Episode 1 Art of China

A country the size of a continent. Population 1.3 billion and counting.

How to understand such a place and the energies that have shaped it?

There's no better way than to explore the art of China.

For 4,000 years it's expressed the spirit of the Chinese people -

their struggles and their hopes.

Red mists of revolution and long years of brutal tyranny.

Splendours and marvels of the imperial court.

The spiritual serenity of the Chinese landscape,

ancient refuge of poets and painters.

The art of ancient China has revealed the country's very origins,

thanks to a century of astonishing archaeological discoveries,

which have revealed some of the most compelling images

ever shaped by human hands.

The story begins here, in a remote corner

of Sichuan province, where, in 1986,

a group of workers, digging in this very network of fields,

made a truly startling discovery.

These are the rural suburbs of Guanghan city,

deep in the plains of the vast Sichuan Basin.

Encircled by mountains,

throughout history this land was barely accessible.

The region was known to have been the home of a primitive

and mysterious people called the Shu, or the people of the eye,

as they were tantalisingly described in early chronicles.

But why they were called that, no-one knew,

until a discovery was made

by workers in the grounds of a brick factory.

TOOL SCRAPES

They stumbled upon two pits containing the broken pieces

of hundreds of bronze, jade and gold artefacts.

What they had discovered

were the treasures of a lost and ancient city called Sanxingdui.

It took the archaeologists all of eight years to piece together

the fragments of their remarkable find.

When they had finished, what they revealed was this.

A whole series of images from ancient China, over 3,000 years,

the like of which had never been seen before.

Grotesque masks, enormous,

made of cast bronze with protruding eyes

and enigmatic smiles on their faces.

And that was just the beginning.

Nearly 2,000 objects were recovered,

revealing the Shu's surprising mastery

of bronze-working technology and their strong sense of the uncanny.

Huge faces with bulging eyes were found

alongside more than 50 smaller, staring heads.

Looking at the bases of them,

they're hollow and they've got clamp-like attachments,

so it seems they were meant to be attached to poles,

perhaps placed within the precincts of a temple.

Imagine a forest of these staring heads, erected all around you.

Even just standing here in this gallery,

the overwhelming impression is of being stared at.

Eyes have always been a source of power in images.

When the Prophet Muhammad, in the Islam world,

wanted to destroy images,

he ordered those doing the destroying to attack the eyes first.

The same was true in England during the Protestant Reformation -

they scratched the eyes out.

Here, the eyes have been given immense significance.

This was the people of the eye. But it's very frustrating.

You're being stared at by these enigmatic faces.

What do your eyes mean? Tell me, tell me, tell me!

No.

They're not saying a word.

These treasures were found without texts or inscriptions.

We know they lay buried for three millennia,

but can only guess at their meaning.

Might they be evidence of the Shu's spiritual belief system?

A great tree of bronze fruit-bearing branches

on which nine beady-eyed birds perch.

A tree of life linking sky and earth - finely wrought prayer

to gods of heaven and harvest, whose names we'll never know.

They save the most...

extraordinary discovery of all till last.

I can't quite believe - I'm very pleased -

they're actually letting me in...

to the case with this remarkable object.

It was always thought that there was no tradition whatsoever

in ancient Chinese art for some 1,500 years,

no tradition of large-scale, figurative, freestanding sculpture

and yet here he is, towering above me.

The only known freestanding bronze sculpture in all of

early Chinese art, discovered less than 30 years ago.

What a figure it is.

He's got bare feet...

..perhaps to suggest that he's in touch with the ground, the earth,

and he's got this headdress in the shape of flames

with the eyes of power embedded within it.

So he is a figure who connects the ground to the heavens.

His hands are in the shape of these great circles,

which implies the holding of some kind of vessel.

Perhaps a hollowed-out elephant tusk.

Elephant tusks were also found in the burial pit.

Not a single object found in Sanxingdui

is for common or everyday use.

Everything is ritual.

It seems to be the entire paraphernalia of an ancient temple.

You've got those huge masks, which were probably attached

to great posts of wood.

You've got the smaller heads attached to poles.

Imagine a temple,

a people whose worship had something to do with the tree of life,

a tree that reaches up to a god that may be associated with the sun,

that nourishes birds, that nourishes the soil.

With this figure in the middle presiding over the ritual.

Sanxingdui is China's Atlantis, but real rather than mythical.

A civilisation buried underground rather than lost at sea.

