb Sweeping Day.
3:53(soft music)
3:55And the Qin family gather
3:56at the grave of their founding ancestor, Qin Guang,
4:01a poet who lived 1,000 years ago.
4:06The presence of the ancestors is still felt
4:08by everyone in China.
4:10In the West,
4:11most of us can hardly go back beyond the great-grandparents.
4:14The Qins can name more than 30 generations.
4:22They've come from all over China, and further afield,
4:25to make their own report to the ancestors,
4:28to tell them how the family's doing
4:30and how the ancestors and their values still live on in us.
4:34(man speaking foreign language)
4:36As the ancients used to say, repaying our roots.
4:41- Amazing scene, isn't it?
4:43Just recalls the whole of Chinese history
4:46over the last 100 years.
4:47Wars, revolutions, famines,
4:51families broken up, cast to the four winds,
4:54and yet they come back
4:56with this kind of homing instinct almost
4:58to the tomb of the founder,
5:01as if everything can be reconstituted.
5:05- [Michael Voiceover] These rituals were banned
5:07by Chairman Mao in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
5:11The grave was vandalized and lost.
5:13But when the revolutionary time was over, Frank Ching,
5:16a graduate of Fordham and Columbia,
5:19came with his sister to search for the tomb.
5:23And what he found was so fascinating
5:25that he decided to write the family history.
5:28- Back in 1982, when I found that gravestone,
5:33none of these things existed.
5:35You know, when I first started out I was like a blank slate.
5:39I didn't know what existed.
5:41It's really very exciting this is happening.
5:43I certainly never expected anything like this to happen
5:46when I started my own journey of discovery.
5:52- [Michael Voiceover] For the head of the family,
5:53Qin Baoxin, rediscovering their lost past
5:56is part of recovering the identity of the nation.
5:59(Qin speaking foreign language)
6:01- [Translator Voiceover] In recent years we've been able
6:03to pay more attention to family values and culture.
6:06This was stopped during the Cultural Revolution
6:09and slowly we've been restoring these things.
6:12Every family in the country is doing the same thing.
6:16(soft music)
6:21- [Michael Voiceover] Like everyone in China, the Qin family
6:23have experienced dizzying change since the end of empire.
6:29From colonial subjects to emigres seeking a better life,
6:33communist revolutionaries
6:34on the Long March with Chairman Mao,
6:37and even glamour on the Shanghai stage,
6:43their family story mirrors the story of the nation.
6:49And now the meaning of that history is flooding back.
6:55Some of the older members have founded a clan newspaper
6:58to publish news about their family history.
7:01(speaking foreign language)
7:03- [Translator Voiceover] In China the family
7:04is the foundation of everything.
7:06If the family's at peace, all things go well.
7:10If each family is fine,
7:12then the whole country will also be fine.
7:15(people speaking indistinctly)
7:21Our family goes back 1,000 years, and in that time
7:25there have been huge changes in the country.
7:28But now we can look back again.
7:31And like many people, we are asking, "How did we get here?
7:35"Where are our roots?"
7:39(man speaking foreign language)
7:44- I'm going to regret this!
7:47(soft music)
7:49- [Michael Voiceover] So the Chinese people have found again
7:52the warmth of home after the vast and terrifying dislocation
7:57of the mid-20th century,
7:59when for a time China turned its back on its past.
8:06The Qin family, like the nation itself,
8:09are seeking a renewed identity,
8:12a distinctively Chinese way forward
8:15anchored in the Chinese past.
8:20And that history goes back thousands of years,
8:23so far back that there are no written texts
8:26that tell of its birth.
8:28But there are myths and legends,
8:31handed down over thousands of years,
8:34and these myths take us
8:36to the heart of the Yellow River plain
8:38that gave China its name, Zhongguo, the middle land.
8:53And here you can still reach back to those beginnings.
8:57(vibrant drumming)
9:01This is a rural fair at a 2,000-year-old temple,
9:04which was closed down in the communist era in the 1950s.
9:08- I'm at the Great Farmer's Festival
9:10in the plain of the Yellow River,
9:12with a million people all around me.
9:17- [Michael Voiceover] And these vast crowds
9:19have come to celebrate an ancient myth
9:21that tells of the origins of the Chinese people.
9:27As in many ancient cultures,
9:29it's the women who've treasured the tales
9:31and handed them down.
9:34- How much?
9:35Three?
9:37- [Michael Voiceover] Especially the tale
9:38of the mother goddess of the Chinese people, Nuwa.
9:42- Little dog.
9:44It's great, isn't it?
9:45This whole great festival
9:47is to two ancient gods in Chinese mythology,
9:52Fuxi, the male god, and Nuwa, the female god.
9:56And she's famous because she created humanity
9:59out of the yellow mud of the Yellow River,
10:02and the mud that was left over, she made dogs and chickens,
10:06according to the myth.
