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Documentary, BBC The Story of China 1 Ancestors - 影片
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00:20China is the oldest nation on earth for thousands of years its rulers believed
00:27their task was to keep human society in balance with the eternal order of the universe the
00:35emperor who achieved that harmony would receive the mandate of heaven blessed by the ancestors
00:44but in the late 19th century the collision with the West shook China to its core in midwinter 1899
00:53the Emperor came here to the altar of heaven in Beijing to ask the ancestors for support in
01:00China's hour of crisis as the Empire crumbled in the face of rebellion and foreign armies it was the
01:10last time the ritual was performed here just before dawn on the winter solstice
01:23the Emperor prostrated himself for the powers of the universe
01:32performed rituals that they believed went back 5,000 years to the yellow Emperor the mythical first
01:39founder of China
01:43made a report to the ancestors about the state of the Empire
01:47but that winter of 1899 China faced disaster
01:57following year 1900 China was plunged into catastrophe with rebellion flood and famine
02:05foreign aggression
02:11and the new century saw swiftly the fall of the Empire short-lived Republic communist revolution and then the insane
02:23madness of the cultural revolution
02:26but despite the tragedies of the 20th century the Chinese people have come through
02:35today China is writing its own story once more under a new mandate
02:42so long the greatest civilization on earth China is rising again
02:47it's a great time to be looking at the events which have shaped the history of China and the ideals
02:56which have made its culture
02:57so distinctive so distinctive and so brilliant for so long
03:05being loved
03:06is
03:07the
03:07is
03:07the
03:07war
03:07K
03:07was
03:07the
03:07the
03:07the
03:07we
03:10have
03:16are
03:41Every year in spring, millions of Chinese people
03:45set off on the journey home.
03:49It's the time of the Qingming Festival, the festival of light,
03:53when, since ancient times, the Chinese have honoured the ancestors.
04:01I'm heading down to the city of Wuxi for a very special occasion,
04:06a family reunion.
04:10For the last 30 years, Chinese people have grown up
04:13in a consumer society.
04:16After the break with communism,
04:19China has been on a headlong rush into the future.
04:27But there's a deeper China, for as new freedoms beckon,
04:31the people themselves are reaching back to the things
04:34that have mattered most to them in their history.
04:37And for the Chinese people, identity begins with the family.
04:43Sometimes the new proves less enticing than was first thought,
04:49and the old far more durable than anyone had ever imagined.
05:02This is the Qing family of Wuxi.
05:05This is the Qing family of Wuxi.
05:06This is the Qing family of Wuxi.
05:28It's dawn on the day of the ancestors,
05:31what the Chinese call tomb-sweeping day.
05:36And the Qing family gather at the grave of their founding ancestor,
05:41Qingguan, a poet who lived 1,000 years ago.
05:50They've come from all over China and further afield
05:53to make their own report to the ancestors,
05:57to tell them how the family's doing
05:58and how the ancestors and their values still live on in us.
06:04As the ancients used to say, repaying our roots.
06:11It's an amazing scene, isn't it?
06:14It just recalls the whole of Chinese history over the last 100 years.
06:18Wars, revolutions, famines.
06:21Families broke up, cast to the four winds,
06:25and yet they come back with this kind of homing instinct almost
06:29to the tomb of the founder,
06:31as if everything can be reconstituted again.
06:38These rituals were banned in the Communist era
06:40and the grave was lost after the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
06:46But when the revolutionary time drew to a close,
06:49Frank Qing and his sister came searching for the tomb.
06:53Back in 1982, when I found that gravestone,
06:58none of these things existed.
07:00You know, when I first started out,
07:02I was like a blank slate.
07:04I didn't know what existed.
07:06It's really very exciting that this is happening.
07:08I certainly never expected anything like this to happen
07:11when I started my own journey of discovery.
07:40Like everyone in China,
07:42the Qing family have experienced dizzying change
07:45since the end of empire.
07:49From colonial subjects to emigres seeking a better life,
07:53Communist revolutionaries on the long march with Chairman Mao,
07:57and even glamour on the Shanghai stage.
08:03Their family story mirrors the story of the nation.
08:08And now the meaning of that history is flooding back.
08:21It's a foundation.
08:24This means that it's the fact that it's having a better life.
