The Forever Walk: China (2022) s01e04 Episode Script

1
Some people think I'm crazy.
Fair enough.
My name is Paul Salopek.
I'm a biologist by training,
a foreign correspondent
through long experience,
and a National Geographic
writer and explorer.
Since 2013, I've been walking continuously
from the human species' birthplace
in Africa
all the way to where our wandering
ancestors ran out of horizons
at the tip of South America.
Except, my trek is about more than
ancient migrations and survival.
The journey I'm on is about slowing down,
taking the time to listen,
to learn,
and to interact with humanity
in the most immersive way possible.
People are my destination.
Regardless of who I encounter,
it's the daily lives of the individuals
along my trail
who offer windows
into the big issues of our time.
Their stories form a mosaic of meaning
that can connect us all.
Now, my journey is taking me
and my local walking partners
deep into China.
Who will we encounter?
Where are they from
and where are they going?
The answers always
are revealed one footstep at a time.
What a view!
-Not too many people get this view.
-Yeah.
One of the many things
I've learned on the walk
is that it's hard to overstate
the importance of rivers
to the story of humankind.
From old civilizations
to new civilizations,
rivers are like veins
carrying the lifeblood we all depend on:
water.
And like time itself,
rivers also carry our past and our present
into an unknown but shared future.
Since setting foot in the Middle Kingdom,
I've been following the Hu Line.
It's an imaginary boundary
that divides East and West China,
and it will steer me some 6,000 km
across ten provinces.
Now, it's brought me
into the heart of Sichuan.
Joining me on my journey
is a new walking partner,
32-year-old educator, Li Huipu.
She's curious, she gets along very well
with the people we meet along the road.
She's fun to be with.
She's funny, and she's super smart.
Keep your eyes closed.
Keep your eyes closed.
Okay. Ready?
Oh, my God!
-Ow
-Ow?
You should be saying, "Ah!"
When the breeze
-Yeah, yeah. So, you wet this, too.
-Really?
Yeah, wet this, too,
and hang it on your head like this.
Then put your hat on.
And this is what the Arabs do.
-It's air conditioning.
-I see.
It's like suddenly you feel like
you're inside of a
A $500 suite on top of the Hilton Hotel.
But, you know, in Chinese medicine
-It's bad.
-Yeah, it's bad.
Wet hair and you cover it,
-that will give you a headache.
-Really? Okay.
You probably want to, like,
let it dry a little bit,
and then when it's dry, put it on.
This walk is really an opportunity for me
to get to know my hometown
and regions around my hometown.
I wasn't very
super, like, worked out person before.
But ever since last year,
I met with Paul and talked about
the possibility of me joining his walk,
I've been practicing, you know,
like practicing, walking a little bit,
but never 20 km per day.
Yeah, in my life.
So, that was something.
And I think I found
I found a sports for me.
-It was kind of, like, I'm so good.
-You're good at it.
-I'm I'm pretty good at this.
-You're good at it.
I'm I'm also amazed by it.
We've come to the banks
of the ancient Minjiang River,
the largest tributary of the famed Yangtze
where in 1929,
a farmer unearthed
a cache of jade artifacts
while digging an irrigation ditch.
Little did he know
that these treasures belonged
to Sanxingdui,
a lost civilization
that flourished around the time
of the Egyptian pharaoh, Tutankhamun.
Their origins, history and culture
have been hidden
until now.
I think walking kind of through
the "archeology" of different countries,
whether it's Ethiopia or China,
is both necessary to my project
to find out how did people move around,
and should I be following their footsteps?
And how do we draw lessons from the past?
How do we learn from what they did?
To think if they have any
Any wisdom for us
as we continue walking
into the 21st century.
For example they always put
the jade and the bronze
Dr. Zhao Hao is one of the archeologists
leading the excavation.
He sheds light on some of the most
significant findings to date.
in the ceremony.
How long are we looking at here?
Like, how many centimeters do you think?
-The hair alone.
-Hair.
-Holders of something.
-Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, beautiful.
Yeah, beautiful.
-Yeah. Knuckles.
-Yeah, and
And the bone, the wrist bone.
A dazzling trove of Bronze Age relics
unlike anything previously found in China,
and unlike anything ever seen
most hauled from a series of burn pits
located inside
a sprawling ancient urban area,
the size of London's Heathrow Airport.
Seeing archeologists
literally pulling things
out of the ground in real time
is a very rare privilege.
It transports you.
It's like a time machine.
Your imagination is unlocked
and you're thinking,
"My God! How did they live here?
"What did they wear?
You know, what did they eat?
"What made their heart ache?
"You know, what made them laugh?"
They're exactly the same as us.
You could sit them down in this room
and you would have no difference,
except, we have struggle to understand
what they're saying.
But they would have exactly
the same range of emotions.
I'm hoping researcher, He Xiaoge,
can share some of her own experiences
and insights at the dig
to help make sense of these findings.
When you pick up these things,
do they echo something to you?
Is there a whisper of this
Oh, my gosh!
Those are the three questions that I ask.