But why would they have broken up their principal images

and objects of worship and buried them in two deep pits?

Were they sacrificing these images of their gods TO their gods

to save themselves from plague, invasion or some other catastrophe?

Whatever the disaster was, it must have done for them.

If they had survived,

they would surely have retrieved their treasures.

And they never did.

Chinese history is often told as a succession of great dynasties,

but the find at Sanxingdui proves this is a myth.

Early China was a patchwork of competing tribes.

The Shu may have fallen simply because they were too peaceful.

No weapons have been found with their remains.

But their lack of a written language was an equally severe disadvantage.

At the very same time, another tribe was setting out to conquer

and unify this land.

They had swords and spears.

But their most important weapon, it seems, was the word.

The earliest origins of written Chinese,

like much of its ancient civilisation,

can be found along the banks of the Yellow River.

100 years ago, here in Henan province, local pharmacists

were dispensing ground-up ancient animal remains called dragon bones.

The relics were covered with archaic inscriptions,

arousing the interest of archaeologists.

Further investigation revealed documentary evidence

of China's first great dynasty.

What, you may ask yourself, are these curious objects?

They are, in fact, among the most significant artefacts

in the entire history of Chinese civilisation.

They are the oracle bones of the Shang.

Each one is the carapace of a turtle.

How it worked was this.

The king would ask himself,

"Is there trouble coming in the next ten days?"

He would ask his diviner to help him find out if there was.

The diviner would take a turtle shell,

apply heat to it until it cracked

and then read in the pattern of cracks

the answer to the king's question.

King's question, priest's prediction

and actual outcome were all then inscribed on the shell.

As well as being a record of Shang superstitions,

these are also the bare bones of Shang history,

recounting conflicts, crop failures and affairs of the court alike.

But why are they so significant?

Because they amount to the first surviving example of an invention

that would change the world -

the Chinese written language.

So, the famous oracle bones.

-These are 1200 BC?

-Yes.

Some of the very earliest surviving Chinese writing.

This part mentions a famous lady of the Shang dynasty,

-Lady Fu Hao.

-Ah, yes.

Know her well. Well, I know here reasonably well.

The king goes to see Fu Hao.

The Shang oracle bones refer more than 100 times to Lady Fu Hao,

a name worth remembering.

A warrior princess who led troops into battle,

took captives and expanded Shang territory.

-What's this? Is there an eye there?

-Yes. It means see.

People kneeled down with a big eye on her head.

-So to go and see is kneeling down with a great big eye?

-Yes.

-Very visual.

-Very visual, yeah.

It's a sort of painting language, which becomes Chinese.

This is the beginning, yes?

It's not the beginning, but the...childhood of Chinese writing.

-The childhood, OK. Not the birth.

-Not the birth.

Look at this character.

I got this character from the oracle bone.

This is an example of what you call associative,

which means you have two images together in one pictogram.

Actually, there are three...images here.

The left side is a little boy. He's counting. It means five.

He's thinking five by five.

-Oh, he's doing his times tables?

-I'm sure.

-Ah! I've got it.

What's going on over here?

This means a father. It's a hand holding something.

-It looks like a stick.

-Yes, he's a father holding a stick.

-The father is waiting with a stick!

-Standing by the side.

-What's the meaning of the whole...

-It means teaching.

Teaching!

That seems to me to be somehow very, very, very Chinese. Yes.

And it all starts here.

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE

Of the three great pictographic languages, including cuneiform

from Syria and hieroglyphics from ancient Egypt,

Chinese alone has survived.

-Hello.

-Hello.

-Hello.

-Hello.

And, in the process,

it has become the foundation of continuity in Chinese civilisation.

The most basic form of Chinese art is Chinese written language.

Here's Mr Tang's teaching or education.

Slightly altered from the oracle bones over the millennia

but it's still essentially recognisable.

The little boy doing his five-times table while his father

stands over him rather forbiddingly with a stick.

The Chinese form of language, because it's picture making,

contains within it values, beliefs, attitudes, systems -

this isn't just teaching, this is teaching "get it right or else!"

Through a series of images,

it freezes ancient moments in history.

If you look at the symbol for wife.

Wife is woman, large hips, cross-legged

and she's got a stick through her hair because in ancient times,

in Asia, when a woman became married,

she lost the right to wear her hair free

and she had to put a stick through it.

