The Story Of China s01e01 Episode Script
Ancestors
China is the oldest nation on earth.
For thousands of years its rulers believed their task was to keep human society in balance with the eternal order of the universe.
The emperor who achieved that harmony would receive the mandate of heaven, blessed by the ancestors.
But in the late 19th century the collision with the West shook China to its core.
In midwinter 1899, the emperor came here to the Altar of Heaven in Beijing to ask the ancestors for support in China's hour of crisis, as the empire crumbled in the face of rebellion and foreign armies.
It was the last time the ritual was performed.
Here, just before dawn on the winter solstice .
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the emperor prostrated himself before the powers of the universe.
He performed rituals that they believed went back 5,000 years to the Yellow Emperor, the mythical first founder of China.
He made a report to the ancestors about the state of the empire.
But that winter of 1899 China faced disaster.
The following year, 1900, China was plunged into catastrophe with rebellion, flood and famine .
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foreign aggression .
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and the new century saw swiftly the fall of the Empire, short-lived republic, Communist revolution and then the insane madness of the Cultural Revolution.
But despite the tragedies of the 20th century, the Chinese people have come through.
Today China is writing its own story once more, under a new mandate.
So long the greatest civilisation on earth, China is rising again.
It's a great time to be looking at the events which have shaped the history of China and the ideals which have made its culture so distinctive and so brilliant for so long.
Every year in spring millions of Chinese people set off on the journey home.
It's the time of the Qingming Festival, the festival of light, when, since ancient times, the Chinese have honoured the ancestors.
I'm heading down to the city of Wuxi for a very special occasion, a family reunion.
For the last 30 years Chinese people have grown up in a consumer society.
After the break with Communism, China has been on a headlong rush into the future.
But there's a deeper China, for as new freedoms beckon, the people themselves are reaching back to the things that have mattered most to them in their history.
And for the Chinese people, identity begins with the family.
Sometimes the new proves less enticing than was first thought and the old far more durable than anyone had ever imagined.
This is the Qin family of Wuxi.
It's dawn on the day of the ancestors, what the Chinese call Tomb-Sweeping Day.
And the Qin family gather at the grave of their founding ancestor, Qin Guan, a poet who lived 1,000 years ago.
They have come from all over China and further afield to make their own report to the ancestors.
To tell them how the family is doing and how the ancestors and their values still live on in us.
As the ancients used to say, repaying our roots.
Amazing scene, isn't it? It recalls the whole of Chinese history over the last 100 years, wars, revolutions, famines, families broken up and cast to the four winds, and yet they come back with this kind of homing instinct, almost, to the tomb of the founder, as if everything can be reconstituted again.
These rituals were banned in the Communist era and the grave was lost after the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
But when the revolutionary time drew to a close, Frank Ching and his sister came searching for the tomb.
Back in 1982, when I found that gravestone, none of these things existed.
When I first sought it out I was like a blank slate, I didn't know what existed.
It's really very exciting that this is happening.
I certainly never expected anything like this to happen when I started my own journey of discovery.
Like everyone in China, the Qin family have experienced dizzying change since the end of empire.
From colonial subjects to emigres seeking a better life, Communist revolutionaries on the long march with Chairman Mao and even glamour on the Shanghai stage.
Their family story mirrors the story of the nation.
And now the meaning of that history is flooding back.
I'm going to regret this.
So the Chinese people have found again the warmth of home .
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after the vast and terrifying dislocation of the mid-20th century when for a time China turned its back on its past.
The Qin family, like the nation itself, are seeking a renewed identity, a distinctively Chinese way forward, anchored in the Chinese past.
And that past goes back thousands of years.
China is the oldest continuous state on earth.
There are no historical texts that describe its birth but later myths and traditions take us to the Yellow River plain that gave China its name, Zhonggou, the middle land.
And here you can still reach back to those beginnings.
This is a rural fair at an ancient temple, closed down in the Communist era.
I'm at a great farmers festival in the plain of the Yellow River with a million people all around me.
And these vast crowds have come to celebrate an ancient myth that tells of the origins of the Chinese people.
As in many ancient cultures, it's the women who have treasured the tales and handed them down.
How much? Three? Especially the tale of the mother goddess of the Chinese people, Nuwa.
Little dog.
It's great, isn't it? This whole great festival is to two ancient gods in Chinese mythology, Fuxi, the male god, and Nuwa, the female god.
And she's famous because she created humanity out of the yellow mud of the Yellow River.
And the mud that was left over she made dogs and chickens, according to the myth.
These myths have been handed down for over 4,000 years.
And they contain a crucial idea, the uniqueness of Chinese ethnic identity.
China is a huge and diverse country, with so many languages and cultures.
But the vast majority of its people see themselves as Han Chinese, part of the biggest tribe in the world.
The myths also tell us about the origins of the Chinese state .
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by the banks of the Yellow River.
All four of the great old world civilisations began on rivers -- the Nile, the Euphrates, the Indus and the Yellow River.
China alone has come down until today.
It was the ability to harness the waters of the river for irrigation that enabled ancient people to feed bigger and bigger populations and eventually to create cities and make civilisation.
But where the rising of the Nile, for example, was predictable to the day and seen by the Egyptians as a joyful and benign source of life, the Yellow River here in China has been a destroyer.
The killer of millions in its great floods throughout Chinese history, right up to the 20th century.
And so the beginnings of Chinese history, the control of the river and its environment, lay at the very heart of political power.
And the tale of the king who tamed the mighty Yellow River and claimed the right to rule the hundreds of tribes along its banks became a myth still told by today's storytellers.
Look at this.
This is a Ming Dynasty temple that was built in the 1520s but on a very, very ancient terrace.
And that is King Yu.
Historians have always thought the tale of King Yu was just a myth, but the recent find of a bronze bowl nearly 3,000 years old engraved with his story proves the tale goes back to the Bronze Age.
The legend says that King Yu was the founder of China's first dynasty 4,000 years ago.
They were called the Xia and they came from the middle plain of the middle land, here in Henan.
And at the village of Erlitou, traditions survived until modern times that this had been the seat of China's first rulers.
The most ancient site in the world? No? Incredible! Ancient Greece, ancient Iraq, ancient Egypt Wherever you look, some memory survives on site.
Here, towns first emerged out of China's myriad Stone Age villages.
Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor, the original Emperor of China.
