- yesterday
Documentary, BBC The Story of China 1 Ancestors - 影片
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00China 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
01:28performed rituals that they believed went back 5,000 years to the yellow Emperor the mythical first
01:39founder of China made a report to the ancestors about the state of the Empire but that winter of 1899
01:50China faced disaster
01:54following year 1900 China was plunged into catastrophe with rebellion flood and famine foreign aggression
02:08and the new century saw swiftly the fall of the Empire short-lived Republic Communist Revolution and then the insane madness of the Cultural Revolution
02:25but despite the tragedies of the 20th century the Chinese people have come through
02:32today China is writing its own story once more under a new mandate
02:42so long the greatest civilization on earth China is rising again
02:48it's a great time to be looking at the events which have shaped the history of China
02:54and the ideals which have made its culture so distinctive and so brilliant for so long
03:02so long
03:06so
03:08so
03:12so
03:16Every 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,
04:07a 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,
04:29for 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,
04:39identity begins with the family.
04:41Sometimes 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.
05:05It'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 a thousand years ago.
05:45They'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,
06:07repaying our roots.
06:08It's an amazing scene, isn't it?
06:14It just recalls the whole of Chinese history
06:17over the last hundred years.
06:18Wars, revolutions, famines.
06:22Families broke up, cast to the four winds,
06:25and yet they come back with this kind of homing instinct,
06:29almost, to the tomb of the founder,
06:31as if everything can be reconstituted again.
06:35These rituals were banned in the Communist era,
06:41and 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.
07:00When I first started out, I was like a blank slate.
07:04I didn't know what existed.
07:06It's really very exciting that this is happening.
07:09I certainly never expected anything like this to happen
07:11when I started my own journey of discovery.
07:15Like everyone in China, the Qin family have experienced dizzying change.
07:20since the end of empire.
07:22Like everyone in China, the Qin family have experienced dizzying change since the end
07:46of empire.
07:49From colonial subjects to emigres seeking a better life, communist revolutionaries on
07:55the long march with Chairman Ma, and even glamour on the Shanghai stage.
08:04Their family story mirrors the story of the nation, and now the meaning of that history
08:12is flooding back.
08:17It's a foundation.
08:22It's one of the principles of the world.
08:24So, the world's life has changed.
08:26It's all good.
08:27It's all good.
08:28It's all good.
08:29The wind has changed and it's all good.
08:30If the weather is good, the whole country is good.
08:39Our families have been extended for 1,000 years.
08:43In this 1,000 years, we have had such a big change in our country.
08:48We are now back.
08:50There are many people who want to find their roots.
08:53Where are our roots?
08:55What did we leave here?
08:58Thank you!
09:03I'm going to regret this.
09:09So the Chinese people have found again the warmth of home.
09:13After the vast and terrifying dislocation of the mid-20th century,
09:19when for a time, China turned its back on its past.
09:23The Qing family, like the nation itself, are seeking a renewed identity,
09:31a distinctively Chinese way forward, anchored in the Chinese past.
09:37And that past goes back thousands of years.
09:48China is the oldest continuous state on Earth.
09:53There are no historical texts that describe its birth.
09:56But later myths and traditions take us to the Yellow River Plain
10:00that gave China its name.
10:03Zhongguo, the Middle Land.
10:14And here you can still reach back to those beginnings.
10:17This is a rural fair at an ancient temple, closed down in the Communist era.
10:26I'm at a great farmer's festival in the plain of the Yellow River,
10:36with a million people all around me.
10:38And these vast crowds have come to celebrate an ancient myth
10:45that tells of the origins of the Chinese people.
10:51As in many ancient cultures,
10:53it's the women who've treasured the tales and handed them down.
10:58How much?
10:59Three?
11:00Especially the tale of the mother goddess of the Chinese people, Nuwa.
11:05Little dog.
11:09It's great, isn't it?
11:10This whole great festival is to two ancient gods in Chinese mythology.
11:17Fuxi, the male god, and Nuwa, the female god.
11:20And she's famous because she created humanity
11:23out of the yellow mud of the Yellow River.
11:26And the mud that was left over,
11:28she made dogs and chickens, according to the myth.
11:35He's famous and oops.
11:38He's famous because of the women who brought to the temple
11:42and the wild her friends.
11:44And he told them,
11:45when he killed the village,
11:46he still came to the village.
11:47And there was no king of the village.
11:49His sonata lived forever.
11:50His sonata lived forever.