Wife, again, it's a...

so to speak, it freezes a moment in ancient history.

The Chinese written language stayed fixed precisely because it was

a set of pictures, and therefore immune to changes in pronunciation.

What do you think?

It's not good, is it?

No.

No!

The written language has always been the bedrock of Chinese civilisation.

THEY CHANT

Its creation was the key to controlling a vast population.

And, thanks to its earliest incarnation,

the characters on the oracle bones,

we know that the Shang dynasty used language to govern,

to educate and to write the laws

by which they imposed their fierce rule.

THEY CHANT

Thanks to their written laws,

the Shang were able to take control of and organise

huge swathes of territory around the Yellow River Valley.

Not quite China, but the beginnings of the nation it would become.

The ground below the city of Anyang,

where 3,000 years ago the Shang capital stood,

produces so many historical artefacts,

the archaeologists can't keep up,

stockpiling whole chunks of relic-rich soil outside their labs.

When they extract these cubes of compacted burial mound earth,

they know that they contain something, but they don't know what,

so it could be a chariot, it could be a bronze drinking vessel.

It's sort of like an archaeologist's lucky dip.

Excavations here unearthed the palace of a powerful Shang king,

Wu Ding, who ruled over the Shang kingdom in 1250 BC.

Nearby, the archaeologists found the tomb of his consort,

a very warrior princess whose name I'd seen on the oracle bones,

Lady Fu Hao.

Now...

Ah...

I'm amazed they've allowed me in, but they have.

Here we are.

So who was Lady Fu Hao? We know she was a princess.

She was one of the favourite consorts of King Wu Ding,

who obviously thought a lot of her because he had her buried

not in the royal burial complex, but here, in his own palace complex,

which suggests that he wanted to remain close to her after she died.

She was a general as well as a princess,

the first recorded female general in Chinese history.

This tomb gives us a remarkable insight

into the beliefs of the Shang concerning the afterlife.

It would appear that they believed, rather as the Egyptians did,

that we continue to live in the tomb after we've gone.

King Wu Ding had her buried with a huge array of bronze objects,

mostly to do with food and wine.

We see two of these ding, which are containers for food.

We see cooking utensils on a stove.

And everywhere else, containers for wine.

She also - this is rather a grisly detail -

she was also supplied with human attendants.

They have uncovered 16 human skeletons.

They were executed and buried along with her

so that they could attend her in the afterlife.

The only person missing is Lady Fu Hao herself,

but that is because this area of the tomb where her coffin was

was below the water table so it's all rotted away,

leaving just the red paint that probably decorated a lacquer coffin.

If you're wondering why the authorities allowed me in here,

that's because this place is partly authentic -

yes, this really is the site of her tomb -

but it's also partly theme park,

in the sense that all of these objects are actually replicas.

They don't tell you that, by the way,

when you walk into the museum, but you need to know it for yourself.

And if you want to actually experience

some of the richness and sophistication

of Shang material culture, you need to go up the road

to the local museum.

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

OK.

ALL TALK AT ONCE

Xiexie. Thank you.

So here it is.

Shang dynasty bronze.

3,500 years ago this object was made.

It's a very heavy thing and yet it's a vessel for drinking wine.

What you can see very clearly is one of the principal motifs

of these grave goods, the taotie, which is

a kind of abstracted, grotesque, demonic, grinning, staring face,

formed from the shapes of two dragons.

Perhaps designed to ward off evil spirits

from Lady Fu Hao's afterlife.

And on the handle, you've got the most hostile face of all.

To me, because it's a handle, it suggests a snake

so it might almost be a cobra, coiled to strike,

and yet it's got the ears perhaps of a wolf, a dog?

This is an object that speaks of their ability to master technology.

They also had the first chariots in China.

It was a kind of revolution in warfare that enabled them

to spread their culture across the north.

Absolutely fantastic.

Faith in the ancestors' life after death

was the dominant belief system in ancient China.

It was used by the Shang and later dynasties

to affirm a rigid social hierarchy.

While finely crafted grave goods for nobles like Fu Hao

would allow them to live nobly after death,

the vast majority of Chinese

living on the land were kept firmly in their place in THEIR afterlives.

They were taught only to expect more ploughing and cropping.

As late as the Han period, around the birth of Christ,

they too were being buried with art, but not crafted bronze ware.

Crude earthenware tablets showing scenes of harvest.

Low art for low expectation.

And the afterlife now? Well, it just won't die.