Under these wheat fields the archaeologists excavated a settlement which had thousands of people and a huge walled enclosure.
Inside it were pillared halls, palaces from different periods between 2000 and 1500 BC.
They stood on rammed earth platforms, one of them with a triple gate, the pattern of all later Chinese royal cities.
The Xia are still a mystery.
But here at Erlitou archaeologists have found tantalizing clues -- pottery, bronze casting and most intriguing of all a burial with a sceptre made of 2,000 pieces of turquoise in the shape of a dragon, the symbol of royalty all the way through Chinese civilisation.
Whether the Xia were China's first dynasty and whether this was their capital is still not known and that's because we lack the key evidence -- writing.
Do you think that this was the capital of the Xia or what do you think? Difficult question.
If it this was the capital of the Xia, for the Chinese, myth would become history, for they would have found the root of the Chinese state.
As it is, though, we now have to leap forward to around 1200 BC to find China's first historical rulers, the Shang Dynasty.
And we know about the Shang because they have left us the first Chinese writing.
The modern discovery of the Shang is one of the most exciting stories in world archaeology.
And it began by chance in one of those storehouses of age-old Chinese wisdom, a traditional pharmacy .
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where beliefs and practices going back into prehistory have come down to us today.
And the clues to the mystery of the Shang, unbelievably, were found inside a packet of over-the-counter medicine.
The story goes like this -- 1899, Chinese scholar called Wang Yirong, who was the Chancellor of the Imperial Academy in Beijing, a great scholar and a collector of ancient bronzes.
He was interested in the earliest Chinese writing systems.
He falls ill with malaria and his local pharmacy, just like this one, delivers a series of ingredients which include dragon bones.
These were animal bones Just like this, they use them today.
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which you ground up and boiled and drank to alleviate the fever.
When he opened the packet, to his amazement, this is what he saw.
Some of the bones were inscribed with what he could see were primitive forms of the old writing that he knew from the inscriptions on his bronzes.
And eventually these dragon bones were traced back to a little place in the lower valley of the Yellow River, a country town called Anyang.
At Anyang, Chinese archaeologists made their greatest discovery.
Huge tombs of the last Shang kings with mass human sacrifice and crucially, written texts on oracle bones.
1928 they finally found the location and they started the excavation.
From the excavation they found nearly 30,000 oracle bones .
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documenting divination performed on behalf of nine late Shang kings.
- I love all the portraits of the people.
- Yes, yes.
There is something so optimistic about their faces.
They thought that their task is to prove that Chinese history was true.
Epoch-making, in world archaeology, really.
Absolutely, yes.
- Now we knew that they were historical.
- Yes.
Anyang was the final capital of the Shang Dynasty.
They ruled for 500 years, controlling the whole of central China.
The first Chinese state.
Their authority rested on force but was validated by divination.
The Shang kings and their diviners burned cracks in tortoise shells or cow bones to speak to the ancestors.
So basically, they chose one piece of bone or shell and then they drilled some holes, and then they heat up these holes with some special plants and then these will create some cracks, and then they look at the pattern of these cracks.
- And the cracks come the other side, is that right? - Yes.
And then they can read these patterns and make their predictions about whether these divinations are auspicious or it is actually against the will of the ancestral spirits, so they should not be carrying out the activity they were asking for.
- So the diviners are asking for the favour of the ancestral spirits.
- Yes.
So basically it's their special way to communicate with their ancestors.
- The ancestors are the key people in their mental universe.
- Yes.
Fantastic.
Basically, in every aspect of their society, including, for instance, the harvest.
This one is even about praying for rain.
Rain and water would be a big part of their concerns living in the Yellow River plain, I suppose.
Yes, for agricultural society it is absolutely crucial.
And unlike the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt or the cuneiform of Babylonia, the archaeologists had no need of a key to decipher them for they could see at once that the signs on the oracle bones were the direct ancestors of today's Chinese writing.
That's the character for rain in modern language.
And in oracle bones it's like this With three drops, so essentially it's the same idea, fundamentally.
- This rain character is characterised by these raindrops.
- Yeah, yeah.
Out of these prehistoric pictographs came the modern Chinese script with its tens of thousands of signs.
So through their script the Chinese people are uniquely connected to their deep past and its ways of thinking.
More so than any other culture on earth.
There seem to be Is this fanciful? There seem to be themes that we trace all the way through Chinese history -- the reverence for the ancestors, the divination, the control of writing and writing as a source of power.
Is that fair? I agree.
I think communication or interaction between the ancestral spirit and the acquisition of social power is indeed a recurrent theme throughout Chinese history.
So power came from the ancestors.
In the oracle bones there is a sacred place.
It has the same name as the dynasty, Shang.
This is not like the shopping malls of Shanghai, that's for sure.
And the archaeologists now turn to a little town in Henan with a tantalizing name.
Shangqiu, the mound or ruins of Shang.
We are now inside the Ming Dynasty city.
This was built in 1511, the previous one destroyed by floods.
Lots more underneath it, of course.
What's fascinating is it's still called Shangqiu, the ruins of Shang.
So was this the ancestral place of China's first great dynasty? That question has intrigued Chinese archaeologists since their first explorations here in the 1930s.
But the Bronze Age layers here are 30 feet deep in Yellow River silt.
Recently, though, geophysical surveys and test cores have detected the outline of a much earlier city underneath the town.
And the clues to what it was were in the oracle bones found at Anyang.
In the 1930s a Chinese scholar called Dong Zuobin worked on the Bronze Age inscriptions scratched into the oracle bones from the Shang Dynasty.
Thousand upon thousand of them, and through the 1930s, when China was driven by civil war and Japanese invasion, he worked transcribing these inscriptions in what, I suppose, you could call self-effacing loyalty to the Chinese past while the catastrophes of the modern world surrounded him.
You see there his transcription of one of the turtle shells with all the splits and the inscriptions on them.
And he worked out the order of the Shang kings and their calendar and their rituals and their journeys.
What he discovered was that the kings came back to do special rituals at the city called Shang.
That was here.
Its name meant "the place where the ancestors were worshiped".
So state and ancestors were tied together.
And amazingly, cults and legends about the Shang still survive here at a mysterious temple at the edge of town.
The Mound of Shang, it's a great artificial hill.
The legends say this mound was built before the Great Flood, that here mankind first got fire, stolen from the gods.