11:51There was a daughter and the son ruler lived together,
11:52at the beginning of his village.
11:54And some people let the village,
11:56and the village of the MostGM.
12:01These myths have been handed down for over 4,000 years, and they contain a crucial
12:23idea, the uniqueness of Chinese ethnic identity.
12:30China is a huge and diverse country, with so many languages and cultures.
12:38But the vast majority of its people see themselves as Han Chinese, part of the biggest tribe in
12:45the world.
12:50The myths also tell us about the origins of the Chinese state, by the banks of the Yellow
12:57River.
13:04All four of the great old world civilizations began on rivers, the Nile, the Euphrates, the
13:10Indus and the Yellow River.
13:13China alone has come down till today.
13:17It 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.
13:31But where the rising of the Nile, for example, was predictable to the day, and seen by the
13:37Egyptians as a joyful and benign source of life, the Yellow River here in China has been a destroyer,
13:45the killer of millions in its great floods throughout Chinese history right up to the 20th century.
13:52And so, the beginnings of Chinese history, the control of the river and its environment lay at the very
14:00heart of political power.
14:05And the tale of the king who tamed the mighty Yellow River, and claimed the right to rule
14:13the hundreds of tribes along its banks, became a myth still told by today's storytellers.
14:20The
14:25one
14:26one
14:28two
14:29two
14:31two
14:33two
14:35three
14:37two
14:39three
14:41three
14:43four
14:44three
14:45four
14:46four
14:47four
14:49He used to put his hand in his hand on his hand.
14:55He took his hand for a hundred years
14:58and took his hand to his hand.
15:00He took his hand to his hand.
15:09Look at this.
15:19This is a Ming Dynasty temple, built in the 1520s, but on a very, very ancient terrace.
15:41And that's King Yu.
15:43Historians have always thought the tale of King Yu was just a myth, but the recent find
15:51of a bronze bowl nearly 3,000 years old, engraved with his story, proves the tale goes back
15:58to the Bronze Age.
15:59The 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
16:22Henan.
16:27And at the village of Erlitou, traditions survived until modern times that this had been the
16:33seat of China's first rulers.
16:35So, the most ancient site in the world?
16:50Incredible.
16:51Ancient Greece, ancient Iraq, ancient Egypt, wherever you look, some memory survives on
16:57the site.
16:58Here, towns first emerged out of China's myriad stone-age villages.
17:14The Yellow Emperor, founder of the original emperor of China.
17:19China.
17:20China.
17:21China.
17:22China.
17:23China.
17:24China.
17:25China.
17:26China.
17:27China.
17:28China.
17:29China.
17:30China.
17:31China.
17:33Under these wheat fields, the archaeologists excavated a settlement which had thousands of
17:38people, and a huge walled enclosure.
17:41And then, there were two small buildings inside it were pillared halls, palaces from different
17:51periods between 2000 and 1500 BC.
17:58They stood on rammed earth platforms, one of them with a triple gate, the pattern of all
18:04later Chinese royal cities.
18:07China.
18:08China.
18:09China.
18:10China.
18:11China.
18:12China.
18:13China.
18:14China.
18:15China.
18:16China.
18:17China.
18:18China.
18:19China.
18:20China.
18:21China.
18:22China.
18:23China.
18:24China.
18:25China.
18:26China.
18:27China.
18:28China.
18:29China.
18:30China.
18:31China.
18:32China.
18:33China.
18:34China.
18:35China.
18:36China.
18:37the symbol of royalty, all the way through Chinese civilisation.
18:49Whether the Xia were China's first dynasty
18:52and whether this was their capital is still not known.
18:56And that's because we lack the key evidence, writing.
19:00Do you think that this was the capital of the Xia?
19:04What do you think?
19:07Difficult question.
19:30If this was the capital of the Xia,
19:32for 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
19:54to find China's first historical rulers, the Shang dynasty.
20:00And we know about the Shang because they've left us the first Chinese writing.
20:14The modern discovery of the Shang is one of the most exciting stories in world archaeology.
20:19And it began by chance in one of those storehouses of age-old Chinese wisdom, a traditional pharmacy.
20:29where 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.
20:51The story goes like this.
20:53The story goes like this.
20:541899, a Chinese scholar called Wang Yirong, who was the Chancellor of the Imperial Academy in Beijing,
21:00a great scholar, and a collector of ancient bronzes.
21:04He 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,
21:16which include dragon bones.
21:20These were animal bones, just like this, they use them today,
21:24which you ground up and boiled and drank to alleviate the fever.