To this day the Chinese still make offerings to their ancestors.

Plates of fly-blown food are involved,

but if you want something more elaborate,

there is a modern solution woven from bamboo and paper.

This is Mr Yang's emporium of the dead.

It's where you come to buy everything you need

if you want to make a sacrifice in the modern day for your ancestors.

How do you do? Hello. Very good to see you.

What an extraordinary setup.

You've got everything you need! You've got a computer over here.

In case you need to check your e-mails in the afterlife!

You can log in.

Dead. Password...

Totally dead.

That'll do it. Oh, it doesn't seem to be working.

The internet is a bit dodgy in this part of China.

There's a car!

There's a car.

Mr Yang. Mr Yang. It's a Mercedes? Mercedes?

Why isn't it a Chinese car?

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

People love Mercedes even when they're dead? Good quality.

Hi. Hello. Good to meet you.

SHE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

Show me... What is this thing here?

SHE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

These are the attendants.

Ah, so, like Lady Fu Hao, she had human sacrifice skeletons

to look after her in the land of the dead, but they actually have...

What's back here?

Oh, wow!

Fantastic!

SHE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

Is this for a dead farmer?

So that you can do a bit of milking in the afterlife, make yourself...

Oh. What's that? It's got an udder!

It's got a bamboo udder. Let's not go there. Let's not go there.

That's animal abuse.

It's a dog!

Do you know how they sacrifice all this stuff TO the ancestor?

They pile it all up - sorry, Fido - and they set fire to it.

The Zhou dynasty, which followed the Shang,

lasted from 1000 to about 250 BC.

It wasn't a golden age for art. Very much a bronze age.

But it was intellectually vibrant.

Writing was no longer the preserve of priests with their oracle bones,

but done on split bamboo staves by secular authors,

poets, philosophers.

Most famous was Confucius,

still venerated today in temples such as this.

He developed a benevolent philosophy of statecraft as opposed to

the violent rule so commonplace before.

He believed a ruler was to be like a father to his subjects.

The Confucians stood for family values, personal morality.

This was the period that also saw the birth of Laozi

and his writings, which later came to be crystallised as Taoism.

He preached the exact opposite. A retreat to nature.

He preferred silence over words, inaction to action.

It's been remembered in Chinese history as the time when

100 schools of thought contended, but 100 armies also contended

and it was a period of increasing fragmentation and division,

at the end of which, China was split into several warring states.

Then one man came along who decided to change all that.

He set out to replace confusion with order.

To replace debate with his absolute rule.

He changed China and he changed Chinese art for ever.

In 221 BC, the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang,

quelled all opposing armies and kings

and, for the first time, created a single, unified country.

This was the moment China was born.

He standardised everything.

Weights, measures, currency...

road dimensions, language.

Like Hitler, Stalin and Mao,

who modelled himself on the First Emperor,

he understood that ruthless organisation

was by far the best way to run a tyranny.

And he was a true tyrant -

brutal, cruel, sadistic and paranoid.

To truly know the First Emperor,

you only have to look at his burial site - 22 square miles.

Home to the most perfectly totalitarian artistic vision

the world has ever seen.

An army of terracotta warriors.

Over there is Pit 2, which they haven't yet fully excavated.

Behind that is Pit 3 where you've got the headquarters.

A small group of leaders of the army.

And in here...

Pit 1.

The thousands and thousands and thousands of soldiers

who stand guard over the emperor's tomb.

Remember Lady Fu Hao's little tomb?

With her objects for the afterlife.

Now, just look at this.

And remember, this is just a tiny part

of 56 square kilometres of the first emperor's tomb - look...

it's like King's Cross!

It's like King's Cross and there they are!

There they are, the emperor's imperial guard.

The Terracotta Army lined up...

for all time, like commuters waiting to travel into eternity.

8,000 men of clay face east, where he believed the souls

of his enemies lay in wait.

He'd subdued the eastern lands during his lifetime,

massacred populations

and intended to do it all again from beyond the grave.

He didn't just want to LIVE the afterlife,

but to conquer it.

There were ancient legends detailing this dark creation -

an underground city and an immortal army

but it was only in 1974 that the soldiers were uncovered.

Few are allowed to walk within the restoration area

and amongst the ranks of troops.

But, up close and personal, it becomes apparent

that each soldier is an individual.

The faces of the emperor's soldiers

express the breadth of his realm. Take these two.