And tradition also said this had been a kind of observatory where the Shang kings watched the stars that protected their dynasty.
Because they believed that the stars were powers in heaven and if we understood them properly then we'd know best how to run our kingdom.
So the oracle bones and the later myths are clues to early Chinese beliefs about society and the cosmos.
Divination, ritual and writing were the basis of state power.
For their sacred ceremonies they cast beautiful bronzes to hold food and wine offerings to the ancestral spirits, which were consumed at the royal feasts.
Some of them bear the symbols of the different lineages of the royal and noble families.
Like the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, the Shang practised human sacrifice.
The oracle bones list the victims.
They were captives from the subject peoples the Shang ruled, killed as offerings to the powers of nature, as the Shang diviners asked the ancestors in heaven for guidance, anxiously watching the stars for omens of auspiciousness and omens of disaster.
To them, time, as revealed in the movements of the stars and planets, was a truly portentous dimension, full of danger as well as auspiciousness, and especially for the rulers, for they knew that in time the planets would reveal heaven's judgment on their earthly rule.
That brings us to one of the key ideas in early Chinese thought, the Mandate of Heaven.
The early Chinese believed their rulers should protect the people, keeping harmony with the order of heaven.
It was said the first Shang king had even offered himself as a sacrifice in time of drought.
But legend said the last Shang king was so depraved and cruel that heaven withdrew its mandate, and it gave a sign.
Five planets came together in the rarest of conjunctions.
'As this happens only once every 516 years, we can pin down the very day.
' - So you can follow any single planet? - Yes.
- It's just wonderful.
'We asked the Beijing Planetarium to work out the exact 'date of the omen and to show us the night sky at that moment.
' So it's what historians always want to do, is actually go back in time -- Mr Liu can do it for us.
He can actually take us back to late May 1058 BC on his computer system, which is 1059 BC on historians' calculations.
This time, this place, the sky you can see them.
'The tribes who lived under the Shang tyranny saw the sign 'and made an alliance under a man known for his virtue, 'King Wen of the Zhou.
' This five-planet conjunction happens once every 516 years but that moment was the closest that has ever happened in human history and at that time the early Chinese chronicles say .
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when the five planets gather in the constellation called the Chamber a great vermillion bird landed on the altar of the earth on Mount Qi.
In its beak was a jade sceptre, and it spoke, saying, "Heaven has commanded that the King ".
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of the Zhou should overthrow the King of the Shang "and take the kingdom.
" In the final battle, the wicked Shang king saw his subjects had turned against him.
So he burned his palace with his treasures and his concubines and put on his jade suit and walked into the fire.
And so the ancestors passed the mandate to the King of the Zhou.
And he laid down the pattern of rule for future ages.
Rulers must be virtuous and keep harmony between humanity and the cosmos by observing the rites and the music of the heavens.
And, amazingly, some of the ritual traditions of the Zhou have come down to us today.
China's oldest religion is Taoism.
In their ceremonies and their music the Taoists, the "seekers after the Way", are a living link with these ancient ideas about the relation of the kingdoms of earth and heaven.
And these very ancient customs and beliefs are still held in affection and practised by the ordinary Chinese people today.
In later times the Zhou came to be seen as model rulers, fulfilling heaven's mandate.
But China's fate throughout its history has been to fragment in times of crisis.
Eventually Zhou power disintegrated.
And the heartland of China descended into chaos.
Across the middle land, feuding kings and warlords fought for supremacy.
Surrounded by their armies, even in death.
Amazing sight, isn't it? This is one of more than a dozen chariot burial pits that have been uncovered in the middle of Luoyang in the last few years.
This with excavated in 2003 during the modern building boom.
There's 18 chariots and their horses here, associated with the tombs of the Kings of the Eastern Zhou.
It's the world of Achilles and Hector in more than just the military hardware.
Politically, just like Agamemnon, the kings here in the central plain of China depended on the co-operation of vassal states, smaller kingdoms.
Sometimes more than 100 of them.
But these were rivals fighting each other, just like the Greek heroes sacking cities and enslaving their populations.
So political instability, warfare and violence were endemic.
And for that reason, perhaps, this is the time when a ferment of ideas grows about the nature of kingship, the function of states, duties, obligation and morality.
Out of this begins the first golden age of Chinese philosophy.
Right across the Old World in the sixth century BC, thinkers and rulers were debating these ideas.
A new age of human thought had dawned, what we call the Axis Age.
The Greek philosophers, the Old Testament prophets, the Buddha in India, all of them were wrestling with ideas about conscience and social justice and human autonomy.
How can a king be just in violent times? What is law and what is virtue? Here in China it was said 100 schools bloomed.
And the most famous thinker came from an obscure state in eastern China.
He was descended from a family of Shang diviners, oracle-bone crackers.
And his obsession was not the inner life but how we act in the public world.
Small-town China, but what a small town.
Because this place, Qufu, has nearly 3,000 years of continuity, life on this spot.
And it gave birth to one of the most influential figures in the history of the world, Confucius.
Ni hao.
Confucius lived in a time of cultural and political crisis.
China divided into many small states that were always fighting each other and sometimes even divided in themselves, like this one, the state of Lu, whose capital was Qufu.
Confucius rose eventually to a quite high ministerial job in which he played a crucial role .
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brokering a peace deal between three feuding clans and persuading them to demolish their fortifications and acknowledge the duke here as their lord.
And that kind of experience gave him the idea of his mission, which was nothing less than to restore civilisation by teaching rulers to be virtuous.
Confucius had a very clear vision.
There is definitely this sense of passion in him that he wants to be recognised.
He wants to contribute to the social order of society and he wants to make sure that ritual practices are followed very closely.
Confucius was very keen on the idea of humaneness, or benevolence, and that the ruler set a direct example for the people to follow.
There's a very lively metaphor in the Analects when the character of the ruler is compared to the wind and the character of the ordinary people is compared to the grass, so it's said that when the wind blows the grass naturally bends.
Like Socrates or the Buddha, his sayings were turned into a book after his death by his disciples.
The Analects.
Horrible word, isn't it? What a mouthful.
It means the sort of quotations from but really it should be called the conversations of Confucius, cos that's what it really is.
It's his sayings, and it's been said that no book in the history of the world, even the Bible, has exerted so much influence for such a long period on so many people.
That's Confucius's little blue book.
