Notes

China was the last of the great civilizations to develop independently in the old world over a thousand years
after the first in Iraq and there's was a vision of life unique
to itself
the Chinese conception of civilization differed completely from that of the
West for then its goal was a moral order on earth sustained by virtue ritual and
reverence for ancestors these ancient
ideas permeated all aspects of Chinese life even the cataclysms of our own time
from the Communist revolution down to the crushing of the democracy movement here in Tiananmen Square in 1989 have
been played out against these deeper forces which have shaped China for thousands of years
this is a search for the roots of Chinese history
and our search begins in the old lanes here near the temple of heaven in Beijing
tucked away in the alleys here is the oldest pharmacy in Beijing founded in 1663
it's enough simply Beijing storming down from yeah is enough sir famous guys and
now is the Beijing China in Chinese medicine as in all
traditional Chinese culture the basic idea is the search for harmony on earth
ultimately this was the goal of civilization itself and to reach it inner and outer lives must be in
Congress yin and yang as they say female and male darkened life this elemental
balance underlies all Chinese thought whether in science or philosophy in food
or as here in medicine the discovery of
the origins of Chinese history happened by a strange chance in 1899 a Chinese
scholar was quite well known here in Peking Wang Yi Jung was suffering from malaria
he had prescriptions for it made up in his local pharmacy it could even have been this one at the time a friend of
his was staying with him as a houseguest and he saw the prescriptions being made up one of the ingredients was a recipe
which had been used by Chinese doctors for hundreds of years ground-up old bones known as dragon
bones but to their astonishment when the two men looked at the bones they saw
that on them was a strange arcade form of writing some of whose characters were
the same as those used in modern Chinese writing and though this recipe had been
used for hundreds of years this was the first time it had come to the attention of scholars the two men determined to
find out where the bones had come from they combed the apothecary shops in this part of Peking and eventually they came
up with their answer the bones had been dug up near a dusty little town in central China in the plain of the Yellow
River a town called an yang
you
kwang-ho the yellow river coming down from Mongolia bearing its rich yellow
silt to the Yellow Sea destroyer of cities killer of millions even in our
own century Chinese civilization first arose on its banks but unlike the
civilizations of the West the source of political power did not lie in control of nature but in control of the past
there's nothing to see a tan yang today the site of the palaces and tombs where the dragon bones were found has been
plowed over Oh hmm but here were the
ruins of yin the last city of the ill-fated Shang Dynasty burned down in
1100 BC and here was the answer to the
riddle of the dragon burns the chemists
in Beijing had been grinding up the ritual archive of the Shang Kings these
were oracle bones used by royal diviners to communicate with the ancestral spirits in these strange marks lay the
beginnings of the II Ching the great Chinese book of wisdom
it was through the magic power of writing that the ancestral spirits could be raised and the ancient Chinese word
for these symbols when writing would become the word for civilization itself
in the beginning was not the city but the word
the second key finder Danyang was the bronzers they were used for sacrifices
and ritual meals their inscriptions tell of the worship of ancestors and lineage basic preoccupations of the Chinese till
today it was the possession of these things
the performance of the correct rituals the monopoly of bronze and writing which gave the rules access to the wisdom of
the ancestors this was the basis of political power
and only with this could the ruler possess the greatest of all gifts
a gift to be kept only so long as he was just and cared for the people the
Mandate of Heaven a fresh grave in the cemetery of the
Kong family in Chu foo a monument to the
most influential figure in Chinese history kung-fu sir Confucius
it was Confucius who transformed the magic of the Bronze Age into the conception of the state as a moral order
sustained by virtue and ritual Confucius
lived in that astonishing axis age when the Buddha was alive and Pythagoras and
the Greek philosophers the Jewish prophets not a religious leader but the coda fire of China's traditions in
history poetry and ritual his teachings were the ideal of Chinese government for
2,000 years at the center of Confucius
message was a very simple and original idea he wasn't concerned with God or the afterlife or heaven I don't know
anything about those things he said his concern was that of every government today on earth how do you build a just
and stable society here and his answer was this goodness was the essential
quality needed to keep society together people are not born good they need to be taught goodness rulers and ruled but it
was essential that the rulers were taught goodness spiritual and intellectual because if rulers rule with
unjust harshness and civility severity meeting out punishments with regimentation then people lose their
faith in the law they lose their respect for themselves they have no sense of shame but if people are taught goodness
then they have all those qualities and they regulate themselves Confucius vision then was of a moral
society bound together by mutual respect and Trust and though he was an aristocrat it was an anti-authoritarian