08:28It's the fact that we really want to keep the power of the nation.
08:32Considering the nature of the country,
08:34it's a life for us.
08:34You see,
08:40it's the fact that our country has been growing up.
09:04I'm going to regret this.
09:09So the Chinese people have found again the warmth of home, after the vast and terrifying
09:17dislocation of the mid-20th century, when for a time China turned its back on its past.
09:26The Qing family, like the nation itself, are seeking a renewed identity, a distinctively
09:33Chinese way forward, anchored in the Chinese past.
09:41And that past goes back thousands of years.
09:47China is the oldest continuous state on earth.
09:53There are no historical texts that describe its birth, but later myths and traditions take
09:59us to the Yellow River plain that gave China its name, Zhongguo, the Middle Land.
10:14And here you can still reach back to those beginnings.
10:22This is a rural fair at an ancient temple, closed down in the communist era.
10:33I'm at a great farmer's festival in the plain of the Yellow River, with a million people
10:38all around me.
10:42And these vast crowds have come to celebrate an ancient myth that tells of the origins of
10:48the Chinese people.
10:52As in many ancient cultures, it's the women who've treasured the tales and handed them down.
10:58How much?
11:01Three?
11:01Especially the tale of the mother goddess of the Chinese people, Nuwa.
11:07A little dark.
11:09It's great, isn't it?
11:10This whole great festival is to two ancient gods in Chinese mythology, Fuxi, the male god,
11:19and Nuwa, the female god.
11:20And she's famous because she created humanity out of the yellow mud of the Yellow River.
11:26And the mud that was left over, she made dogs and chickens, according to the myth.
11:31She has on board, Mr.
11:38A Ellen.
11:42She is a woman.
11:44She is a woman then, and she has made her own business.
11:53Yes, she is doing it.
11:54Two ages, the ladiesela, the women, the women, the women, and the women on the island,
11:57and her women in each other are leaving the war together.
12:00I was a man who did not have their children.
12:17These myths have been handed down for over 4,000 years, and they contain a crucial idea,
12:24the uniqueness of Chinese ethnic identity.
12:29China is a huge and diverse country, with so many languages and cultures.
12:37But the vast majority of its people see themselves as Han Chinese, part of the biggest tribe in
12:45the world.
12:49The myths also tell us about the origins of the Chinese state, by the banks of the Yellow
12:57River.
13:03All four of the great old world civilizations began on rivers, the Nile, the Euphrates,
13:09the Indus, and the Yellow River. China alone has come down till today.
13:16It was the ability to harness the waters of the river for irrigation that enabled ancient
13:22people to feed bigger and bigger populations, and eventually to create cities and make civilization.
13:30But where the rising of the Nile, for example, was predictable to the day, and seen by the
13:36Egyptians as a joyful and benign source of life, the Yellow River here in China has been a destroyer,
13:46the killer of millions in its great floods throughout Chinese history right up to the
13:5190th century. And so, the beginnings of Chinese history, the control of the river and its
13:59environment, lay at the very heart of political power.
14:07And the tale of the king who tamed the mighty Yellow River and claimed the right to rule the
14:13hundreds of tribes along its banks became a myth still told by today's storytellers.
14:21In the Old Testament, there were two different places. One of the
14:25two are the one that was the one, the one who called the One From The One.
14:29The One From The One is the One. The One! The One is the One!
14:34The One from the One is the One, the One the One, the One is the One!
14:47The One Can't be a
14:48The One is the Ange!
14:48The One from the One is the One!
14:51at the side of the house.
14:54After a while,
14:56he spent a few years
14:57in the last few years
14:57in the last few years
14:58and in the last few years
15:00in the last few years.
15:00He had to go to the house
15:02and he had to go to the house.
15:09Look at this.
15:31This is a Ming Dynasty temple, built in the 1520s, but on a very, very ancient terrace.
15:41And that's King Yu.
15:46Historians have always thought the tale of King Yu was just a myth,
15:49but the recent find of a bronze bowl nearly 3,000 years old, engraved with his story,
15:56proves the tale goes back to the Bronze Age.
16:07The legend says that King Yu was the founder of China's first dynasty 4,000 years ago.
16:16They were called the Xia, and they came from the middle plain of the Middle Land, here in Henan.