10:09- [Michael Voiceover] And the myth contains
10:10the seeds of Chinese identity, (soft music)
10:12incredibly passed down from the Bronze Age.
10:16(woman speaking foreign language)
10:19- [Translator Voiceover] A long time ago,
10:20the Earth quaked and the sky fell in.
10:24Only Nuwa and her brother Fuxi survived.
10:28So they bit their fingers and mixed their blood
10:30with mud from the Yellow River,
10:33and with this mixture they molded the very first humans.
10:42So Nuwa is our ancestral mother.
10:46We're all here because of her.
10:48(woman chuckling)
10:52- [Michael Voiceover] These myths have been handed down
10:54for over 4,000 years, and they contain a crucial idea,
10:59the uniqueness of Chinese ethnic identity.
11:05China is a huge and diverse country,
11:07with so many languages and cultures.
11:13But the vast majority of its people
11:15call themselves Han Chinese after the great Han Dynasty
11:20that ruled China 2,000 years ago.
11:27But the story of China told in the myths
11:30and revealed by modern archaeology goes back much further.
11:35And the tale begins on the banks of the Yellow River.
11:41All four of the great civilizations of the ancient world
11:45began on the banks of rivers, the Nile, the Euphrates,
11:49the Indus, and the Yellow River.
11:54And the rise of all of them
11:55depended on control of the water.
11:59- It was the ability to harness the waters of the river
12:02for irrigation that enabled ancient people
12:04to feed bigger and bigger populations
12:07and eventually to create cities and make civilization.
12:13But where the rising of the Nile, for example,
12:15was predictable to the day, and seen by the Egyptians
12:19as a joyful and benign source of life,
12:24the Yellow River here in China has been a destroyer,
12:28the killer of millions in its great floods
12:30throughout Chinese history, right up to the 20th century.
12:36- [Michael Voiceover] And so at the beginnings
12:37of Chinese history,
12:38control of the river lay at the heart of political power,
12:43and new archaeological discoveries
12:45have pinpointed a great flood just before 1900 BCE.
12:50(soft music)
12:52And this connects with the most famous myth
12:55about the origin of the Chinese state,
12:57the tale of the king who first channeled the Yellow River
13:01after a great flood is still told by the storytellers.
13:06(man speaking foreign language)
13:09- [Translator Voiceover] King Yu had two good helpers,
13:12Yellow Dragon and Black Turtle.
13:15Yellow Dragon had a very long tail
13:17and Black Turtle was very strong.
13:21To divert the flood, Yellow Dragon dragged its tail
13:25and opened a channel for the water.
13:30And when King Yu needed to build a dam,
13:33Black turtle pushed huge amounts of mud into position.
13:41King Yu worked so hard trying to control the water
13:44that he didn't return home for 13 years.
13:50- Look at this.
13:55- [Michael Voiceover] So could the legend of King Yu
13:58have handed down the memory
13:59of a catastrophic flood in prehistory,
14:03and even the memory of a real ruler?
14:06(thunder roaring)
14:10- This is a Ming Dynasty temple.
14:12It was built in the 1520s
14:15but on a very, very ancient terrace.
14:20And that's King Yu.
14:22(soft music)
14:24- [Michael Voiceover] Up until now historians have thought
14:26the tale of King Yu was just a myth,
14:29but recently a bronze bowl was found,
14:32nearly 3,000 years old, engraved with his story,
14:36proving the tale goes back to the Bronze Age
14:39and maybe even back to the Great Flood of 1900 BCE.
14:48The legend said that it was King Yu
14:50who founded China's first dynasty.
14:53They were called the Xia (singing in foreign language)
14:54and they came from the middle plain of the middle land
14:58here in the rich wheatfields of Henan,
15:02where China's fist large scale societies began.
15:06And at the village of Erlitou,
15:08traditions survived until modern times,
15:11but this had been the seat of China's first rulers.
15:16(women speaking foreign language)
15:18- So the most ancient site in the world?
15:21- [Translator Voiceover] The oldest remains are over there.
15:24- Erlitou!
15:25- No!
15:27Incredible!
15:29Ancient Greece, Ancient Iraq, Ancient Egypt.
15:32Wherever you look, some memory survives onsite.
15:36- [Michael Voiceover] Here towns first emerged
15:38out of China's Stone Age villages
15:41soon after the Great Flood.
15:43(woman speaking foreign language)
15:45- [Translator Voiceover] A long time ago,
15:46Emperor Huangdi was buried there.
15:49Thousands and thousands of years ago.
15:51- Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor, the founder of,
15:54the original emperor of China.
15:56(woman speaking foreign language)
15:58- [Translator Voiceover] North of the river Luo
15:59there was an ancient village.