idea because the ideology would rest with the scholars not with the emperors who themselves had to obey that golden
mean otherwise they risked for the Mandate of Heaven as even today's rulers of China have found out
in the last few years the rulers of China have revived some of the old Confucian traditions at least in that
art word form performance of these rituals ceased after the communist revolution these are actors and this
ceremony in Confucius hometown is for tourists they're largely foreign Chinese
tourists from Taiwan Hong Kong and Singapore rediscovering roots severed
temporarily it would not seem in 1949
it's a vision of a splendid past which the rulers of China in our time attempted to do away with in the belief
that new traditions could replace them but just when we think we've shaken it
off the past has an uncanny habit of coming back to restate its old claims on
our loyalties
the ancient Chinese believed that earth nature and the cosmos were part of a
harmonious natural order the DAO or path
the search for the right path Taoism is the second great stream of Chinese
thought a natural mysticism to set beside the practical common-sense of Confucius not an alternative but the
other half of a necessary balance in life
the pilgrim path up the sacred mountain Tyshawn is a symbol for that search for
the DAR it's been walked for thousands of years by Chinese people rich and poor from the first emperor to Chairman Mao
and today tourists and pilgrims are coming again for so long
Western culture has seen nature in terms of control and exploitation but for the
Chinese it is the source of all harmony and balance they thought it was our duty as human beings through art religion or
science to understand the harmony not to abuse it or needlessly to change it but
to go with the force of nature the yin and yang as they would say the little
Taoist temple on the top of Tai Shan dedicated to the goddess of the mountain was wrecked in the Cultural Revolution
it's not lived in again not by actors but by real Taoist monks and nuns who
came back in 1985 committing themselves to the old way in the end said the
taoist sage Lao Tzu all creatures return to their distinctive roots that is
called returning to one's destiny these
people are tourists from Taiwan their leader is a spirit medium well known on
TV in Taipei it's the kind of ceremony you can see in backstreet's ancestor
temples in the urban jungles of Singapore and Hong Kong now they're
returning to communicate with the older ancestors
on the summit of tyshaun the pilgrims wait for the first glimpse of the dawn
it was up here the chairman ma proclaimed the East is red but that was
before his Great Leap Forward turned the dawn yellow with pollution the first
emperor surveyed his kingdom from here as the Sun rose and announced now i've united the whole world confucius said
simply now i realize how small the world is
the Silk Route in the Gobi Desert in the Far West of China the most inhospitable
landscape in the world across this
desert from the second century AD came the ideas Goods and people which ushered in China's first internationally age
till this time Chinese civilization had developed in isolation uniquely itself
neither wanting or needing anything from the outside world
but now contacts opened up with Central Asia Persia even Rome but especially
with India for what the Chinese wanted was not material riches but spiritual
enlightenment the wisdom of the Buddha
Oh
the Chinese never developed perhaps never needed an elaborate theology of their own
indeed the Western idea of a personal God is utterly foreign to them but
Buddhism with its atheistic and Democratic message its deep care for ritual was to have the greatest appeal
of all the foreign religions which took root here Buddhism was the third great
stream making up the current of Chinese civilization along with Confucian wisdom
and Taoist mysticism and the later Chinese came to believe that these three
philosophies contained the essential ideas of civilization and without any one of them
life would be unbalanced but however sophisticated and technologically
advanced the society might become its people could only be fulfilled through inner enlightenment and the
contemplation of eternity
in the Tang Dynasty Chinese scholars went on great missionary journeys to
India to bring back authentic texts and relics of the Buddha and in this little
temple in a secluded valley outside Seon I kept the ashes of the most famous of those missionaries Swan son some of the
texts he brought back from India in the 7th century are still here
oh my goodness what does it made out of passionate
young shouldn't saw them into the utamu bad bush but bin laden shreya thought so
made of pound choosing in England Paulie positive yes I'm the script this script
is not Sanskrit visit what is the language treasure tink I teach a movement about the Asian
Pelle this Asian see does he never have how many books son son actually brought
back to China from India did I need a dog job she loved ashes of mingled a blood or Josh go topper sure
swan song brought 650 books back to see on for translation rucksack on his back
a lamp to light his way it's rare in history that we can pinpoint the very moment when one great civilization goes
out to learn from another
in the 8th century AD all roads in Asia led to sear off China as it was there
now it was the greatest city in the world rivaled only by Baghdad and
Constantinople its vast square laid out like a chessboard
a huge ritual enclosure Shangaan central boulevard was four miles long and twice
as wide as today's avenue which leads to the city's Bell top
this was the first time that foreigners had entered China in any numbers and as often in later days they were confined
to their own area at night well away from the center of park over in the