16:26And at the village of Erlitou, traditions survived until modern times,
16:32that this had been the seat of China's first rulers.
16:39So, the most ancient site in the world.
16:43That's the most ancient site in the world.
16:45No!
16:50Incredible!
16:51Ancient Greece, ancient Iraq, ancient Egypt, wherever you look, some memory survives on the site.
16:58Here, towns first emerged out of China's myriad stone-age villages.
17:13The Yellow Emperor, founder of the original emperor of China.
17:18We have a house.
17:20We have a house.
17:23We have a house.
17:26We have a house.
17:26We have a house.
17:27We have a house.
17:27We have a house.
17:28We can go back to the house.
17:32We have everything.
17:33Under these wheat fields, the archaeologists excavated a settlement which had thousands of people,
17:39and a huge walled enclosure.
17:46Inside it were pillared halls, palaces from different periods between 2000 and 1500 BC.
17:58They stood on rammed earth platforms, one of them with a triple gate, the pattern of
18:04all later Chinese royal cities.
18:13The Xia are still a mystery, but here at Erlitou, archaeologists have found tantalising
18:21clues, pottery, bronze casting, and most intriguing of all, a burial with a sceptre made of 2000
18:32pieces of turquoise in the shape of a dragon, the symbol of royalty all the way through
18:39Chinese civilisation.
18:49Whether the Xia were China's first dynasty and whether this was their capital is still
18:54not known, and that's because we lack the key evidence, writing.
19:00Do you think that this was the capital of the Xia, or what do you think?
19:07Difficult question.
19:29If this was the capital of the Xia, for the Chinese, myth would become history.
19:36For they'd have found the root of the Chinese state.
19:50As it is though, we now have to leap forward to around 1200 BC to find China's first historical
19:58rulers, the Shang dynasty.
20:03And we know about the Shang because they've left us the first Chinese writing.
20:13The modern discovery of the Shang is one of the most exciting stories in world archaeology.
20:21And it began by chance in one of those storehouses of age-old Chinese wisdom.
20:27A traditional pharmacy.
20:33Where beliefs and practices going back into prehistory have come down to us today.
20:43And the clues to the mystery of the Shang, unbelievably, were found inside a packet of over-the-counter medicine.
20:52The story goes like this.
20:54In 1899, a Chinese scholar called Wang Yirong, who was the Chancellor of the Imperial Academy in Beijing.
21:01A great scholar.
21:02And a collector of ancient bronzes.
21:05He was interested in the earliest Chinese writing systems.
21:08He falls ill with malaria.
21:10And his local pharmacy, just like this one, delivers a series of ingredients, which include dragon bones.
21:20These were animal bones, just like this.
21:23They use them today, which you ground up and boiled and drank to alleviate the fever.
21:29When he opened the packet, to his amazement, this is what he saw.
21:36Some of the bones were inscribed with what he could see were primitive forms of the old writing that he
21:46knew from the inscriptions on his bronzes.
21:49And eventually, these dragon bones were traced back to a little place in the lower valley of the Yellow River.
21:56A country town called An Yang.
22:00At An Yang, Chinese archaeologists made their greatest discovery.
22:06Huge tombs of the last Shang kings with mass human sacrifice.
22:12And crucially, written texts on oracle bones.
22:181928, they finally found the location and they started the excavation.
22:25From the excavation, they found nearly 30,000 oracle bones.
22:32Documenting divination performed on behalf of nine late Shang kings.
22:41I love all the portraits of the people.
22:44Yes, yes.
22:44There's something so optimistic about the faces.
22:49They thought that their task is to prove that the Chinese history was true.
22:57Epoch-making, in world archaeology, really, I guess you say.
23:02Absolutely, yes.
23:04Now we knew that they were historical.
23:06Yes.
23:09An Yang was the final capital of the Shang dynasty.
23:13They ruled for 500 years, controlling the whole of central China.
23:18The first Chinese state.
23:25Their authority rested on force, but was validated by divination.
23:31The Shang kings and their diviners burned cracks in tortoise shells,
23:35or cow bones, to speak to the ancestors.
23:40So, basically, they choose one piece of bones or shells,
23:44and then they treat some holes,
23:47and then they heat up these holes with some special plants,
23:51and then this will create some cracks,
23:54and then they look at the pattern of these cracks.