16:01This area was excavated
16:03and the things they dug out are over there.
16:06(soft music)
16:11- [Michael Voiceover] Under these wheatfields
16:12the archaeologists excavated a settlement
16:15which had thousands of people and a huge walled enclosure.
16:19(man speaking foreign language)
16:21- [Translator Voiceover] You see the white house?
16:22That is where palace number four is.
16:26- [Michael Voiceover] Inside were pillared halls,
16:28palaces from different periods between 1900 and 1500 BCE.
16:37They stood on rammed earth platforms,
16:39one of them with a triple gate,
16:42the pattern of all later Chinese royal cities.
16:49The Xia Dynasty are still a mystery.
16:53Here at Erlitou,
16:54archaeologists are still piecing together the clues
16:58from the pottery and from the bronze casting.
17:03Most intriguing of all is a bronze scepter
17:06inlaid with 2,000 pieces of turquoise
17:08in the shape of a dragon,
17:10the age old symbol of Chinese royalty,
17:13and an echo, perhaps, of the dragon scepter
17:16given by the gods to King Yu when he tamed the flood.
17:26So Erlitou looks tantalizingly
17:28like the beginnings of the Chinese state.
17:32The finds on the ground
17:34seem to be baring up the story of the myths.
17:38(man speaking foreign language)
17:41- [Translator Voiceover] Archaeologists think this site
17:43is very important.
17:45It seems to be the first city of the mythical Xia,
17:50but of course we need writing to be 100% sure.
17:56(soft music)
17:59- [Michael Voiceover] If this was the capital of the Xia,
18:01China's first dynasty, it's where myth becomes history,
18:06the origin place of the Chinese state.
18:14As it is, though, to find China's first historical rulers
18:18we now have to leap forward to around 1500 BCE
18:23to the Shang Dynasty.
18:27And we know about the Shang
18:28because they've left us the first Chinese writing.
18:36The modern discovery of the Shang
18:38is one of the most exciting stories in world archaeology,
18:44and it began by chance in one of those storehouses
18:47of age-old Chinese wisdom,
18:50a traditional pharmacy,
18:56where beliefs and practices going back into prehistory
19:00have come down to us today,
19:05and the clues to the mystery of the Shang, unbelievably,
19:10were found inside a packet of over-the-counter medicine.
19:16- The story goes like this.
19:171899, a Chinese scholar called Wang Yirong,
19:21who was the Chancellor of the Imperial Academy in Beijing,
19:24a great scholar and a collector of ancient bronzes,
19:28he was interested in the earliest Chinese writing systems.
19:32He falls ill with malaria and his local pharmacy,
19:36just like this one, delivers a series of ingredients,
19:39which include dragon bones.
19:43These were animal bones, just like this,
19:46they use them today,
19:47which you ground up and boiled and drank
19:50to alleviate the fever.
19:53When he opened the packet,
19:56to his amazement, this is what he saw.
20:00Some of the bones were inscribed with what he could see
20:05were primitive forms of the old writing
20:10that he knew from the inscriptions on his bronzes.
20:12And eventually these dragon bones were traced back
20:15to a little place in the lower valley of the Yellow River,
20:19a country town called Anyang.
20:22(soft music)
20:29- [Michael Voiceover] And Anyang,
20:30according to the ancient Chinese legends,
20:32had been the last capital of the Shang Dynasty.
20:37When the archaeologists dug there they found the foundations
20:39of palaces of the Shang kings and huge underground tombs.
20:45They found human sacrifice,
20:47wives and slaves killed with their masters,
20:50their skeletons and severed heads laid out in rows
20:53to please the gods.
20:57And they also unearthed heaps of dragon bones,
21:01bones of cows and sheep and turtles
21:04that the Shang kings and their diviners
21:07used to talk to their ancestors and to read the future.
21:16- So basically they choose one piece of bone or shell
21:20and then they drill some holes.
21:22And then they heat up these holes with some special plants
21:27and then these will create some cracks.
21:30And then they'd look at the patterns of these cracks.
21:35- [Michael Voiceover] It was a strange and archaic
21:37form of divination.
21:39With a heated point,
21:40they burned little holes in the back of the bone.
21:46That made cracks on the other side,
21:48and then the priests looked at the cracks
21:50and from them interpreted the will of the ancestral spirits.
21:55And they wrote the questions and the answers on the bones,
21:59which were stored in the royal archive.
22:02Will our enemies attack us?
22:03Will the queen's baby boy survive?
22:06Will the rains come?
22:09- So the diviners are asking
22:10for the favor of the ancestral spirits?
22:12- Yes, yes.
22:14- [Michael] Wow.
22:15- Yes, so basically it's their special way
22:17to communicate with their ancestors.
22:21- [Michael] The ancestors are the key people
22:22in their mental universe. - Yes, yes, yes.