- 18? - 18.
- 18, OK, great.
'The Analects would become China's guide 'to the principles of good government.
' He says that if you govern people by cheng -- it could be translated as "law" or "punishment" -- then you get people who have no sense of shame.
You get order but people don't really know what they're doing wrong.
But then if you govern by de -- a sense of virtue, morality -- then people have a sense of shame and with that idea it's implied that they will have moral progress as well.
It's a very old idea in the story of China that the basis of all government is not law but established morality.
And the key end -- to preserve the state.
In the West we tend to think of Confucius as an archconservative, a bit pious and a bit pompous.
But without virtue he thought any rule is morally bankrupt and should be resisted, even until death.
He travelled the roads of China like some intellectual trouble-shooter, trying to sell China's local rulers his new deal.
At his tomb I met a group of Confucian teachers from Korea.
These gentlemen are not priests, they're scholars.
And what they're doing is not so much religion as ritual.
An active reverence for the old master and his ideal of universal brotherhood.
Bowing before his tombstone, which was smashed to pieces by the Communist Red Guards only 50 years ago but is now restored.
Ah, very good question! We are interested in the history of China and Confucius is so important that that is why we are here.
Confucius is covering all over the world love.
Should spread all over the world.
Not just individual.
- Love, benevolence, courtesy - Courtesy.
- .
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good manners.
These are the way society works, - when society works well, in Confucius's idea.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Confucius was condemned during the Communist revolution as the embodiment of old ideas and old customs.
But now, once more, he's a national treasure, praised by the government for his stress on social values, though not so much perhaps for his insistence that it is the intellectual's duty to speak truth to power.
But in both he's a symbol of the Chinese way.
Very good! Oh, very good! Xie xie! Thank you very much! Fantastic! Confucius was not an innovator, he was the distiller, the crystalliser of an already ancient tradition.
The idea of the virtuous ruler.
Of filial piety, of ritual and ceremony as the glue that bound society together and the overruling power of education.
Those are the values that still underlie Chinese values today.
And South Asian values from Korea and Japan all the way down to Vietnam.
What a legacy.
But the truth is in his own lifetime Confucius was a complete failure.
No ruler bought into his manifesto for change.
After his death in 469 BC the warring states fought each other for two more centuries until the fall of the last of the Zhou.
And when their end came no-one was listening to arguments about morality but only the claims of violence and war.
And one of those warring states was the Qin.
Through military conquest they swallowed up the Zhou and the other states of the Yellow River plain.
And in 221 BC they proclaimed their leader the First Emperor of all China .
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Qin Shi Huangdi.
The First Emperor imposed his own revolutionary political system on the conquered lands.
Dispossessing the old aristocracies, creating an enormous captive labour force to build his new state, the Qin.
That's the source of the name China used today by the outside world, although not by the Chinese themselves.
Qin Shi Huangdi built the first Great Wall.
He made a new road system linking the 36 military provinces.
For tax and commerce the weights and measures were standardised.
There was to be a uniform coinage.
And the Chinese script itself was simplified so the Emperor's will could be conveyed right down to the local magistrates, who administered a population of more than 30 million people.
Almost a third of the world.
And the key to the Qin Emperor's power was the army.
It was the image of the empire -- discipline, obedience, hierarchy.
With their mass-produced bronze weapons and mechanical crossbows there'd been nothing like this in the whole of history.
Infantry, archers and cavalry and charioteers, so that's really the battle formation of the Qin Dynasty.
So how Qin how the First Emperor conquered the other states, used his military troops.
- Frightening actually! - Yeah.
- When you're faced with them like this! One of the most amazing discoveries ever, isn't it, really? - Yeah.
- And more recently you've discovered pits, not with warriors but with other people attached to the court.
We found terracotta acrobats, terracotta musicians and actually bronze birds, bronze chariots.
All part of the whole tomb complex.
They serve the Emperor in his afterlife.
This pit is one of nearly 200, large and small, found so far.
The more the archaeologists look, the more they find.
I think we are very similar to the doctor.
The only difference is our patient is different.
'Paranoid to the end, the Emperor took no chances, 'magically protected by his army even in the afterlife.
' Do we know what rank he was in the army? No, he's a normal soldier.
You can tell that by the headdress and the armour? Depends on his armour and depends on his his troops, because general has more detail, - more - Posh clothes.
- Yeah.
More - Yeah! More - A stern look of command, hasn't he? We've all become so familiar with the images of the Terracotta Army.
So familiar perhaps that it's easy to forget their significance in the history of China and of the world.
How this vast and diverse area became one state, that's one of the great themes of our story.
As we've already seen, it began a long time before, with the Xia and Shang Dynasties, but without the Qin Emperor, whose army is arrayed before us now, it might never have happened.
The beginnings of China as a unitary state, as the world's first bureaucratic, centralised empire, begin with Qin Shi Huangdi.
But the First Emperor's rule over China was brief, just 11 years, his son's even briefer, their hated regime overthrown by a rebellion led by the peasant Liu Bang, who founded the dynasty after whom the Chinese still name themselves today, the Han.
And for all the wars and revolutions, the triumphs and tragedies that would follow, the idea will never be lost that China, a land of so many peoples and cultures, is a single state and a single civilisation.
Still today the Chinese call themselves Han.
They speak of "our Han culture" and "Han speech".
As if one great tribe.
A tribe with many stories but one great story -- China itself.
And at the very heart of the story the link between the state and the family and the ancestors.
Over the next 2,000 years these values will run under the surface of the great river of Chinese history.
Often tested, sometimes seemingly broken, but still passed on across even the tyrannies and cruelties of the 20th century.
At the Temple of Nuwa, the mother goddess of the Chinese people, the pilgrims are gathering again to give thanks to the ancestors.
This prayer ceremony was last done 100 years ago at the end of the empire.
Now the rituals are brought back to life for today's people, recreated with words from sacred books over 2,000 years old.
It's a symbol of today's China.
After the ravages of the 20th century the Chinese people's belief in their history as a source of strength, not weakness, has returned.
The ideas that nourished their identity for so long handed down now into an ever more competent and expansive Chinese future.
With a new text, may our country's great traditions be passed down once more from generation to generation.
So that's the first part of this great adventure, the story of China.
And this is just the beginning.
In the next chapter of the story, China goes out to the world in one of the greatest epochs in world civilisation, the Tang Dynasty.