23:58And the cracks come the other side?
24:00Yes, yes.
24:01Great.
24:01And then they can read these patterns and make their prediction
24:04about whether this divination is auspicious,
24:09or it's actually against the will of the ancestral spirits.
24:14So, they should not be carrying the activity they were asking for.
24:20So, the diviners are asking...
24:22For the favour of the ancestral spirits?
24:24Yes, yes.
24:25Wow.
24:26So, basically, it's their special way to communicate with their ancestors.
24:32The ancestors are the key people in their mental universe.
24:36Yes, yes.
24:36God, fantastic.
24:37Basically, in every aspect of the society,
24:40including, for instance, the harvest.
24:42This one is an event about praying for rain.
24:45Rain and water would be a big part of their concerns.
24:50Yes, absolutely.
24:50Living in the Yellow River Plain, I suppose.
24:52Yes, yes, yes.
24:53For agricultural society, that's absolutely crucial.
24:59And unlike the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt or the cuneiform of Babylonia,
25:04the archaeologists had no need of a key to decipher them.
25:07For they could see at once that the signs on the oracle bones
25:10were the direct ancestors of today's Chinese writing.
25:16That's the character for rain, I mean, in modern language.
25:22And in all of the bones, it's like this, with three drops.
25:28So, essentially, it's the same idea, fundamentally.
25:30This rain character is characterised by these rain drops.
25:35Yes, yes.
25:36Out of these prehistoric pictographs came the modern Chinese script
25:41with its tens of thousands of signs.
25:47So, through their script, the Chinese people are uniquely connected
25:52to their deep past and its ways of thinking,
25:55more so than any other culture on earth.
26:04There seem to be...
26:06Is this fanciful?
26:08There seem to be themes that we trace
26:12all the way through Chinese history.
26:14The reverence for the ancestors.
26:16Yes.
26:17The divination.
26:18The control of writing,
26:20and writing as a source of power.
26:22Is that fair?
26:23Is that fair?
26:24Yes.
26:24So, I think...
26:25I agree.
26:26I think that sort of communication or interaction
26:29between the ancestral spirits
26:31and the acquisition of social power,
26:34it is indeed a recurrent theme throughout Chinese history.
26:39So, power came from the ancestors.
26:44In the oracle bones, there's a sacred place.
26:48Hello.
26:48It has the same name as the dynasty, Shang.
26:52Well, this is not like the shopping malls of Shanghai,
26:55that's for sure.
26:56And the archaeologists now turn to a little town in Henan
26:59with a tantalising name.
27:02Shangqiu, the mound or ruins of Shang.
27:06We are now inside the Ming dynasty city.
27:09This was built in 1511,
27:11the previous one destroyed by floods.
27:13Lots more underneath it, of course.
27:15What's fascinating is,
27:17it's still called Shangqiu,
27:20the ruins of Shang.
27:23So, was this the ancestral place
27:25of China's first great dynasty?
27:28A good system.
27:31That question has intrigued Chinese archaeologists
27:34since their first explorations here in the 1930s.
27:41But the Bronze Age layers here are 30 feet deep
27:45in Yellow River silt.
27:50Recently, though, geophysical surveys and test cores
27:54have detected the outline of a much earlier city
27:57underneath the tarn.
27:59And the clues to what it was
28:01were in the oracle bones found at Anyang.
28:05In the 1930s, a Chinese scholar called Dong Zhuo-bin
28:09worked on the Bronze Age inscriptions
28:13scratched into the oracle bones from the Shang dynasty.
28:18Thousand upon thousand of them.
28:20And through the 1930s, when China was driven by civil war
28:26and Japanese invasion,
28:28he worked transcribing these inscriptions
28:31in what I suppose you could call self-effacing loyalty
28:36to the Chinese past,
28:38while the catastrophes of the modern world surrounded him.
28:40And you see there his transcription of one of the turtle shells
28:45with all the splits and the inscriptions on them.
28:48And he worked out the order of the Shang kings
28:51and their calendar and their rituals and their journeys.
29:00What he discovered was that the kings came back
29:03to do special rituals at the city called Shang.
29:08And that was here.