Western quarter of the city though you in the foreigners nclude you could find an anarchic vitality and a
sophistication and a cultural mix that impressed all visitors to Chung on here
there were Muslims Christians and Jews from Syria and Iraq Zoroastrianism Manicheans from Iran and
Central Asia they were Persian conjurer's Turkish moneylenders and Hindu fakers in the
cafes there was Central Asian music Asian food as there still is today and
also entertainment from singing and dancing girls from Persia and even further afield some of them it was said
with blonde hair and blue eyes small wonder then that as a writer of the time
said you could miss spend your youth in cities like this and end up with nothing but the reputation of a wanderer in the
blue houses
in Chinese eyes the Tang Dynasty was above all the most golden of the many golden ages of their poetry an art whose
roots go back to the shamanistic magic of the bronze age
for the Chinese indeed composing poetry is one of the essential ingredients of
civilization but if we could choose a single career to symbolize this first
international era of Chinese culture then it would be perhaps the great poet Li Bai or Li Po as we know him in the
West Li Po was the product of the Silk Road he was born not in China but out in Central Asia and spoke one of the
Turkish languages he spent his early years as a wandering soldier of fortune before he found his opportunities here
in the greatest city on earth he was a magnetic personality irascible
self-taught flashing eyes a fearsome voice and a heaven-sent Talent he was a
prodigious drinker too the story goes that he died falling drunk into a river
trying to catch it the reflection of the moon but Li Po wandered through the music halls and the cabarets and
restaurants of Shanghai and the other cities of China is ear tuned not only to classical poetry but to folk songs and
ballads and the latest pop music coming part out of Central Asia on the caravan
trails he was always an outsider he refused pointedly to sit the Confucian
examinations preferring to do it as he would have put it his way or was an
outsider but still today among the Chinese people along with his friend du feu their best loved and their best
known poet beyond the Vermilion gates
and the smell of wine and flesh wrote du feu people are freezing and starving to
death in thousands of villages they harvest
only weeds while the women do the plowing the people of China can face any test if only their leaders treat them
humanely
the Tang Dynasty ended in social upheaval and revolution like many in Chinese history but it was followed by
one even greater 400 miles from Xian eastwards down the
Yellow River lies Kaifeng
Oh in the 11th century AD kaifeng was the
capital of what is regarded as the peak of Chinese civilization the Song Dynasty a golden age unsurpassed in world
history
the song achievement was right across the board from industry and technology to art literature poetry history and it
makes it one of the great cultural epochs of the world and with the existence of printing they could disseminate their ideals right across
eastern Asia there was another characteristic to that time and that was
of an intense inward cultivation of inward development they reshaped the old
ideals of Confucian philosophy of self-development and secular piety harness them to an examination system
which ensured that only the best could aspire to positions of power and they made that the root of their state
culture indeed that philosophy would dominate eastern Asia for the next millennium and is the cultural basis of
the phenomenal success of countries like Japan and Korea in modern times for they are still essentially Confucian
here in kaifeng as everywhere in today's China 40 years of communist rule have
not severed these deeper beliefs reverence for ancestors filial piety
Confucian virtues are all coming back into the open now that freedom of worship is once more guaranteed
it's the autumn festival tonight in Kaifeng and on the streets the Old Market and restaurant culture of the
city is resurgent here in kaifeng in the 11th century are the origins of another
of China's great gifts to humanity it's cooking the Chinese was the world's
first great cuisine long before the French in song times vast restaurants
here like the humane harmony diner it was said turned night into day like it's
medicine Chinese cooking is based on ancient theories of harmony and balance on the five elements the five tastes yin
and yang the old themes of Chinese culture
and here today in Kaifeng you can still find the oldest restaurant in the world Mar you Ching's bucket chicken house
founded in 1153 tell that maxims of
Paris
a cuisine is a whole way of seeing the
world it's one of the simplest and most direct ways in which people can enjoy life a mark of civilization and the
Chinese excelled in it as they still do
in the 13th century when European visitors came in numbers to China the
first time they were still open marked at what they saw
sailing up the Grand Canal here in Suzhou the Venetian Marco Polo had no
doubt that this was the greatest civilization in the world
I tell you he said in all truth the riches and resources it's all on such a
stupendous scale you wouldn't believe it unless you saw it if the Chinese were
warlike they could conquer the rest of the world thank goodness they're not
at this time agricultural and commercial revolutions led to a population boom
which saw China become the most populous country on earth as it still is today
but the country was self-sufficient and could feed all its people as the Arab
traveller eben a Battuta said theirs was incomparably the highest standard of living in the world
there comes a point in the life of any civilization when the basic necessities