For thousands of years its rulers believed their task was to keep human society in balance with the eternal order of the universe.
The emperor who achieved that harmony would receive the mandate of heaven, blessed by the ancestors.
But in the late 19th century the collision with the West shook China to its core.
In midwinter 1899, the emperor came here to the Altar of Heaven in Beijing to ask the ancestors for support in China's hour of crisis, as the empire crumbled in the face of rebellion and foreign armies.
It was the last time the ritual was performed.
Here, just before dawn on the winter solstice .
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the emperor prostrated himself before the powers of the universe.
He performed rituals that they believed went back 5,000 years to the Yellow Emperor, the mythical first founder of China.
He made a report to the ancestors about the state of the empire.
But that winter of 1899 China faced disaster.
The following year, 1900, China was plunged into catastrophe with rebellion, flood and famine .
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foreign aggression .
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and the new century saw swiftly the fall of the Empire, short-lived republic, Communist revolution and then the insane madness of the Cultural Revolution.
But despite the tragedies of the 20th century, the Chinese people have come through.
Today China is writing its own story once more, under a new mandate.
So long the greatest civilisation on earth, China is rising again.
It's a great time to be looking at the events which have shaped the history of China and the ideals which have made its culture so distinctive and so brilliant for so long.
Every year in spring millions of Chinese people set off on the journey home.
It's the time of the Qingming Festival, the festival of light, when, since ancient times, the Chinese have honoured the ancestors.
I'm heading down to the city of Wuxi for a very special occasion, a family reunion.
For the last 30 years Chinese people have grown up in a consumer society.
After the break with Communism, China has been on a headlong rush into the future.
But there's a deeper China, for as new freedoms beckon, the people themselves are reaching back to the things that have mattered most to them in their history.
And for the Chinese people, identity begins with the family.
Sometimes the new proves less enticing than was first thought and the old far more durable than anyone had ever imagined.
This is the Qin family of Wuxi.
It's dawn on the day of the ancestors, what the Chinese call Tomb-Sweeping Day.
And the Qin family gather at the grave of their founding ancestor, Qin Guan, a poet who lived 1,000 years ago.
They have come from all over China and further afield to make their own report to the ancestors.
To tell them how the family is doing and how the ancestors and their values still live on in us.
As the ancients used to say, repaying our roots.
Amazing scene, isn't it? It recalls the whole of Chinese history over the last 100 years, wars, revolutions, famines, families broken up and cast to the four winds, and yet they come back with this kind of homing instinct, almost, to the tomb of the founder, as if everything can be reconstituted again.
These rituals were banned in the Communist era and the grave was lost after the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
But when the revolutionary time drew to a close, Frank Ching and his sister came searching for the tomb.
Back in 1982, when I found that gravestone, none of these things existed.
When I first sought it out I was like a blank slate, I didn't know what existed.
It's really very exciting that this is happening.
I certainly never expected anything like this to happen when I started my own journey of discovery.
Like everyone in China, the Qin family have experienced dizzying change since the end of empire.
From colonial subjects to emigres seeking a better life, Communist revolutionaries on the long march with Chairman Mao and even glamour on the Shanghai stage.
Their family story mirrors the story of the nation.
And now the meaning of that history is flooding back.
I'm going to regret this.
So the Chinese people have found again the warmth of home .
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after the vast and terrifying dislocation of the mid-20th century when for a time China turned its back on its past.
The Qin family, like the nation itself, are seeking a renewed identity, a distinctively Chinese way forward, anchored in the Chinese past.
And that past goes back thousands of years.
China is the oldest continuous state on earth.
There are no historical texts that describe its birth but later myths and traditions take us to the Yellow River plain that gave China its name, Zhonggou, the middle land.
And here you can still reach back to those beginnings.
This is a rural fair at an ancient temple, closed down in the Communist era.
I'm at a great farmers festival in the plain of the Yellow River with a million people all around me.
And these vast crowds have come to celebrate an ancient myth that tells of the origins of the Chinese people.
As in many ancient cultures, it's the women who have treasured the tales and handed them down.
How much? Three? Especially the tale of the mother goddess of the Chinese people, Nuwa.
Little dog.
It's great, isn't it? This whole great festival is to two ancient gods in Chinese mythology, Fuxi, the male god, and Nuwa, the female god.
And she's famous because she created humanity out of the yellow mud of the Yellow River.
And the mud that was left over she made dogs and chickens, according to the myth.
These myths have been handed down for over 4,000 years.
And they contain a crucial idea, the uniqueness of Chinese ethnic identity.
China is a huge and diverse country, with so many languages and cultures.
But the vast majority of its people see themselves as Han Chinese, part of the biggest tribe in the world.
The myths also tell us about the origins of the Chinese state .
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by the banks of the Yellow River.
All four of the great old world civilisations began on rivers -- the Nile, the Euphrates, the Indus and the Yellow River.
China alone has come down until today.
It was the ability to harness the waters of the river for irrigation that enabled ancient people to feed bigger and bigger populations and eventually to create cities and make civilisation.
But where the rising of the Nile, for example, was predictable to the day and seen by the Egyptians as a joyful and benign source of life, the Yellow River here in China has been a destroyer.
The killer of millions in its great floods throughout Chinese history, right up to the 20th century.
And so the beginnings of Chinese history, the control of the river and its environment, lay at the very heart of political power.
And the tale of the king who tamed the mighty Yellow River and claimed the right to rule the hundreds of tribes along its banks became a myth still told by today's storytellers.
Look at this.
This is a Ming Dynasty temple that was built in the 1520s but on a very, very ancient terrace.
And that is King Yu.
Historians have always thought the tale of King Yu was just a myth, but the recent find of a bronze bowl nearly 3,000 years old engraved with his story proves the tale goes back to the Bronze Age.
The legend says that King Yu was the founder of China's first dynasty 4,000 years ago.
They were called the Xia and they came from the middle plain of the middle land, here in Henan.
And at the village of Erlitou, traditions survived until modern times that this had been the seat of China's first rulers.
The most ancient site in the world? No? Incredible! Ancient Greece, ancient Iraq, ancient Egypt Wherever you look, some memory survives on site.
Here, towns first emerged out of China's myriad Stone Age villages.
Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor, the original Emperor of China.