This chap is, almost certainly, a local, a Qin,

he's got the right face, the right eyes,

the right hairstyle, but...

this bloke...

well, high Asiatic cheekbones. He's got the beard

of what the Chinese at that point were still calling "a barbarian"

and yet he's in the emperor's army. He's almost certainly

from central Asia.

No-one's doing their own thing any more.

Everyone's marching to the First Emperor's tune.

The creation of the Terracotta Army required its own army -

700,000 strong.

It took them 38 years to finish the job.

This wasn't an artist's workshop - it was a production line.

I like this part because they've, um...

They've laid the sculpture out so that you can actually see

some of the evidence of its bureaucratic making -

here, you've got the name of the craftsman responsible.

A poor slave labourer, he was called Duo...

and here, here and here you've got the seal

of the supervisor of the department

that was bureaucratically responsible for the creation

of the Terracotta Army, so...

Duo did it and "Boom, boom... that's good to go."

Good to go to the tomb. And look over here...

Looking down into the legs of a terracotta soldier...

you're not just looking down into that, you're looking down

into the traces of how these objects were made.

Very simply, using, essentially, child's modelling clay

that's then baked. And you can still see, if you look inside,

you can still see...

the imprint of the craftsman's hand. His fingers.

The way that they've dragged the clay into the shape required

to model the torso and the legs.

The Terracotta Army may yet prove to be just the beginning

of the discoveries here.

Such is the scale of the site,

the archaeologists say that it may be more than a century

before they finish their excavation.

The pits and soldiers lie a full mile to the east

of the emperor's final resting place.

According to a Chinese historian who was writing less than a century

after the First Emperor's death -

The emperor had himself buried within that great mound

in a stone sarcophagus placed inside a bronze surround

within an entire underground palace filled,

the historian writes tantalisingly, "with treasure".

The palace was surrounded by a moat of poisonous mercury

and if that weren't enough to deter would-be tomb robbers,

there were ingeniously-rigged archers

armed with deadly crossbows.

Now that once might have all seemed like historical fancy, legend,

but now that they've discovered the terracotta soldiers

anything seems possible.

What secrets lie buried beneath that great hill?

Of all the objects uncovered during the excavations so far,

these two bronze chariots have to be the most remarkable.

Found close to the emperor's burial mound, they were designed

to transport his spirit through his realm in the afterlife.

Now, the terracotta soldiers are relatively crudely made -

this object is very different. It's made out of bronze,

the craftsmanship is utterly remarkable,

it's a fully-functioning chariot.

If you detached it from its horses and its stand,

it would roll along the ground - it works.

Look at the umbrella under which he rides.

It's got a mechanism, still-functioning mechanism,

that enables its angle to be moved, its elevation to be altered.

This may well be the most complicated bronze object

ever created by man.

Formed from more than 3,000 separate pieces.

The charioteer - what a piece of work he is.

He's got a sword in his belt, he's got arrows by his side.

And look at these horses -

these are the horses of the Mongolian steppe

with their pronounced haunches,

their startled eyes, the flare of their nostrils,

the folds of their skin - all rendered in cast bronze.

So what are these objects?

What do they represent? What do they stand for as works of art?

Well... it used to be heresy to say so

in Communist China...

but now it's a commonly-held opinion

that what they represent in terms of art history is actually...

(the first great influence of the West on the art of China.)

Previously there had been no Chinese tradition

of realistic figurative sculpture, images of man that looked like man.

This is Western realism applied to Chinese beliefs.

In the Ancient World, only the Greeks had created such art.

And how might the First Emperor have seen Greek sculpture...?

100 years earlier, in the time of Alexander the Great,

Greeks had settled as far east as Afghanistan

and may well have been trading with the Chinese along the Silk Road.

This was the harshest corner of this land, the far north-west,

the corridor between the Mongolian steppes and the mountains of Tibet.

Through this windswept desert came not only foreign styles of art,

but foreign beliefs that would transform Chinese civilisation.

The Silk Road is a modern name for the ancient network

of trade routes that formed cross-continent,

linking Europe and Asia.

Through this perilous and epic path,

merchants, soldiers and monks arrived.

Now, you could read about it in a book,

you can look at it on a map

but nothing quite prepares you for the experience

of actually walking along the Silk Road -

thousands of miles of unendingly hostile terrain...

and yet...this was the route, the only route,

for merchants carrying silk and spices

from China to the outside world

and carrying Western or Indian goods back into China.