21:28When 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
21:44of the old writing that he knew from the inscriptions on his bronzes.
21:49And eventually, these dragon bones were traced back to a little place
21:53in the lower valley of the Yellow River, a 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.
22:161928, they finally found the location, and they started the excavation.
22:25From the excavation, they found nearly 30,000 oracle bones.
22:31Documenting divination performed on behalf of nine lay Shang kings.
22:41I love all the portraits of the people.
22:43Yes, 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.
22:56Epoch-making in world archaeology, really, I guess you say.
23:01Absolutely, yes, yes.
23:04Now we knew that they were historical.
23:06Yes.
23:07An Yang was the final capital of the Shang dynasty.
23:14They 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.
23:29by divination, the Shang kings and their diviners
23:33burned cracks in tortoise shells or cow bones
23:37to 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.
23:52And then this will create some cracks.
23:55And then they look at the pattern of these cracks.
23:58And the cracks come the other side, is that right?
24:00Yes, yes.
24:01And then they can read these patterns
24:03and make their prediction about whether this divination
24:08is auspicious or it's actually against the will
24:12of the ancestral spirits.
24:14So they should not be carrying the activity they were asking for.
24:20So the diviners are asking for the favor
24:23of the ancestral spirits?
24:24Yes.
24:25Yes, so basically, it's their special way to communicate
24:29with their ancestors.
24:32The ancestors are the key people in their mental universe.
24:36Yes.
24:37Fantastic.
24:38Basically, in every aspect of the society, including, for instance,
24:41the harvest, this one is an event about praying for rain.
24:45Rain and water would be a big part of their concerns.
24:50Yes, absolutely.
24:51Living in the yellow river plain, I suppose.
24:52Yes, yes, yes.
24:53For agricultural society, that's absolutely crucial.
24:57And unlike the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt or the cuneiform of Babylonia,
25:04the archaeologists had no need of a key to decipher them,
25:08for they could see at once that the signs on the oracle bones
25:11were the direct ancestors of today's Chinese writing.
25:15That's the character for rain, I mean, in modern language.
25:23And in all of the bones, it's like this, with three drops.
25:28So essentially, it's the same idea, fundamentally.
25:31This rain character is characterised by these rain drops.
25:35Yeah, yeah.
25:37Out of these prehistoric pictographs came the modern Chinese script,
25:42with its tens of thousands of suns.
25:48So through their script, the Chinese people are uniquely connected
25:52to their deep past and its ways of thinking,
25:56more so than any other culture on Earth.
25:58There seem to be, is this fanciful?
26:08There seem to be themes that we trace all the way through Chinese history.
26:14The reverence for the ancestors, the divination,
26:18the control of writing, and writing as a source of power.
26:23Is that fair? Is that fair?
26:24Yes, so I think, I agree, I think that sort of communication
26:28or interaction between the ancestral spirits
26:31and the acquisition of social power,
26:34it is indeed a recurrent theme throughout Chinese history.
26:40So power came from the ancestors.
26:44In the oracle bones, there's a sacred place.
26:48Hello.
26:49It has the same name as the dynasty, Shang.
26:52Well, this is not like the shopping malls of Shanghai, that's for sure.
26:56And the archaeologists now turned to a little town in Henan
26:59with a tantalising name, Shangqiu,
27:03the mound or ruins of Shang.
27:07We're now inside the Ming dynasty city.
27:09This was built in 1511, the previous one destroyed by floods.
27:13Lots more underneath it, of course.
27:15What's fascinating is, it's still called Shangqiu,
27:20the ruins of Shang.
27:23So was this the ancestral place of China's first great dynasty?
27:28Good system.
27:31That question has intrigued Chinese archaeologists
27:35since their first explorations here in the 1930s.
27:38But the Bronze Age layers here are 30 feet deep in Yellow River silt.
27:50Recently, though, geophysical surveys and test cores
27:54have detected the outline of a much earlier city underneath the town.
27:58And the clues to what it was were in the oracle bones found at Anyang.
28:04In 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,
28:17thousand 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,
28:37while 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 to do special rituals
29:05at the city called Shang, and that was here.
29:09It's 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 still survive here
29:25at a mysterious temple at the edge of town.
29:31The Mound of Shang, it's a great artificial hill.
29:35The 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
30:17are clues to early Chinese beliefs about society and the cosmos.
30:22Divination, ritual and writing were the basis of state power.