of life for the people have been satisfied food shelter freedom from violence
then it can aspire to extend its higher ideas to more and more of its people
the key conception of Chinese civilization had always been the search for hum and all his manifestations were
part of that search from patterns of the bronze caster and
the painter the porcelain maker to the designs of the silk Weaver
you by cultivating such odds the noble
person could realize the universal harmony which Confucian wisdom sort
for the Chinese this was the supreme mission of civilization
the path to such wisdom still began with the magic of writing
from its beginnings as a tool of divination writing remained the means of access to the wisdom of the ancestors
the symbol for writing the sign called when had begun by signifying the
characters on the oracle burns
through time its meanings deepened and widened to embrace writing culture
refinement elegance till writing came to mean civilization itself it was nothing
less than an expression of the way the Chinese saw the world
but now the way China saw the world began to change
from this vast bay at trend oh in south china now silted up but then the busiest
port in the world admiral jang her embarked on great voyages of exploration in the 15th
century which could have changed the course of history
Jeng her sailed his fleets to the great South Indian harbour of Cochin the
meeting place of east and west
here he would have seen the Chinese fishing nets imported in mongrel times for Indian merchants have long traded
with China from here exchanging pepper and spices for porcelain and silk
from Cochin jang-ho explored East Africa and visited the Persian Gulf and Mecca
itself he could have discovered the worst and
he had the inclination
it would be nearly a century before Vasco de Gama sailed into this same heart not as a bearer of peace but a
harbinger of war and conquest
then suddenly the imperial bureaucrats banned any further voyages despite their rich commercial potential
the ships were broken up their logbooks destroyed and now only a few stone
inscriptions on a windswept hillside remain to speak of one of the great mysteries of history Western thinkers
have always taken a brutally simple line on the stopping of Cheng hos explorations for them it would be like
calling a halt to manned space exploration on the eve of the first moon landing it's proof that the Chinese are
backward-looking and ignorant had no desire for new knowledge and were run by load of hidebound bureaucrats proof too
that the West was the fount of Science and Technology and progress and had a monopoly on the spirit of enterprise but
as always in history there are many ways of looking at the same question after all it was the Chinese who were the
great technological innovators so perhaps it's really a question of how different civilizations think you should
use technology and perhaps then the Chinese saw quite sensibly on the face
of it that their true interests lay here inside their own borders cultivating
their soil cultivating the inner life searching for the harmony that had always been the goal of their
civilization and that it was the West on the other hand that had a compulsive desire to change a compulsive need to
invade other people's space both moral and physical and a refusal to accept
limits on its own since the 18th century it's been customary to talk about the
East needing to catch up with the West these days that's obviously happening all around us materially if it's not
happened already but it takes two to make a dialogue and perhaps the West
still has some catching up to do perhaps the West still has to learn from the
East a way of cultivating its inner space of accepting limits on desires and
space in an increasingly finite world at the beginning of this modern dialogue
between the East and the West the French philosopher Pascal said that the trouble with Western man was this he did not
know how to be content in an empty room
the banning of the Ming voyages was part of a deeper introspection in Chinese culture now behind a new Great Wall to
keep out the barbarians the Chinese built a new Capitol far to the north beijing the north city
here at the altar of heaven the emperor continued to perform the rituals of the bronze age in the belief that the world
would never change
the longest and richest intellectual tradition in the world now increasingly turned in on itself and here in the
National Library in Beijing is the most staggering proof both of that greatness and of its progressive desiccation
this is the greatest literary enterprise of all time an encyclopedia running to
seventy nine thousand handwritten volumes still in its original shelves and boxes labeled in green red blue and
gray according to the Imperial cataloging system of spring summer autumn and winter four classics history
philosophy and literature a testimony to
the idea that all knowledge past present and future could be contained in a single room but all this time
far away in barbarian Europe bacon Newton Descartes had been concerning
themselves not with how to perfect the past how to control the future and now
some Chinese intellectuals began to plead for a more open approach to knowledge among them an obscure young
historian called Chang su a Chang it was Chang Seward Chang on the very eve of
the most momentous upheaval in Chinese history since the time of the Qin emperor in other words the clash with
the West and all that that would engender it was he who tempted to reappraise the way that the Chinese had
seen history since the very beginnings of the Confucian tradition for him
history was an all-embracing concept which would include all of this the
entire Canon of Chinese literature the Confucian texts he said were all history