Under these wheat fields the archaeologists excavated a settlement which had thousands of people and a huge walled enclosure.
Inside it were pillared halls, palaces from different periods between 2000 and 1500 BC.
They stood on rammed earth platforms, one of them with a triple gate, the pattern of all later Chinese royal cities.
The Xia are still a mystery.
But here at Erlitou archaeologists have found tantalizing clues -- pottery, bronze casting and most intriguing of all a burial with a sceptre made of 2,000 pieces of turquoise in the shape of a dragon, the symbol of royalty all the way through Chinese civilisation.
Whether the Xia were China's first dynasty and whether this was their capital is still not known and that's because we lack the key evidence -- writing.
Do you think that this was the capital of the Xia or what do you think? Difficult question.
If it this was the capital of the Xia, for the Chinese, myth would become history, for they would have found the root of the Chinese state.
As it is, though, we now have to leap forward to around 1200 BC to find China's first historical rulers, the Shang Dynasty.
And we know about the Shang because they have left us the first Chinese writing.
The modern discovery of the Shang is one of the most exciting stories in world archaeology.
And it began by chance in one of those storehouses of age-old Chinese wisdom, a traditional pharmacy .
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where beliefs and practices going back into prehistory have come down to us today.
And the clues to the mystery of the Shang, unbelievably, were found inside a packet of over-the-counter medicine.
The story goes like this -- 1899, Chinese scholar called Wang Yirong, who was the Chancellor of the Imperial Academy in Beijing, a great scholar and a collector of ancient bronzes.
He was interested in the earliest Chinese writing systems.
He falls ill with malaria and his local pharmacy, just like this one, delivers a series of ingredients which include dragon bones.
These were animal bones Just like this, they use them today.
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which you ground up and boiled and drank to alleviate the fever.
When he opened the packet, to his amazement, this is what he saw.
Some of the bones were inscribed with what he could see were primitive forms of the old writing that he knew from the inscriptions on his bronzes.
And eventually these dragon bones were traced back to a little place in the lower valley of the Yellow River, a country town called Anyang.
At Anyang, Chinese archaeologists made their greatest discovery.
Huge tombs of the last Shang kings with mass human sacrifice and crucially, written texts on oracle bones.
1928 they finally found the location and they started the excavation.
From the excavation they found nearly 30,000 oracle bones .
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documenting divination performed on behalf of nine late Shang kings.
- I love all the portraits of the people.
- Yes, yes.
There is something so optimistic about their faces.
They thought that their task is to prove that Chinese history was true.
Epoch-making, in world archaeology, really.
Absolutely, yes.
- Now we knew that they were historical.
- Yes.
Anyang was the final capital of the Shang Dynasty.
They ruled for 500 years, controlling the whole of central China.
The first Chinese state.
Their authority rested on force but was validated by divination.
The Shang kings and their diviners burned cracks in tortoise shells or cow bones to speak to the ancestors.
So basically, they chose one piece of bone or shell and then they drilled some holes, and then they heat up these holes with some special plants and then these will create some cracks, and then they look at the pattern of these cracks.
- And the cracks come the other side, is that right? - Yes.
And then they can read these patterns and make their predictions about whether these divinations are auspicious or it is actually against the will of the ancestral spirits, so they should not be carrying out the activity they were asking for.
- So the diviners are asking for the favour of the ancestral spirits.
- Yes.
So basically it's their special way to communicate with their ancestors.
- The ancestors are the key people in their mental universe.
- Yes.
Fantastic.
Basically, in every aspect of their society, including, for instance, the harvest.
This one is even about praying for rain.
Rain and water would be a big part of their concerns living in the Yellow River plain, I suppose.
Yes, for agricultural society it is absolutely crucial.
And unlike the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt or the cuneiform of Babylonia, the archaeologists had no need of a key to decipher them for they could see at once that the signs on the oracle bones were the direct ancestors of today's Chinese writing.
That's the character for rain in modern language.
And in oracle bones it's like this With three drops, so essentially it's the same idea, fundamentally.
- This rain character is characterised by these raindrops.
- Yeah, yeah.
Out of these prehistoric pictographs came the modern Chinese script with its tens of thousands of signs.
So through their script the Chinese people are uniquely connected to their deep past and its ways of thinking.
More so than any other culture on earth.
There seem to be Is this fanciful? There seem to be themes that we trace all the way through Chinese history -- the reverence for the ancestors, the divination, the control of writing and writing as a source of power.
Is that fair? I agree.
I think communication or interaction between the ancestral spirit and the acquisition of social power is indeed a recurrent theme throughout Chinese history.
So power came from the ancestors.
In the oracle bones there is a sacred place.
It has the same name as the dynasty, Shang.
This is not like the shopping malls of Shanghai, that's for sure.
And the archaeologists now turn to a little town in Henan with a tantalizing name.
Shangqiu, the mound or ruins of Shang.
We are now inside the Ming Dynasty city.
This was built in 1511, the previous one destroyed by floods.
Lots more underneath it, of course.
What's fascinating is it's still called Shangqiu, the ruins of Shang.
So was this the ancestral place of China's first great dynasty? That question has intrigued Chinese archaeologists since their first explorations here in the 1930s.
But the Bronze Age layers here are 30 feet deep in Yellow River silt.
Recently, though, geophysical surveys and test cores have detected the outline of a much earlier city underneath the town.
And the clues to what it was were in the oracle bones found at Anyang.
In the 1930s a Chinese scholar called Dong Zuobin worked on the Bronze Age inscriptions scratched into the oracle bones from the Shang Dynasty.
Thousand upon thousand of them, and through the 1930s, when China was driven by civil war and Japanese invasion, he worked transcribing these inscriptions in what, I suppose, you could call self-effacing loyalty to the Chinese past while the catastrophes of the modern world surrounded him.
You see there his transcription of one of the turtle shells with all the splits and the inscriptions on them.
And he worked out the order of the Shang kings and their calendar and their rituals and their journeys.
What he discovered was that the kings came back to do special rituals at the city called Shang.
That was here.
Its name meant "the place where the ancestors were worshiped".
So state and ancestors were tied together.
And amazingly, cults and legends about the Shang still survive here at a mysterious temple at the edge of town.
The Mound of Shang, it's a great artificial hill.
The legends say this mound was built before the Great Flood, that here mankind first got fire, stolen from the gods.