Can you describe what we'd be seeing
if we were sitting here 3,200 years ago?
So they're even taking apart their temples
and burying them.
All signs of Sanxingdui
vanished soon thereafter.
Despite decades of excavation,
research and investment,
the extraordinary relics
only deepened the enigma
of the people
who made such sophisticated art.
Certain artists are able to capture
the spirit of an animal really well,
and somebody's been
looking at these birds.
-What a What a piece, huh?
-Yeah.
Why would they leave all of this behind?
One hypothesis
is that an earthquake
may have triggered catastrophic landslides
that cut off access to the Minjiang River,
their main water source,
and diverted it to a new location.
This might have spurred the people
to abandon their city
and follow the river to its new course.
It's a good reminder for me,
the class of Sanxingdui,
about when we need to survive,
using our legs to move
is one of the oldest methods to survive.
Migration is not a problem.
It can be a solution.
-I don't know.
-I know, I know.
My I used to work at a chicken factory.
Donkey today live life short
but live a better life.
I'm in the middle of Sichuan,
crossing lush farmlands
with my walking partners.
A motley caravan
brave enough to face
a stifling heat wave in the province.
-Just one because they're heavy.
-Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.
Take one.
Take one more, okay?
Every now and then,
specialists join me on my journey,
providing depth and context
to the history
that underpins my storytelling.
Professor Luo Xin from Peking University
is one of them.
What's been really special
about this section of the walk,
not just in China but across the world,
is walking with a world leader
in historical knowledge,
and Professor Luo is a encyclopedia
of information about the history of China.
And he's
He's this very rare combination
of an intellectual, an academic,
a deep thinker with a very athletic body.
I mean, he has no trouble keeping up.
In fact, he's often leading
during the day.
The concrete road,
-they make your shoes hot, right?
-It does.
Makes your feet hot, too. Yeah.
That's how you get blisters.
Tracing the Minjiang River,
I learned that throughout Chinese history,
rivers carried an almost mythical quality,
something between
the human and the divine.
They are subjects
of centuries of Chinese poetry,
art, literature, folklore and philosophy.
Rivers water our civilizations.
It's nice. Try.
This fact is particularly poignant
in our era of environmental stress.
Water is a finite resource
and only renewable, if well managed.
Following in the footsteps
of our ancient predecessors,
we soon find a prime example.
A wealth of old temples
have taken root along the river banks,
where many have prayed for relief
from the frequent floods
devastating this region
of the Sichuan Basin.
Unbeknownst to them,
these very waters that plagued them,
would end up being their salvation.
Dujiangyan is a city in Sichuan province
named after its famed landmark
An irrigation system
built in the third century B.C.
that's still in operation today.
It's good and I'm liking it.
-Really?
-Yeah.
It's not even from the Qin dynasty.
Okay.
So this shows you like the whole structure
-of the irrigation system.
-Yeah, this is good.
Here is the Here is the point.
-That's it.
-This is called, like, the fish
-Fish mouth.
-Yeah, the fish mouth.
This is outside river.
This is, like, inner Inner river.
The inner river actually, like,
goes to Chengdu, right?
So the idea is
you want to probably split the water,
so that not all the water
will flood into Chengdu.
So, this is the first diversion,
and all the way over here,
you will have something called Feishayan.
Because there is, like,
a little angle here, right?
And you'll have this
to filter a lot of sand and stone
into the outer river.
And over here, you have one last piece.
It's called Bottleneck.
-Very beautiful.
-Yeah.
Once there is, like,
a huge volume of water flowing,
the whirlpools actually help to activate
the function of the filter.
Because riding this way,
it's actually filtering out the
-The silt. The sediment.
-Clean the sand.
The sand.
Yeah, because it goes like this.
This colossal early water project
is not just impressive in the way
it takes advantage of the topography,
but also in its ingenious construction.
In the past time, they made this
with the bamboo basket full of rocks,
put one by one together to build this.
In other parts,
in Southern China,
you can still see that structures.
The same technology you
You mentioned in your article,
one of your articles,
that the people in Central Asia,
they guide the antelopes
in the direction they wanted to the trap.
-That's right.
-Yeah. Yeah.
It's much more
kind of a soft energy solution.
-Yes. Yes.
-Yeah. Yeah.
It really puts into perspective
the Chinese adage.
"Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water,
"yet for dissolving the hard
and inflexible, nothing can surpass it.
"The soft overcomes the hard,
"the gentle overcomes the rigid."
By corraling the river,
Dujiangyan prevented floods
and provided consistent irrigation
for food production.
And in the process,
opened up the doors to a golden age.
I've crossed many, many rivers
and I've walked along many rivers,
and what I've found is that
rivers are biographers of landscape.
So, the Minjiang
is a beautiful river for time,
for the thinking about time
and how time flows
back from the Stone Age,
the first people
who walked through this part of China,
all the way up to the modern,
gleaming steel and glass city of Chengdu
with 20, you know, 20 plus million people.
The entire continuity of the human story
in that part of the Sichuan Basin of China
can be told by that river.