Confucius may be a true guide to life but he is also simply a historical text
and the time is past when history should be merely minut textual analysis and
compilation by squads of scholars borrowing away on a rigid and old-fashioned curriculum history should
be dynamic and meaningful some have seen him as a precursor of the revolution
prophet of democracy an enemy of feudalism that's no doubt exaggerated
but in 1799 two years before his death he wrote a prophetic letter about what
he saw as the inevitable decline of the ching dynasty and the worrying prospects ahead this
was a time he said when history should no longer concern itself merely with the past but should use the past to reform
the present and indeed to look into the future and historians greatest gifts he
said were not just knowledge but inspiration and insight and a historians
inspiration he thought was just like the each in the Book of Changes in that it
enabled him to look into the future at the moment of his death
China was about to come face to face with another culture whose view of history was diametrically opposed to
that of the Chinese tradition the Europeans were their judeo-christian heritage believed that history was
purposive that it was leading towards an appointed end and that they would be the
winners the first Chinese descriptions
of we Westerners are not flattering these barbarians have a grim look untidy
hair and unpleasant smell they have no rituals worthy of the name
they're liars and a rather arrogant they conquer countries by fraud and force
ingratiating themselves in a friendly way before they oppressed the natives at
the heart of their conduct is violence
by the 18th century the coasts of the South China Sea were frequented by the Spanish the Dutch Portuguese English and
later Americans all bearing Chinese inventions gunpowder the stern rudder
the magnetic compass paper maps coming not just to sell but to impose their
goods their ideas their religion their will
they soon set up trading colonies lording it from grand mansions paid for
by the illicit trade in goods like opium
in the tale of colonial infamy this is one of the least known episodes in the West but it culminated in the central
event of 19th century Chinese history the opium war
the point of the opium trade simply was to sell opium to China but in practice
that meant getting as many Chinese people addicted to the drug as possible but opium was prohibited in China and
had an almost negligible local consumption so it had to be sold illicitly in bulk from the one permitted
trading post on the mainland Canton and from offshore bases like this one the
indispensable link in this setup was India there the British imperial
possessions had grown in the last decades of the 18th century and as the British themselves produced nothing
which the Chinese wish to buy it was in India that the opium and to a lesser extent the cotton could be grown that
could be traded in for the luxuries that the British desired and especially tea which by then had become a national
obsession and so an infernal triangle was set up between Britain China and
India which parallels the tragic triangle of the previous century between
Africa the Caribbean and Europe the slave trade and this was no small business incredible as it may sound in
the early 19th century opium was the biggest single trade anywhere it is as
if today the Columbian drug barons possessed such a powerful fleet but they
were able to sail into San Francisco Bay and compel a large portion of the population of the United States to
become addicted to heroin and cocaine and to wipe out the US fleet of it intervene in what Gladstone called the
most disreputable war ever fought by the British the Chinese fleets hopelessly outgunned and outdated were smashed to
pieces defeated by the very technology which
they had invented but let's stand still for the Chinese defeat was a shattering
revelation forced now to watch impotent as the western barbarians their cultural
inferiors now began to carve up the Middle Kingdom into colonies with the same greedy relish that they had
scrambled for Africa and dismembered India
unable to cope with the pressure of the outside world the Chinese government are collapsed
Chinese people were treated like animals in their own land by the Western imperialists harnessed Apolo traps for
sport band along with dogs in their own public parks
the great time of revolution had arrived as the eaching the Book of Changes
States and the great man was at hand in whom all belief would reside
in 1949 my land the communists took power on a tide of emotion and optimism
after years of civil war famine and foreign rule
but in their haste to erase the past they killed millions by ill-judged reforms and tyrannical violence and this
in the name of a Western ideology and a Western conception of history
today the Chinese people are living through a time of great opportunity
still without political power that poise nonetheless to become an economic giant
they could regain their place as the greatest of all civilizations but when
their rulers crushed the democracy movement here in Tiananmen Square in 1989 they showed the old fear of
authoritarians throughout history the fear of the past to discredit the
present on the streets at night the
Chinese people can listen once more to the old music band under Mars dictatorship
in the each in the ancient Chinese book of divination there is a hexagram entitled revolution in a revolution it
says two mistakes must be avoided you must not move with excessive haste nor
use excessive ruthlessness against the people what is done must correspond to a
higher truth a revolution not founded on inner truth will come to grief for in
the end the people will support only what they feel in their hearts to be just this is the meaning of the Mandate
of Heaven