30:29For their sacred ceremonies,
30:34they cast beautiful bronzes to hold food and wine offerings
30:38to the ancestral spirits which were consumed at the royal feasts.
30:44Some of them bear the symbols of the different lineages
30:47of the royal and noble families.
30:49Like the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians,
30:57the Shang practised human sacrifice.
31:01The oracle bones list the victims.
31:04They were captives from the subject peoples the Shang ruled,
31:09killed as offerings to the powers of nature.
31:11As the Shang diviners asked the ancestors in heaven for guidance.
31:17Anxiously watching the stars for omens of auspiciousness
31:23and omens of disaster.
31:25To them, time, as revealed in the movements of the stars and planets,
31:38was a truly portentous dimension,
31:42full of danger as well as auspiciousness,
31:45and especially for the rulers for they knew that in time
31:50the planets would reveal heaven's judgment on their earthly rule.
31:57That brings us to one of the key ideas in early Chinese thought,
32:01the 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
32:22as a sacrifice in time of drought.
32:25But legend said the last Shang king was so depraved and cruel
32:35that heaven withdrew its mandate.
32:38And it gave a sign.
32:40Five planets came together in the rarest of conjunctions.
32:48As this happens only once every 516 years,
32:52we can pin down the very day.
32:54So you can follow any single planet?
32:57Yes.
32:58Wonderful.
33:02We asked the Beijing Planetarium to work out the exact date of the omen
33:07and to show us the night sky at that moment.
33:11So it's what historians always want to do is actually go back in time.
33:15Mr Liu can do it for us.
33:17He can actually take us back to late May, 1058 BC on his computer system,
33:24which is 1059 BC on historians' calculations.
33:32This time, this place, the sky, you can see.
33:38The tribes who lived under the Shang tyranny saw the sign
33:42and made an alliance under a man known for his virtue,
33:46King Wen of the Zhou.
33:49This 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,
34:07a 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 Zhou should overthrow the king of the Shan
34:33and take the kingdom.
34:37In the final battle, the wicked Shang king saw his subjects had turned against him.
34:52So he burned his palace with his treasures and his concubines,
34:56put on his jade suit and walked into the fire.
35:00And so the ancestors passed the mandate to the king of the Zhou,
35:09and he laid down the pattern of rule for future ages.
35:13Rulers 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.
35:31China'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.
35:51The sacred sacred moon of the dance poder is also a king.
35:56In the words of the throne, the king of the Zhou is an unkind,
36:00the same god and the same kind.
36:03It was used for the reasons of the Chinese were sold in Rome.
36:06It was a long-due by theaggiorn too.
36:08This was called the ancient holy faith,
36:11And these very ancient customs and beliefs are still held in affection and practiced
36:35by the ordinary Chinese people today.
36:41In later times, the Zhou came to be seen as model rulers, fulfilling Heaven's mandate.
37:10But China's fate throughout its history has been to fragment in times of crisis.
37:22Eventually, Zhou power disintegrated and the heartland of China descended into chaos.
37:34Across the Middleland, feuding kings and warlords fought for supremacy.
37:46Surrounded by their armies, even in death.
37:50Amazing sight, isn't it?
38:02This is one of more than a dozen chariot burial pits that have been uncovered in the middle of Luoyang in the last few years.
38:10This was excavated in 2003 during the modern building boom.
38:14There's 18 chariots and their horses here, associated with the tombs of the kings of the Eastern Zhou.
38:24It's the world of Achilles and Hector in more than just the military hardware.
38:30Politically, just like Agamemnon, the kings here in the central plain of China depended on the cooperation of vassal states.
38:40Smaller kingdoms, sometimes more than a hundred of them.
38:44But these were rivals fighting each other, just like the Greek heroes sacking cities and 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 grows about the nature of kingship.
39:04The function of states, duties, obligation and morality.
39:10Out of this begins the first golden age of Chinese philosophy.
39:18Right across the old world in the 6th century BC, thinkers and rulers were debating these ideas.
39:27A new age of human thought had dawned, what we call the Axis Age.
39:35The Greek philosophers, the Old Testament prophets, the Buddha in India,
39:40all of them were wrestling with ideas about conscience and social justice at human autonomy.
39:51How can a king be just in violent times?
39:54What is law?
39:56And what is virtue?
39:57Here in China, it was said a hundred schools bloomed.
40:09And the most famous thinker came from an obscure state in eastern China.
40:13He was descended from a family of Shang diviners, oracle bone crackers.