29:09Its name meant the place where the ancestors were worshipped.
29:13So state and ancestors were tied together.
29:21And amazingly, cults and legends about the Shang
29:24still survive here at a mysterious temple at the edge of town.
29:31The Mound of Shang.
29:33It's a great artificial hill.
29:37The legends say this mound was built before the great flood.
29:41That here mankind first got fire stolen from the gods.
29:48And tradition also said this had been a kind of observatory
29:53where the Shang kings watched the stars that protected their dynasty.
29:59Because they believed that the stars were powers in heaven.
30:05And if we understood them properly,
30:07then we'd know best how to run our kingdom.
30:14So the oracle bones and the later myths are clues to early Chinese beliefs
30:19about society and the cosmos.
30:22Divination, ritual and writing were the basis of state power.
30:32For their sacred ceremonies, they cast beautiful bronzes to hold food and wine offerings
30:38to the ancestral spirits, which were consumed at the royal feasts.
30:43Some of them bear the symbols of the different lineages of the royal and noble families.
30:53Like the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, the Shang practiced human sacrifice.
31:01The oracle bones list the victims.
31:04They were captives from the subject peoples the Shang ruled,
31:08killed as offerings to the powers of nature.
31:11As the Shang diviners asked the ancestors in heaven for guidance.
31:19Anxiously watching the stars for omens of auspiciousness and omens of disaster.
31:32To them, time, as revealed in the movements of the stars and planets,
31:37was a truly portentous dimension, full of danger as well as auspiciousness.
31:45And especially for the rulers.
31:46For they knew that in time, the planets would reveal heaven's judgment on their earthly rule.
31:57That brings us to one of the key ideas in early Chinese thought.
32:02The mandate of heaven.
32:11The early Chinese believed their rulers should protect the people,
32:15keeping harmony with the order of heaven.
32:19It was said the first Shang king had even offered himself as a sacrifice in time of drought.
32:30But legend said the last Shang king was so depraved and cruel that heaven withdrew its mandate.
32:38And it gave a sign.
32:40Five planets came together in the rarest of conjunctions.
32:47As this happens only once every 516 years, we can pin down the very day.
32:54So you can follow any single planet?
32:57Yes.
32:58Wonderful.
33:01We asked the Beijing planetarium to work out the exact date of the omen and to show us the night
33:08sky at that moment.
33:11So it's what historians always want to do is actually go back in time.
33:15Mr Lu can do it for us.
33:17He can actually take us back to late May, 1058 BC on his computer system, which is 1059 BC on
33:27historians' calculations.
33:32This time, this place, the sky, you can see it.
33:38The tribes who lived under the Shang tyranny saw the sign and made an alliance under a man known for
33:45his virtue, King Wen of the Jove.
33:48This five planet conjunction happens once every 516 years.
33:54But that moment was the closest that has ever happened in human history.
33:59And at that time, the early Chinese chronicles so.
34:03When the five planets gathered in the constellation called the Chamber,
34:09a great vermilion bird landed on the altar of the Earth on Mount Qi.
34:20In its beak was a jade sceptre and it spoke, saying,
34:26Heaven has commanded that the King of the Jove should overthrow the King of the Shang and take the kingdom.
34:43In the final battle, the wicked Shang King saw his subjects had turned against him.
34:51So he burned his palace with his treasures and his concubines,
34:56put on his jade suit and walked into the fire.
35:04And so the ancestors passed the mandate to the King of the Jove,
35:08and he laid down the pattern of rule for future ages.
35:12Rulers must be virtuous and keep harmony between humanity and the cosmos,
35:18by observing the rites and the music of the heavens.
35:26And amazingly, some of the ritual traditions of the Zhou have come down to us today.
35:34China's oldest religion is Taoism.
35:38In their ceremonies and their music, the Taoists, the seekers after the way,
35:43are a living link with these ancient ideas about the relation of the kingdoms of Earth and Heaven.
35:53The golden moon is also a king.
35:57The golden moon is also a king.
35:58The king and the king of the earth are the same king, the same king, the same king.
36:03It was a very ancient world of China.
36:06It was a very ancient world of China.
36:07It was a ancient world of China.
36:13So, in China, many things are related to the religion.