22:25- [Michael] God, fantastic.
22:26(soft music)
22:29- [Michael Voiceover] And unlike the hieroglyphs
22:31of ancient Egypt or the Cuneiform of Babylonia,
22:34the archaeologists had no need of a key to decipher them,
22:38for they could see at once
22:39that the signs on the oracle bones
22:41were the direct ancestors of today's Chinese writing.
22:47- That's the character for rain, I mean in modern language,
22:53and in oracle bones it's like this,
22:57with three drops. - It's still rain drops.
22:58- So essentially it's the same idea, fundamentally.
23:01This rain character is characterized by these raindrops.
23:05- [Michael] Yeah, yeah.
23:08- [Michael Voiceover] Out of these prehistoric pictographs
23:11came today's Chinese script
23:14with its 10s of thousands of signs.
23:17But when modern Chinese people read them
23:20they see not simple letters representing sounds,
23:24but ancient concepts
23:26carrying a whole civilization's way of seeing.
23:33So through their script, the Chinese people
23:35are uniquely connected with their deep past,
23:39more so than any other culture on Earth.
23:42(soft music)
23:48So Shang power came from the ancestors.
23:53Now on the oracle bones was one sacred place in particular.
23:57- Hello!
23:59- [Michael Voiceover] A place with the same name
24:00as the dynasty, Shang.
24:03- Well this is not like the shopping malls of Shanghai,
24:04that's for sure.
24:06- [Michael Voiceover] To find it,
24:08the archaeologists now turned to a little town in Henan
24:11with a tantalizing name, Shangqiu, the Ruins of Shang.
24:18- Well we're now inside the Ming Dynasty city.
24:21This was built in 1511,
24:22the previous one destroyed by floods.
24:24Lots more underneath it, of course.
24:27What's fascinating is it's still called Shangqiu,
24:31the Ruins of Shang.
24:35- [Michael Voiceover] So was this the ancestral place
24:37of China's first great dynasty?
24:40- Good system!
24:41(Michael chuckling)
24:43- [Michael Voiceover] That question has intrigued
24:45Chinese archaeologists
24:47since their first explorations here in the 1930s.
24:51(horns honking)
24:53But the Bronze Age layers here
24:55are 30 feet deep in Yellow River silt.
25:00Not long ago, though, a joint Chinese expedition
25:04with the University of Boston detected the outline
25:07of a much older city underneath the modern town.
25:11And the clues to what it was were in the oracle bones
25:15found at Anyang.
25:17- In the 1930s a the Chinese scholar called Dong Zuobin
25:21worked on the Bronze Age inscriptions
25:25scratched into the oracle bones from the Shang Dynasty.
25:29Thousand upon thousand of them.
25:32And through the 1930s,
25:35when China was riven by civil war and Japanese invasion,
25:39he worked transcribing these inscriptions
25:43in what I suppose you could call self-effacing loyalty
25:47to the Chinese past
25:49while the catastrophes of the modern world surrounded him.
25:52And you see there his transcription
25:54of one of the turtle shells
25:57with all the splits and the inscriptions on them
26:00and he worked out the order of the Shang kings
26:02and their calendar and their rituals and their journeys.
26:08(soft music)
26:12- [Michael Voiceover] What he discovered
26:13was that the kings came back to do special rituals
26:17at the city called Shang.
26:19And that was here.
26:21Its name meant
26:22"the place where the ancestors were worshipped."
26:25So state and ancestors were tied together.
26:33And amazingly cults and legends about the Shang
26:35still survive here
26:37at a mysterious temple at the edge of town.
26:43The mound of Shang.
26:45It's a great artificial hill.
26:49The legends say this mound was built before the Great Flood,
26:53that here mankind first got fire stolen from the gods.
27:00And tradition also said this had been a kind of observatory,
27:05where the Shang kings watched the stars
27:08that protected their dynasty.
27:11- Because they believed that the stars were powers in heaven
27:16and if we understood them properly
27:19then we'd know best how to run our kingdom.
27:22(slow music)
27:26- [Michael Voiceover] So the oracle bones
27:27and the later myths are clues to early Chinese beliefs
27:31about society and the cosmos.
27:34Divination, ritual, and writing
27:37were the basis of state power.
27:44For their sacred ceremonies they cast beautiful bronzes
27:48to hold food and wine offerings to the ancestral spirits,
27:52which were consumed at the royal feasts.
27:55Some of them bear the symbols of the different lineages
27:58of the royal and noble families.
28:06Like the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians,
28:09the Shang practiced human sacrifice.
28:13The oracle bones list the victims.
28:16They were captives from the subject peoples the Shang ruled,
28:20killed as offerings to the powers of nature,
28:25as the Shang diviners asked the ancestors in heaven
28:29for guidance, anxiously watching the stars
28:33for omens of auspiciousness and omens of disaster.