40:22And his obsession was not the inner life, but how we act in the public world.
40:28Small town China.
40:30But what a small town.
40:31Because this place, Chu Fu, has nearly 3,000 years of continuity, life on this spot.
40:40And it gave birth to one of the most influential figures in the history of the world.
40:45Confucius.
40:46Confucius.
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, the state of Lu, whose capital was Chu Fu.
41:11Confucius rose eventually to a quite high ministerial job, in which he played a crucial role brokering a peace deal between three feuding clans,
41:30and persuading them to demolish their fortifications and acknowledge the duke here as their lord.
41:35And that kind of experience gave him the idea of his mission, which was nothing less than to restore civilization by teaching rulers to be virtuous.
41:49Confucius had a very clear vision.
41:52There is definitely this sense of passion in him that he wants to be recognized.
41:57He wants to contribute to the social order of society, and he wants to make sure that ritual practices are followed very closely.
42:10Confucius was very keen on the idea of humaneness or benevolence, and that the ruler set a direct example for the people to follow.
42:19There is 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.
42:34So it is said that when the wind blows, the grass naturally bends.
42:38Like 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, because that's what it really is.
42:57It'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.
43:14That's Confucius's little blue book.
43:1718?
43:1918, 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, 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.
43:55And with that idea it's implied that they'll have moral progress as well.
44:03It's a very old idea in the story of China that the basis of all government is not law, but established morality.
44:11And the key end to preserve the state.
44:17In the West we tend to think of Confucius as an arch conservative, a bit pious, a bit pompous.
44:29But without virtue he thought any rule is morally bankrupt and should be resisted, even until death.
44:39He travelled the roads of China like some intellectual troubleshooter trying to sell China's local rulers his New Deal.
44:49At his tomb I met a group of Confucian teachers from Korea.
45:00These gentlemen are not priests, they're scholars.
45:03They're scholars.
45:04And 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.
45:17An act of reverence for the old master.
45:21Bowing before his tombstone, which was smashed to pieces by the communist red guards only 50 years ago, but is now restored.
45:31I agree with you since they were here since now for the last month.
45:35I'm grateful for my .
45:44Very good question.
45:46So we are interested in the history of China.
45:48And Confucius is so important that that is why we are here.
45:52I would like to see a lot of people in the world.
45:56I've lived a lot of people in the world.
46:01I've lived a lot of people in the world.
46:05Confucius is covering all of the world's love.
46:10She's spread all over the world, not just individual.
46:15Love, benevolence, courtesy, good manners.
46:19These are the way society works, when society works well.
46:23Yeah, yeah, yeah.
46:24Confucius' idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
46:28Confucius was condemned during the Communist Revolution
46:31as 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.
46:54.
47:01Confucius was not an innovator.
47:19He was the distiller, the crystallizer of an already ancient tradition.
47:25The idea of the virtuous ruler, of filial piety, of ritual and ceremony
47:32is the glue that bound society together.
47:35And the overruling power of education.
47:39Those are the values that still underlie Chinese values today.
47:44And South Asian values, from Korea and Japan all the way down to Vietnam.
47:50What a legacy.
48:02But the truth is, in his own lifetime, Confucius was a complete failure.
48:06No ruler bought into his manifesto for change.
48:09After his death in 469 BC,
48:12the warring states fought each other for two more centuries,
48:17till the fall of the last of the Joe.
48:24And when their end came,
48:26no-one was listening to arguments about morality,
48:29but only the claims of violence and war.
48:34.
48:41And one of those warring states was the Qin.
48:44Through military conquest,
48:46they swallowed up the Zhou
48:48and the other states of the Yellow River Plain.
48:51.
48:56And in 221 BC,
48:58they proclaimed their leader,
49:00the first emperor of all China.
49:03.
49:08The first emperor imposed his own revolutionary political system on the conquered lands,
49:27dispossessing the old aristocracies,
49:31creating an enormous captive labor force to build his new state.
49:36The Qin.
49:38That's the source of the name China,
49:40used today by the outside world,
49:43although not by the Chinese themselves.
49:46.
49:50Qin Shi Huangdi built the first Great Wall.
49:57He made a new road system linking the 36 military provinces.
50:02For tax and commerce, the weights and measures were standardised.
50:06There was to be a uniform coinage.
50:12And the Chinese script itself was simplified,
50:14so the emperor's will could be conveyed right down to the local magistrates,
50:19who administered a population of more than 30 million people.
50:24almost a third of the world.