36:28And these very ancient customs and beliefs are still held in affection and practiced by the ordinary Chinese people today.
36:43It was a great day.
36:45It made its own principle.
36:50It's important that the Taoist's gods must be a god and a man of the god.
36:54The Taoist's religion also had to do great things.
36:55The Taoists were brought to the Great Manual of theDave and the Taoists on the Edom.
37:03And the Taoists were brought to the Great Manual of the sunset,
37:07fulfilling heaven's mandate.
37:12But China's fate throughout its history
37:15has been to fragment in times of crisis.
37:23Eventually, Zhou power disintegrated
37:27and the heartland of China descended into chaos.
37:35Across the middle land, feuding kings and warlords
37:38fought for supremacy.
37:46Surrounded by their armies, even in death.
38:00Amazing sight, isn't it?
38:01This is one of more than a dozen chariot burial pits
38:05that have been uncovered in the middle of Luoyang
38:09in the last few years.
38:10This was excavated in 2003, during the modern building boom.
38:15There's 18 chariots and their horses here,
38:19associated with the tombs of the kings of the Eastern Zhou.
38:24It's the world of Achilles and Hector
38:27in more than just the military hardware.
38:31Politically, just like Agamemnon,
38:33the kings here in the central plain of China
38:36depended on the cooperation of vassal states,
38:40smaller kingdoms, sometimes more than 100 of them.
38:43But these were rivals fighting each other,
38:46just like the Greek heroes sacking cities
38:49and enslaving their populations.
38:51So political instability, warfare and violence were endemic.
38:57And for that reason, perhaps, this is the time when a ferment of ideas
39:02grows about the nature of kingship, the function of states,
39:06duties, obligation and morality.
39:11Out of this begins the first golden age of Chinese philosophy.
39:18Right across the old world in the 6th century BC,
39:22thinkers and rulers were debating these ideas.
39:27A new age of human thought had dawned,
39:31what we call the Axis Age.
39:35The Greek philosophers, the Old Testament prophets,
39:39the Buddha in India, all of them were wrestling with ideas
39:43about conscience and social justice at human autonomy.
39:51How can a king be just in violent times?
39:55What is law?
39:56And what is virtue?
39:58Here in China, it was said a hundred schools bloomed.
40:08And the most famous thinker came from an obscure state in eastern China.
40:16He was descended from a family of Shang diviners, oracle bone crackers.
40:21And his obsession was not the inner life, but how we act in the public world.
40:27Small town China, but what a small town.
40:33Because this place, Chu Fu, has nearly 3,000 years of continuity,
40:38life on this spot.
40:40And it gave birth to one of the most influential figures
40:43in the history of the world, Confucius.
40:54Confucius lived in a time of cultural and political crisis.
40:58China divided into many small states that were always fighting each other,
41:03and sometimes even divided in themselves, like this one,
41:07the state of Lu, whose capital was Chu Fu.
41:16Confucius rose eventually to a quite high ministerial job in which he played a crucial role
41:25brokering a peace deal between three feuding clans and persuading them to demolish their
41:31fortifications and acknowledge the duke here as their lord.
41:35And that kind of experience gave him the idea of his mission,
41:40which was nothing less than to restore civilisation by teaching rulers to be virtuous.
41:50Confucius had a very clear vision.
41:52There is definitely this sense of passion in him that he wants to be recognised.
41:58He wants to contribute to the social order of society,
42:02and he wants to make sure that ritual practices are followed very closely.
42:10Confucius was very keen on the idea of humaneness or benevolence,
42:16and that the ruler set a direct example for the people to follow.
42:20Confucius was very keen on the people to follow.
42:23There is a very lively metaphor in the Analects,
42:26when the character of the ruler is compared to the wind,
42:30and the character of the ordinary people is compared to the grass.
42:35So it is said that when the wind blows, the grass naturally bends.
42:40Like Socrates or the Buddha, his sayings were turned into a book after his death by his disciples.
42:45The Analects. Horrible word, isn't it? What a mouthful.
42:50It means the sort of quotations from, but really it should be called the Conversations of Confucius,
42:57because that's what it really is. It's his sayings.
43:00And it's been said that no book in the history of the world, even the Bible,
43:05has exerted so much influence for such a long period on so many people.