And tradition also said this had been a kind of observatory where the Shang kings watched the stars that protected their dynasty.
Because they believed that the stars were powers in heaven and if we understood them properly then we'd know best how to run our kingdom.
So the oracle bones and the later myths are clues to early Chinese beliefs about society and the cosmos.
Divination, ritual and writing were the basis of state power.
For their sacred ceremonies they cast beautiful bronzes to hold food and wine offerings to the ancestral spirits, which were consumed at the royal feasts.
Some of them bear the symbols of the different lineages of the royal and noble families.
Like the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, the Shang practised human sacrifice.
The oracle bones list the victims.
They were captives from the subject peoples the Shang ruled, killed as offerings to the powers of nature, as the Shang diviners asked the ancestors in heaven for guidance, anxiously watching the stars for omens of auspiciousness and omens of disaster.
To them, time, as revealed in the movements of the stars and planets, was a truly portentous dimension, full of danger as well as auspiciousness, and especially for the rulers, for they knew that in time the planets would reveal heaven's judgment on their earthly rule.
That brings us to one of the key ideas in early Chinese thought, the Mandate of Heaven.
The early Chinese believed their rulers should protect the people, keeping harmony with the order of heaven.
It was said the first Shang king had even offered himself as a sacrifice in time of drought.
But legend said the last Shang king was so depraved and cruel that heaven withdrew its mandate, and it gave a sign.
Five planets came together in the rarest of conjunctions.
'As this happens only once every 516 years, we can pin down the very day.
' - So you can follow any single planet? - Yes.
- It's just wonderful.
'We asked the Beijing Planetarium to work out the exact 'date of the omen and to show us the night sky at that moment.
' So it's what historians always want to do, is actually go back in time -- Mr Liu can do it for us.
He can actually take us back to late May 1058 BC on his computer system, which is 1059 BC on historians' calculations.
This time, this place, the sky you can see them.
'The tribes who lived under the Shang tyranny saw the sign 'and made an alliance under a man known for his virtue, 'King Wen of the Zhou.
' This five-planet conjunction happens once every 516 years but that moment was the closest that has ever happened in human history and at that time the early Chinese chronicles say .
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when the five planets gather in the constellation called the Chamber a great vermillion bird landed on the altar of the earth on Mount Qi.
In its beak was a jade sceptre, and it spoke, saying, "Heaven has commanded that the King ".
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of the Zhou should overthrow the King of the Shang "and take the kingdom.
" In the final battle, the wicked Shang king saw his subjects had turned against him.
So he burned his palace with his treasures and his concubines and put on his jade suit and walked into the fire.
And so the ancestors passed the mandate to the King of the Zhou.
And he laid down the pattern of rule for future ages.
Rulers must be virtuous and keep harmony between humanity and the cosmos by observing the rites and the music of the heavens.
And, amazingly, some of the ritual traditions of the Zhou have come down to us today.
China's oldest religion is Taoism.
In their ceremonies and their music the Taoists, the "seekers after the Way", are a living link with these ancient ideas about the relation of the kingdoms of earth and heaven.
And these very ancient customs and beliefs are still held in affection and practised by the ordinary Chinese people today.
In later times the Zhou came to be seen as model rulers, fulfilling heaven's mandate.
But China's fate throughout its history has been to fragment in times of crisis.
Eventually Zhou power disintegrated.
And the heartland of China descended into chaos.
Across the middle land, feuding kings and warlords fought for supremacy.
Surrounded by their armies, even in death.
Amazing sight, isn't it? This is one of more than a dozen chariot burial pits that have been uncovered in the middle of Luoyang in the last few years.
This with excavated in 2003 during the modern building boom.
There's 18 chariots and their horses here, associated with the tombs of the Kings of the Eastern Zhou.
It's the world of Achilles and Hector in more than just the military hardware.
Politically, just like Agamemnon, the kings here in the central plain of China depended on the co-operation of vassal states, smaller kingdoms.
Sometimes more than 100 of them.
But these were rivals fighting each other, just like the Greek heroes sacking cities and enslaving their populations.
So political instability, warfare and violence were endemic.
And for that reason, perhaps, this is the time when a ferment of ideas grows about the nature of kingship, the function of states, duties, obligation and morality.
Out of this begins the first golden age of Chinese philosophy.
Right across the Old World in the sixth century BC, thinkers and rulers were debating these ideas.
A new age of human thought had dawned, what we call the Axis Age.
The Greek philosophers, the Old Testament prophets, the Buddha in India, all of them were wrestling with ideas about conscience and social justice and human autonomy.
How can a king be just in violent times? What is law and what is virtue? Here in China it was said 100 schools bloomed.
And the most famous thinker came from an obscure state in eastern China.
He was descended from a family of Shang diviners, oracle-bone crackers.
And his obsession was not the inner life but how we act in the public world.
Small-town China, but what a small town.
Because this place, Qufu, has nearly 3,000 years of continuity, life on this spot.
And it gave birth to one of the most influential figures in the history of the world, Confucius.
Ni hao.
Confucius lived in a time of cultural and political crisis.
China divided into many small states that were always fighting each other and sometimes even divided in themselves, like this one, the state of Lu, whose capital was Qufu.
Confucius rose eventually to a quite high ministerial job in which he played a crucial role .
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brokering a peace deal between three feuding clans and persuading them to demolish their fortifications and acknowledge the duke here as their lord.
And that kind of experience gave him the idea of his mission, which was nothing less than to restore civilisation by teaching rulers to be virtuous.
Confucius had a very clear vision.
There is definitely this sense of passion in him that he wants to be recognised.
He wants to contribute to the social order of society and he wants to make sure that ritual practices are followed very closely.
Confucius was very keen on the idea of humaneness, or benevolence, and that the ruler set a direct example for the people to follow.
There's a very lively metaphor in the Analects when the character of the ruler is compared to the wind and the character of the ordinary people is compared to the grass, so it's said that when the wind blows the grass naturally bends.
Like Socrates or the Buddha, his sayings were turned into a book after his death by his disciples.
The Analects.
Horrible word, isn't it? What a mouthful.
It means the sort of quotations from but really it should be called the conversations of Confucius, cos that's what it really is.
It's his sayings, and it's been said that no book in the history of the world, even the Bible, has exerted so much influence for such a long period on so many people.
That's Confucius's little blue book.
- 18? - 18.