28:44- To them time,
28:45as revealed in the movements of the stars and planets,
28:49was a truly portentous dimension
28:53full of danger as well as auspiciousness,
28:56and especially for the rulers,
28:58for they knew that in time the planets would reveal
29:04heaven's judgment on their earthly rule.
29:10- [Michael Voiceover] And eventually
29:11heaven did make its judgement.
29:13After five centuries the last Shang king, Di Xin,
29:17came to the throne, and he would never be forgotten.
29:22- In the end the last of the Shang kings
29:24turned into a monster.
29:26He became a wicked villain,
29:29like the characters in a fairy tale.
29:33And anybody who argued with him he had put to death.
29:36And when his most honest councilor
29:38tried to make him behave better,
29:40the wicked queen ordered the councilor's heart
29:43to be cut out.
29:45(woman speaking foreign language)
29:48And then, with the people despairing of his cruelty,
29:52in the heavens they saw a sign.
29:55Five planets clustered together
29:57in a small corner of the sky.
30:00Heaven had spoken.
30:05That five-planet conjunction happens every 516 years.
30:11So we asked the astronomers of Beijing Planetarium
30:14to help us find the day
30:16when the gods turned against the Shang.
30:21It's usually very hard to find exact dates this far back,
30:25but as the ancient Chinese
30:27recorded this rare planetary gathering, now we can do it.
30:32- So it's what historians always want to do
30:33is to actually go back in time.
30:35Mr. Lu can do it for us.
30:37He can actually take us back to late May 1058 BC
30:42on his computer system.
30:46(soft music)
30:48So you can follow any single planet?
30:51- Yes.
30:52- It's just wonderful.
30:53- The sun is raised the sky.
30:58- [Michael Voiceover] The sign in the heavens
31:00was also seen by the tribes
31:02who lived under the Shang tyranny,
31:04and they made an alliance under a man known for his virtue,
31:08King Wen of the Zhou.
31:12And then came another omen.
31:14A huge red bird landed on the altar of the earth
31:18on Mount Jin, and it spoke.
31:22Heaven has commanded that the king of the Shang
31:26must be overthrown.
31:31(people yelling indistinctly)
31:33Finally, on May the 23rd, 1046 BCE,
31:38Di Xin, the last king of the Shang,
31:40bowed to the will of the ancestors.
31:43- And in the end all the king's enemies gathered
31:45and brought an army against his royal palace.
31:50And then he realized that he'd lost the favor of the gods,
31:56or as the Chinese call it, the Mandate of Heaven.
31:58(soft music)
32:00(singing in foreign language)
32:02And all his allies deserted him,
32:05and as his palace in his royal city went up in flames,
32:08he puts on his precious jade suit
32:12and he walked into the fire.
32:14That was the end of the Shang Dynasty.
32:20- [Michael Voiceover] And so the Mandate of Heaven
32:23passed to the king of the Zhou,
32:25and he laid down the pattern of rule for future ages.
32:30Rulers must be virtuous
32:31and keep harmony between humanity and the cosmos,
32:35observing the rituals and the music of the heavens.
32:40(singing in foreign language)
32:42And amazingly some of the ritual traditions
32:45of the Shang and the Zhou have survived until today.
32:50These are Daoists, followers of China's oldest religion.
32:54Their name means the seekers after the way.
32:57In their ceremonies and music,
32:59the Daoists are a living link with these ancient ideas
33:03about the relation of the kingdoms of Earth and heaven.
33:07(woman speaking foreign language)
33:09- [Translator Voiceover] In Daoism,
33:10heaven and Earth are two kingdoms.
33:12Those kingdoms have the same spirit, the same emperor.
33:17Daoism has inherited China's ancient beliefs
33:19from the Xia, Shang, and Zhou Dynasties.
33:23But it is not just about belief.
33:25In Chinese culture many ordinary, practical things
33:28can be done in the Daoist way.
33:31(soft music)
33:32- [Michael Voiceover] And these very ancient
33:34customs and beliefs are still held in affection,
33:37and practiced, by the ordinary Chinese people today.
33:42(singing in foreign language)
33:52In later times the Zhou came to be seen as model rulers,
33:57fulfilling Heaven's Mandate.
34:01But China's fate throughout its history
34:04has been to fragment in times of crisis.
34:08(people yelling indistinctly)
34:11(dynamic music)
34:13Eventually Zhou power disintegrated
34:17and the heartland of China descended into chaos.
34:23Across the middle land feuding kings and warlords
34:26fought for supremacy.
34:30And a recent string of astonishing archaeological finds
34:34have shown us what their armies looked like.
34:37- Amazing sight, isn't it?
34:39This is one of more than a dozen chariot burial pits
34:42that have been uncovered in the middle of Luoyang
34:46in the last few years.