43:13That's Confucius's little blue book. 18? 18. OK, great.
43:21The Analects would become China's guide to the principles of good government.
43:28He says that if you govern people by Zheng, it could be translated as law or punishment,
43:38and then you get people who have no sense of shame.
43:42You get order, but people don't really know what they're doing wrong.
43:46But then if you govern by De, a sense of virtue, morality, then people have a sense of shame.
43:57And with that idea, it's implied that they'll have moral progress as well.
44:04It's a very old idea in the story of China that the basis of all government is not law,
44:10but established morality. And the key end, to preserve the state.
44:23In the West, we tend to think of Confucius as an arch-conservative, a bit pious, a bit pompous.
44:32But without virtue, he thought any rule is morally bankrupt and should be resisted,
44:39even until death.
44:41He travelled the roads of China like some intellectual troubleshooter,
44:46trying to sell China's local rulers his New Deal.
44:54At his tomb, I met a group of Confucian teachers from Korea.
45:00These gentlemen are not priests, they're scholars.
45:05And what they're doing is not so much religion as ritual.
45:10An act of reverence for the old master and his ideal of universal brotherhood.
45:16An act of reverence for the old master and his ideal of universal brotherhood.
45:21Bowing before his tombstone, which was smashed to pieces by the Communist Red Guards
45:27only 50 years ago, but is now restored.
45:45So we are interested in the history of China, and Confucius is so important that that is why we are
45:51here.
45:52So we are not the religious of our own people.
45:54So we must list a lot of people.
45:56That is why people come.
45:58So we get out with our own people.
46:06Yeah, so that is why we all live in the world.
46:14So we want to live in our own people.
46:16Love, benevolence, courtesy, good manners.
46:20These are the way society works, when society works well.
46:24Yeah, yeah, yeah. In Confucius' idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
46:29Confucius was condemned during the Communist Revolution
46:32as the embodiment of old ideas and old customs.
46:35But now, once more, he's a national treasure,
46:38praised by the government for his stress on social values.
46:42Though not so much, perhaps, for his insistence
46:45that it is the intellectual's duty to speak truth to power.
46:50But in both, he's a symbol of the Chinese way.
47:02Oh, very good.
47:06Thank you very much. Fantastic.
47:18Confucius was not an innovator.
47:21He was the distiller, the crystalliser
47:24of an already ancient tradition.
47:27The idea of the virtuous ruler,
47:30of filial piety, of ritual and ceremony
47:33is the glue that bound society together,
47:36and the overruling power of education.
47:40Those are the values that still underlie Chinese values today,
47:45and South Asian values,
47:48from Korea and Japan all the way down to Vietnam.
47:51What a legacy.
48:02But the truth is, in his own lifetime,
48:05Confucius was a complete failure.
48:07No ruler bought into his manifesto for change.
48:10After his death in 469 BC,
48:13the warring states fought each other for two more centuries
48:17till the fall of the last of the Joe.
48:25And when their end came,
48:27no-one was listening to arguments about morality,
48:30but only the claims of violence and war.
48:41And one of those warring states was the Qin.
48:45Through military conquest,
48:47they swallowed up the Zhou
48:49and the other states of the Yellow River Plain.
48:57And in 221 BC,
48:59they proclaimed their leader
49:01the first emperor of all China.
49:06and the second emperor of all China.
49:06Qin Shi Huangdi.
49:22The first emperor imposed his own revolutionary political system
49:26on the conquered lands,
49:29dispossessing the old aristocracies,
49:31creating an enormous captive labour force
49:34to build his new state.
49:37The Qin.
49:38That's the source of the name China,
49:41used today by the outside world,
49:43although not by the Chinese themselves.
49:53Qin Shi Huangdi built the first Great Wall.
49:57He made a new road system linking the 36 military provinces.
50:03For tax and commerce,
50:04the weights and measures were standardised.
50:07There was to be a uniform coinage.
50:12And the Chinese script itself was simplified
50:15so the emperor's will could be conveyed
50:18right down to the local magistrates,
50:21who administered a population of more than 30 million people.
50:26Almost a third of the world.
50:36And the key to the Qin emperor's power was the army.
50:44It was the image of the empire.
50:47Discipline, obedience, hierarchy.