50:37And the key to the Qin emperor's power was the army.
50:44It was the image of the empire.
50:47There was no discipline, obedience, hierarchy.
50:53With their mass-produced bronze weapons and mechanical crossbows,
50:58there'd be nothing like this in the whole of history.
51:04Infantry, you know, archers and cavalry, so, and charioteers, you know.
51:10So that's really the battle formation of the Qin dynasty.
51:14So, you know, how Qin, the first emperor, conquered the other states,
51:19used his military troops.
51:22Frightening, actually.
51:23Yeah.
51:24You're faced with them like this, isn't it?
51:26One of the most amazing discoveries ever, isn't it, really?
51:29Yeah.
51:30And more recently, you've discovered pits not with warriors
51:33but with other people attached to the court.
51:37We found tarikata acrobats, you know, tarikata musicians,
51:42and actually bronze birds, bronze chariots.
51:46All 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.
52:02The more the archaeologists look, the more they find.
52:07I think we are very similar to the doctor.
52:13Only different is our patient is different.
52:18Paranoid to the end, the emperor took no chances.
52:21Magically protected by his army, even in the afterlife.
52:26Do we know what rank he was in the army?
52:30No, it's a normal, normal soldier.
52:33You can tell that by the headdress and the armor?
52:35The headdress depends on his armor and depends on his troops.
52:43Because the general has more detail, more stress.
52:47Fresh clothes.
52:48Yeah.
52:53More...
52:54Yeah.
52:55More...
52:56A stern...
52:57A stern look of command, isn't he?
52:59We've all become so familiar with the images of the terracotta army.
53:09So familiar, perhaps, that it's easy to forget their significance in the history of China and of the world.
53:15How this vast and diverse area became one state, that's one of the great themes of our story.
53:27As we've already seen, it began a long time before with the Xia and the Shang dynasties.
53:33But without the Qin emperor, whose army is arrayed before us now, it might never have happened.
53:41The 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.
54:00His sons, even briefer, their hated regime overthrown by a rebellion led by the peasant Liu Bang,
54:08who founded the dynasty after whom the Chinese still name themselves today, the Han.
54:15The German
54:29Three
54:32��가
54:37Three
54:40Four
54:42It was a dream of a monster, a monster with a monster.
54:47There was a monster in a monster.
54:54It was a dream of a monster.
54:59After four years of the first time,
55:02he became the king of the king,
55:04and became the king of the king of the king.
55:12And for all the wars and revolutions,
55:28the triumphs and tragedies that would follow,
55:31the idea will never be lost that China,
55:34a land of so many peoples and cultures,
55:37is a single state and a single civilisation.
55:42Still today, the Chinese call themselves Han.
55:46They speak of our Han culture and Han speech,
55:51as if one great tribe.
55:54A tribe with many stories,
55:57but one great story, China itself.
56:01And at the very heart of the story,
56:06the link between the state and the family and the ancestors.
56:12Over the next 2,000 years,
56:15these values will run under the surface of the great river of Chinese history.
56:20often tested, sometimes seemingly broken,
56:25but still passed on across even the tyrannies and cruelties of the 20th century.
56:35At the temple of Nuwa, the mother goddess of the Chinese people,
56:39the pilgrims are gathering again to give thanks to the ancestors.
56:51This prayer ceremony was last done 100 years ago at the end of the empire.
56:56Now the rituals are brought back to life for today's people,
57:00recreated with words from sacred books over 2,000 years old.
57:05It's a symbol of today's China.
57:08After the ravages of the 20th century,
57:11the Chinese people's belief in their history as a source of strength,
57:16not weakness, has returned.
57:19The ideas that nourished their identity for so long
57:22handed down now into an ever more confident and expansive Chinese future.
57:30With a new text.
57:32May our country's great traditions be passed down once more,
57:36from generation to generation.
57:41When we are soort hol ganges,
57:48and it is truly not hurting any people over the rebirth of this new disease.
58:03.
58:07So that's the first part of this great adventure, the story of China.
58:13And this is just the beginning.
58:16In the next chapter of the story, China goes out to the world
58:20in one of the greatest epochs in world civilisation, the Tang Dynasty.
58:32So you can see that next week at the same time here on BBC Two.
58:36And next, with all her guests pushing the limits of human endurance,
58:41it's The Clare Balding Show.
Recommended
1:13
|
Up next
58:57
14:06
40:38
1:35
1:54
3:56
3:56
3:00
58:57
59:10