34:47There's 18 chariots and their horses here.
34:52It's the world of Achilles and Hector
34:54in more than just the military hardware.
34:58Politically, just like Agamemnon,
35:01the kings here in the central plain of China
35:03depended on the cooperation of vassal states,
35:07smaller kingdoms, sometimes more than 100 of them.
35:11But these were rivals fighting each other.
35:15Political instability, warfare, and violence were endemic.
35:20And for that reason, perhaps,
35:22this is the time when a ferment of ideas grows
35:25about the nature of kingship, the function of states,
35:29duties, obligation, and morality.
35:33Out of this
35:35begins the first golden age of Chinese philosophy.
35:42(soft music)
35:46- [Michael Voiceover] Right across the old world
35:48in the 6th century BC,
35:50thinkers and rulers were debating these ideas.
35:55A new age of human thought had dawned,
35:58what we call the Axial Age.
36:03Greek philosophers, the Old Testament prophets,
36:07the Buddha in India.
36:08All of them were wrestling with ideas about conscience
36:12and social justice, and human autonomy.
36:19How can a king be just in violent times?
36:23What is law?
36:24What is virtue?
36:25(man speaking foreign language)
36:27In China, it was said 100 schools of thought bloomed,
36:32and the most famous thinker
36:34came from an obscure state in Eastern China.
36:40He was descended
36:41from a family of Shang oracle bone diviners,
36:45and his obsession was not the inner life,
36:47but how we act in the public world.
36:50- Small town China.
36:52But what a small town!
36:55Because this place, Qufu,
36:58has nearly 3,000 years of continuity, life on this spot,
37:03and it gave birth to one of the most influential figures
37:06in the history of the world.
37:08Confucius.
37:10(soft music)
37:17Confucius lived in a time of cultural and political crisis,
37:21China divided into many small states
37:24that were always fighting each other,
37:26and sometimes even divided in themselves.
37:29Like this one, the state of Lu, whose capital was Qufu.
37:39Confucius rose eventually to a quite high ministerial job
37:45in which he played a crucial role,
37:48brokering a peace deal between three feuding clans
37:52and persuading them to demolish their fortifications
37:55and acknowledge the duke here as their lord.
37:58And that kind of experience gave him
38:00the idea of his mission, which was nothing less than to
38:04restore civilization by teaching rulers to be virtuous.
38:10(birds chirping)
38:12- Confucius had a very clear vision.
38:15There is definitely this sense of passion in him
38:18that he wants to be recognized
38:22He wants to contribute to the social order of society
38:25and he wants to make sure that ritual practices
38:29are followed very closely.
38:33Confucius was very keen
38:35on the idea of humaneness or benevolence,
38:38and that the ruler set a direct example
38:41for the people to follow.
38:46There's a very lively metaphor in the Analects,
38:49when the character of the ruler is compared to the wind
38:53and the character of the ordinary people
38:55is compared to the grass.
38:57So it's said that when the wind blows,
39:00the grass naturally bends.
39:03- [Michael Voiceover] Like Socrates or the Buddha,
39:04his sayings were turned into a book after his death
39:07by his disciples.
39:09- The Analects.
39:10Horrible word, isn't it?
39:11What a mouthful.
39:13It means the sort of quotations from,
39:16but really it should be called
39:17the conversations of Confucius
39:19because that's what it really is.
39:20It's his sayings.
39:23And it's been said that no book in the history of the world,
39:27even the Bible, has exerted so much influence
39:30for such a long period on so many people.
39:36That's Confucius's little blue book.
39:4018?
39:4118, okay great.
39:44- [Michael Voiceover] The Analects would become
39:45China's guide to the principles of good government.
39:51- He says that if you govern people by Zheng,?
39:55it could be translated as law or punishment,
40:01then you get people who have no sense of shame.
40:05You get order
40:06but people don't really know what they're doing wrong.
40:09But then if you govern by De, a sense of virtue, morality,
40:16then people have a sense of shame
40:19and with that idea it's implied
40:21that they'll have moral progress as well.
40:26- [Michael Voiceover] It's a very old idea
40:27in the story of China that the basis of all government
40:30is not law, but established morality,
40:34and the key end to preserve the state.
40:40So the ideas of Confucius weren't religious.
40:44They were what we would call political,
40:47and that's another key to the Story of China.
40:49The core ideals of their civilization were not theological,
40:53they were ethical.
40:55Good governance would come if the elite were educated
40:58and the king was virtuous.
41:02Without virtue, Confucius thought any ruler
41:05was morally bankrupt and should be resisted.
41:10He traveled the roads of China
41:12like some intellectual troubleshooter,
41:14trying to sell China's local rulers his New Deal.
41:21At his tomb I met a group of Confucian teachers from Korea.