- 18, OK, great.
'The Analects would become China's guide 'to the principles of good government.
' He says that if you govern people by cheng -- it could be translated as "law" or "punishment" -- then you get people who have no sense of shame.
You get order but people don't really know what they're doing wrong.
But then if you govern by de -- a sense of virtue, morality -- then people have a sense of shame and with that idea it's implied that they will have moral progress as well.
It's a very old idea in the story of China that the basis of all government is not law but established morality.
And the key end -- to preserve the state.
In the West we tend to think of Confucius as an archconservative, a bit pious and a bit pompous.
But without virtue he thought any rule is morally bankrupt and should be resisted, even until death.
He travelled the roads of China like some intellectual trouble-shooter, trying to sell China's local rulers his new deal.
At his tomb I met a group of Confucian teachers from Korea.
These gentlemen are not priests, they're scholars.
And what they're doing is not so much religion as ritual.
An active reverence for the old master and his ideal of universal brotherhood.
Bowing before his tombstone, which was smashed to pieces by the Communist Red Guards only 50 years ago but is now restored.
Ah, very good question! We are interested in the history of China and Confucius is so important that that is why we are here.
Confucius is covering all over the world love.
Should spread all over the world.
Not just individual.
- Love, benevolence, courtesy - Courtesy.
- .
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good manners.
These are the way society works, - when society works well, in Confucius's idea.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Confucius was condemned during the Communist revolution as the embodiment of old ideas and old customs.
But now, once more, he's a national treasure, praised by the government for his stress on social values, though not so much perhaps for his insistence that it is the intellectual's duty to speak truth to power.
But in both he's a symbol of the Chinese way.
Very good! Oh, very good! Xie xie! Thank you very much! Fantastic! Confucius was not an innovator, he was the distiller, the crystalliser of an already ancient tradition.
The idea of the virtuous ruler.
Of filial piety, of ritual and ceremony as the glue that bound society together and the overruling power of education.
Those are the values that still underlie Chinese values today.
And South Asian values from Korea and Japan all the way down to Vietnam.
What a legacy.
But the truth is in his own lifetime Confucius was a complete failure.
No ruler bought into his manifesto for change.
After his death in 469 BC the warring states fought each other for two more centuries until the fall of the last of the Zhou.
And when their end came no-one was listening to arguments about morality but only the claims of violence and war.
And one of those warring states was the Qin.
Through military conquest they swallowed up the Zhou and the other states of the Yellow River plain.
And in 221 BC they proclaimed their leader the First Emperor of all China .
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Qin Shi Huangdi.
The First Emperor imposed his own revolutionary political system on the conquered lands.
Dispossessing the old aristocracies, creating an enormous captive labour force to build his new state, the Qin.
That's the source of the name China used today by the outside world, although not by the Chinese themselves.
Qin Shi Huangdi built the first Great Wall.
He made a new road system linking the 36 military provinces.
For tax and commerce the weights and measures were standardised.
There was to be a uniform coinage.
And the Chinese script itself was simplified so the Emperor's will could be conveyed right down to the local magistrates, who administered a population of more than 30 million people.
Almost a third of the world.
And the key to the Qin Emperor's power was the army.
It was the image of the empire -- discipline, obedience, hierarchy.
With their mass-produced bronze weapons and mechanical crossbows there'd been nothing like this in the whole of history.
Infantry, archers and cavalry and charioteers, so that's really the battle formation of the Qin Dynasty.
So how Qin how the First Emperor conquered the other states, used his military troops.
- Frightening actually! - Yeah.
- When you're faced with them like this! One of the most amazing discoveries ever, isn't it, really? - Yeah.
- And more recently you've discovered pits, not with warriors but with other people attached to the court.
We found terracotta acrobats, terracotta musicians and actually bronze birds, bronze chariots.
All part of the whole tomb complex.
They serve the Emperor in his afterlife.
This pit is one of nearly 200, large and small, found so far.
The more the archaeologists look, the more they find.
I think we are very similar to the doctor.
The only difference is our patient is different.
'Paranoid to the end, the Emperor took no chances, 'magically protected by his army even in the afterlife.
' Do we know what rank he was in the army? No, he's a normal soldier.
You can tell that by the headdress and the armour? Depends on his armour and depends on his his troops, because general has more detail, - more - Posh clothes.
- Yeah.
More - Yeah! More - A stern look of command, hasn't he? We've all become so familiar with the images of the Terracotta Army.
So familiar perhaps that it's easy to forget their significance in the history of China and of the world.
How this vast and diverse area became one state, that's one of the great themes of our story.
As we've already seen, it began a long time before, with the Xia and Shang Dynasties, but without the Qin Emperor, whose army is arrayed before us now, it might never have happened.
The beginnings of China as a unitary state, as the world's first bureaucratic, centralised empire, begin with Qin Shi Huangdi.
But the First Emperor's rule over China was brief, just 11 years, his son's even briefer, their hated regime overthrown by a rebellion led by the peasant Liu Bang, who founded the dynasty after whom the Chinese still name themselves today, the Han.
And for all the wars and revolutions, the triumphs and tragedies that would follow, the idea will never be lost that China, a land of so many peoples and cultures, is a single state and a single civilisation.
Still today the Chinese call themselves Han.
They speak of "our Han culture" and "Han speech".
As if one great tribe.
A tribe with many stories but one great story -- China itself.
And at the very heart of the story the link between the state and the family and the ancestors.
Over the next 2,000 years these values will run under the surface of the great river of Chinese history.
Often tested, sometimes seemingly broken, but still passed on across even the tyrannies and cruelties of the 20th century.
At the Temple of Nuwa, the mother goddess of the Chinese people, the pilgrims are gathering again to give thanks to the ancestors.
This prayer ceremony was last done 100 years ago at the end of the empire.
Now the rituals are brought back to life for today's people, recreated with words from sacred books over 2,000 years old.
It's a symbol of today's China.
After the ravages of the 20th century the Chinese people's belief in their history as a source of strength, not weakness, has returned.
The ideas that nourished their identity for so long handed down now into an ever more competent and expansive Chinese future.
With a new text, may our country's great traditions be passed down once more from generation to generation.
So that's the first part of this great adventure, the story of China.
And this is just the beginning.
In the next chapter of the story, China goes out to the world in one of the greatest epochs in world civilisation, the Tang Dynasty.