50:53With their mass-produced bronze weapons and mechanical crossbows,
50:58there'd be nothing like this in the whole of history.
51:05Infantry, you know, archers and cavalry,
51:09and charioteers, you know.
51:11So that's really the battle formation of the Qin dynasty.
51:15So, you know, how Qin, the first emperor, conquered the other states,
51:21used his military troops.
51:23Frightening, actually.
51:26One of the most amazing discoveries ever, isn't it, really?
51:30Yeah.
51:30And more recently, you've discovered pits,
51:33not with warriors, but with other people attached to the court.
51:37We found tarikata acrobats, you know, tarikata musicians,
51:43and actually bronze birds, bronze chariots.
51:48All parts of the whole tomb complex deserve the emperor in his afterlife.
51:57This pit is one of nearly 200, large and small, found so far.
52:03The more the archaeologists look, the more they find.
52:12I think we are very similar to the doctor.
52:15Only different is our patient is different.
52:19Paranoid to the end, the emperor took no chances,
52:23magically protected by his army, even in the afterlife.
52:28Do we know what rank he was in the army?
52:32No, he's a normal, normal soldier.
52:35You can tell that by the headdress and the armor?
52:37The headdress depends on his armor,
52:39and it depends on his troops,
52:44because the general has more detail, more...
52:48Fosh clothes.
52:54More...
52:55Yeah, more...
52:58A stern look of command, isn't he?
53:07We've all become so familiar with the images of the Terracotta Army.
53:11So familiar, perhaps, that it's easy to forget their significance in the history of China and of the world.
53:20How this vast and diverse area became one state, that's one of the great themes of our story.
53:28As we've already seen, it began a long time before, with the Xia and Shang dynasties.
53:34But without the Qin Emperor, whose army is arrayed before us now, it might never have happened.
53:42The beginnings of China as a unitary state, as the world's first bureaucratic centralised empire, begin with Qin Shi Huangdi.
53:56But the first emperor's rule over China was brief, just 11 years.
54:01His sons, even briefer, their hated regime overthrown by a rebellion led by the peasant Liu Bang,
54:09who founded the dynasty after whom the Chinese still name themselves today, the Han.
54:16What happened?!
54:18Terror.
54:18Terror.
54:18Terror.
54:18Terror.
54:22Terror.
54:33Terror.
54:36It's been a very interesting story about the Loes Bunking that broke the blood.
54:48It's a real one, but it will kill him.
54:55In the days of the Loes Bunking,
54:56it will come and kill him.
54:57The Kitsung gets killed by the Loes Bunking one entangling.
54:59After 3 years of the early and then,
55:26And for all the wars and revolutions, the triumphs and tragedies that would follow
55:31the idea will never be lost that China, a land of so many peoples and cultures, is a single
55:38state and a single civilisation. Still today, the Chinese call themselves Han. They speak
55:47of our Han culture and Han speech as if one great tribe. A tribe with many stories, but
55:58one great story, China itself. And at the very heart of the story, the link between the state
56:08and the family and the ancestors. Over the next 2,000 years, these values will run under
56:18the surface of the great river of Chinese history. Often tested, sometimes seemingly broken,
56:25but still passed on across even the tyrannies and cruelties of the 20th century. At the
56:36temple of Nuwa, the mother goddess of the Chinese people, the pilgrims are gathering again to
56:42give thanks to the ancestors.
56:52This prayer ceremony was last done a hundred years ago at the end of the empire. Now the
56:58rituals are brought back to life for today's people, recreated with words from sacred books
57:03over 2,000 years old. It's a symbol of today's China. After the ravages of the 20th century,
57:13the Chinese people's belief in their history as a source of strength, not weakness, has returned.
57:20The ideas that nourished their identity for so long, handed down now into an ever more confident
57:26and expansive Chinese future. With a new text, may our country's great traditions be passed down
57:36once more, from generation to generation.
58:08So that's the first part of this great adventure, the story of China.
58:13And this is just the beginning. In the next chapter of the story, China goes out to the world
58:20in one of the greatest epochs in world civilization, the Tang Dynasty.
58:32So you can see that next week at the same time here on BBC Two. And next, with all her
58:38guests
58:38pushing the limits of human endurance, it's the Claire Balding Show.
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