41:27These gentlemen are not priests, they're scholars,
41:32and what they are doing is not so much religion as ritual.
41:37An act of reverence for the old master
41:40and his ideal of universal brotherhood.
41:44(singing in foreign language)
41:48Bowing before his tombstone, which was smashed to pieces
41:52by the communist Red Guards only 50 years ago,
41:56but is now restored.
42:02(man speaking foreign language)
42:04- [Translator Voiceover] We are here to honour Confucius.
42:07But why are you here?
42:09(people chuckle)
42:10- Ah, very good question!
42:12So we are interested in the history of China
42:14and Confucius is so important that that is why we are here.
42:19- [Michael Voiceover] But for them, of course,
42:20Confucius is a living teacher
42:23in an unbroken tradition of 2,500 years.
42:27(man speaking foreign language)
42:32- All over the world,
42:33people, they should know about Confucius.
42:38Love should spread all over the world, not just individual.
42:43- Yeah, love, benevolence, courtesy, good manners.
42:47These are the way society works when society works well
42:51- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - in Confucius's idea.
42:54(soft music)
42:56- [Michael Voiceover] Confucius was condemned
42:57during the Communist Revolution
42:59as the embodiment of old ideas and old customs,
43:03but now once more he's a national treasure,
43:06praised by the government for his stress on social values,
43:09though not so much, perhaps, for his insistence
43:12that it is the intellectual's duty to speak truth to power.
43:18But in both he's a symbol of the Chinese way.
43:22(speaking foreign language)
43:30- [Michael] Very good, oh very good!
43:33Xie, Xie! (soft music)
43:35Thank you very much.
43:36Fantastic.
43:37Very, very good.
43:45Confucius was not an innovator, he was the distiller,
43:50the crystallizer of an already ancient tradition.
43:55The idea of the virtuous ruler, of filial piety,
43:59of ritual and ceremony as the glue
44:01that bound society together,
44:03and the overruling power of education.
44:07Those are the values
44:09that still underlie Chinese values today, and Asian values
44:14from Korea and Japan, all the way down to Vietnam.
44:19What a legacy.
44:29But the truth is,
44:30in his own lifetime Confucius was a failure.
44:34No ruler bought into his manifesto for change.
44:39After his death in 479 BCE,
44:43the warring states fought each other for two more centuries.
44:50And by then no one was listening
44:51to arguments about morality,
44:54but only the claims of violence and war.
45:02(people yelling indistinctly)
45:03And one of those warring states was the Qin.
45:10Through military conquest they swallowed up the Zhou
45:14and the other states of the Yellow River plain.
45:23And in 221 BC they proclaimed their leader
45:26the first emperor of all China, Qin Shi Huangdi.
45:32- How this vast and diverse area became one state,
45:37that's one of the great themes of our story.
45:40As we've already seen, it began a long time before
45:43with the Xia and Shang Dynasties.
45:46But without the Qin emperor,
45:48whose army is arrayed before us now,
45:51it might never have happened.
45:54The ongoing excavation of the first emperor's tomb
45:57near Xi'an has given us an unparalleled insight
46:00into his empire.
46:03Discipline.
46:04Obedience.
46:05Military might.
46:07- All these terracotta warriors
46:08are only a small part of the whole tomb complex.
46:11You know, the whole tomb complex of the first emperor
46:14covers about 15, 16 square kilometers.
46:20- [Michael Voiceover] This pit is one of
46:22nearly 200 large and small found since the 1970s.
46:27The more the archaeologists look, the more they find.
46:31The restoration job will take several lifetimes.
46:36- I think we are very similar to the doctor.
46:38Only difference is our patient is different.
46:43- [Michael Voiceover] And every one
46:45of the thousands of terracotta warriors
46:46has an individual treatment plan
46:49as they're put back together in the onsite labs.
46:52- Do we know what rank he was in the army?
46:55- [Xia] No, he's a normal soldier.
46:58- You can tell that by the headdress and the armor?
47:00- Headdress.
47:01Depends on his armor,
47:03and depends on his troops
47:08because general has more detail, more--
47:12- [Michael] Posh clothes, yeah, yeah.
47:14- More, yeah!
47:16More--
47:18- [Michael] A stern, a stern look of command doesn't he?
47:22And this gives us a sense of what the first emperor's army
47:25actually was like?
47:27- Yeah, this really a model of the Qin Dynasty army,
47:30you know, because these battle formations shows infantry,
47:34you know, archers and cavalry, and charioteers, you know.
47:40So that's really battle formation of the Qin Dynasty.
47:44(vibrant music)
47:47- [Michael Voiceover] With their mass-produced bronze
47:49weapons and mechanical crossbows,
47:51the Qin army conquered all their neighbors.
47:53(people cheering)
47:57The first emperor imposed his own
47:59revolutionary political system on the conquered lands,
48:03dispossessing the old aristocracies,
48:06creating an enormous captive labor force
48:09to build his new state, the Qin.
48:13That's the source of the name for China used today
48:16by the outside world,
48:18which first came to know China at this time.
48:24Qin Si Huangdi built the first Great Wall.
48:28He made a new road system linking the 36 military provinces.
48:34For tax and commerce,
48:35the weights and measures were regulated,
48:38and there was to be a uniform coinage.
48:43And the Chinese script, too, was standardized,
48:46so the emperor's will could be conveyed
48:48right down to local magistrates,
48:51who administered a population
48:52of more than 30 million people.
48:56- The beginnings of China as a unitary state,
48:59as the world's first bureaucratic, centralized empire,
49:04begin with Qin Shi Huangdi.
49:10- [Michael Voiceover] But this first united China
49:12was held together by fear and force.
49:16(people yelling indistinctly)
49:19The Qin emperor killed 400 Confucian scholars
49:23and ordered all history books to be burnt.
49:27In the Qin year 0, history was to be erased.
49:32(man yelling in foreign language)
49:34But the emperor's cruelty was the downfall of his dynasty.
49:38Only three years after his death the people rose in revolt.
49:46The great rebellion was led by a peasant, Liu Bang,
49:50(man yelling in foreign language)
49:53and Liu Bang founded the new dynasty after which
49:56the Chinese still name themselves today, the Han.
50:01(man speaking foreign language)
50:04- [Translator Voiceover] Liu Bang, the leader of the rebels,
50:05had a very magical birth.
50:11His mother dreamed she mated with a dragon
50:17and the dragon landed on her and she became pregnant,
50:20and soon she gave birth to Liu Bang.
50:23(soft music)
50:25When the Qin Empire fell there was civil war.
50:31After four years Liu Bang triumphed, unified China,
50:35and became the first emperor of the Han Dynasty.
50:43- [Michael Voiceover] The Han Dynasty
50:45would last for 400 years,
50:47and they laid the pattern for future Chinese government,
50:53balancing the harshness of the first emperor
50:56with the humane Confucian tradition.
50:59It was under the Han that China first went out to the West,
51:04making contacts with the Greeks and Romans
51:06out on the Silk Road.
51:09- In earlier times, wrote the great historian Polybius,
51:13the history of the world was a series of unrelated episodes.
51:16But from now on history becomes an organic hole.
51:24The affairs of Europe and Africa connect with those of Asia.
51:28Events have a relationship
51:30and everything contributes towards a single development.
51:40- [Michael Voiceover] It's a key moment in world history
51:42and it's recorded by China's greatest historian,
51:46the Han Dynasty's Sima Qian.
51:50- His father had been astrologer and archivist of the court,
51:55what we would say, I suppose, is the official historian,
51:58and had hoped to write a history of China,
52:00but had not done so.
52:02And now, here in Luoyang, he's dying.
52:05And at this point he extracts from his son a solemn promise.
52:09"In the past age," he said,
52:12"the writing of history has been abandoned.
52:15"But now the Han Dynasty has arisen
52:17"and all within the four oceans is united.
52:21"But I fear that the history of the world,
52:24"i.e. the history of China, will not be written.
52:27"You must do it."
52:30And as Sima Qian tells the story, he replied,
52:34"It is the greatest crime
52:36"to ignore what the ancestors have requested.
52:40"I dare not fail."
52:43(soft music)
52:44- [Michael Voiceover] And Sima Qian didn't fail,
52:47even when condemned to be castrated
52:49for sympathizing with a critic of the emperor.
52:52Rather than committing suicide as a gentleman should,
52:56he accepted the public humiliation
52:59and fulfilled his vow to his father
53:01to tell the story and to hand it down to us.
53:10So under the Han continuity was restored.
53:15Still today the Chinese people call themselves Han,
53:19with Han speech and Han culture,
53:23and acknowledgement that for all China's ethnic
53:26and linguistic diversity,
53:28they belong to one great civilization
53:31with one overarching narrative,
53:35the story of China itself.
53:43Back at the temple of Nuwa,
53:45the mother goddess of the Chinese people,
53:48the pilgrims are gathering again
53:49to give thanks to the ancestors.
53:55This ancient ceremony ceased at the end of the empire,
53:59and the temple was closed down in the 1950s,
54:02but now the rituals have been brought back to life
54:06with words from sacred books over 2,000 years old.
54:13After the ravages of the 20th century
54:15the Chinese people have recovered their belief
54:18in their history as a source of strength, not weakness,
54:24and the ideas that have nourished their identity for so long
54:28are being handed down now
54:30into an ever more confident and expansive Chinese future
54:35with a new text,
54:37may our country's great traditions be passed down once more
54:42from generation to generation.

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