Travelling the Silk Road wasn't just arduous,

it was extremely dangerous.

On the one hand there were roving groups of bandits

ready to steal your treasure and kill you.

On the other hand there was nature.

The sand dunes and their ever-shifting configurations.

Sand storms blowing in.

Sometimes the only way you'd know you were on the right path

was because you'd come across a little heap

of bleached-white human bones.

In 206 BC, just five years after the First Emperor's death

the Qin Dynasty gave way to the outward-looking Han.

The new rulers expanded, defeating the nomads,

who'd dominated these desert lands.

Frontier towns were created to control

both the newly-extended borders and the growing trade.

One of the biggest, built on an oasis, was Dunhuang.

2,000 years ago, travellers and merchants grew rich here

from the blossoming trade of the Silk Road.

But the travellers from the West brought more than goods.

They brought their ideas and their gods.

None had greater impact on China than Buddhism.

From the 3rd century, Buddhism spread rapidly among the Chinese

offering them a joyful alternative

to their own grimly-limiting visions of the afterlife.

Suddenly, even the poorest person could hope to be reincarnated

into a better life and eventually achieve nirvana,

the Buddhist state of transcendent peace.

BELLS RING

The religion's beginnings in China were humble.

Simple monks' caves cut into the rocks by the side of the Silk Road,

where travellers would give thanks or pray for safe passage.

Soon, the prayers were accompanied by art.

At the beginning of the 20th century, just outside Dunhuang,

the most remarkable examples of this early Buddhist art

were rediscovered, concealed beneath 1,000 years of sand.

The Magao cave complex is a labyrinth of hundreds of temples

hewn into the rock face.

The earliest date back to 336AD.

Within them, 45,000 square metres of extraordinary Buddhist painting.

2,000 sculptures of Buddhas, bodhisattvas,

guardians and devotees.

All document the evolution of Chinese life

over the best part of a millennium.

This...this is a treat.

All of the paintings and sculptures in this space

were created more than 1,500 years ago.

This is one of the most spectacular sequences

of early painting anywhere in the world,

not just in Dunhuang.

What do we see...?

The principal image of the Buddha and all around us...

what must have seemed to Chinese people, in the 6th century,

astonishingly exotic, foreign, alien faces.

Look at this fantastically-Indian Buddha,

this is Indian art and Indian religion

transplanted to Chinese soil.

Remember, the Chinese, up to this point, really,

they were used to their sacred spaces being underground.

Now they're 100 feet up in the air,

contemplating a theatre of Buddhist imagery. Now, look...

..the sculptures force you to your knees.

Because only when you go to your knees

do you meet their eyes.

And then, when you do look up...

you see these processions of figures going around the walls

and what you see are these...

..wonderfully stark, very quickly-painted, impulsive,

expressionistic images of the Buddha teaching,

the Buddha meditating. Here he is...

during that time when he set out to meditate for 49 days

and demons and devils and poisonous snakes came

to tempt and distract him.

Perhaps they were meant to be the demons of the mind?

One of the messages of this space is that there are many Buddhas.

That any individual can rise to Buddha-hood.

You see that in the lower register of the paintings, where you have

these wonderfully vivid depictions of the roughly 1,200 people

who've paid communally to have this chapel created,

and those figures are matched by -

you see up there? - these sort of plaques that decorate the wall,

they are 1,200 Buddhas, so the idea being that each person

who paid for the creation of this

might themselves rise to become a Buddha.

And I think the principal impact of this space might have been...

this great, seemingly endless frieze of figures,

especially when you think how it would have been experienced

by many worshippers through procession.

You process around the space and you don't just do it once,

you do it many, many times, perhaps as many as 100 times.

You say your prayers to the Buddha, you prostrate yourself

before the Buddha, you continue to pray, perhaps to chant,

there might be music...

The whole purpose of this space was to help those who worshipped here

take themselves to another space.

The space that, perhaps, isn't even in this world at all.

The Magao Caves reached their heyday some 300 years later

at the turn of the 7th century

with the arrival of the enlightened and the tolerant Tang Dynasty.

Under their rule, Buddhism surged in popularity -

the impact can still be felt in modern China

where a third of the population is Buddhist.

One Tang ruler even elevated the importance

of this new faith from India above Chinese Daoism.

Which is perhaps why, at the heart of the Magao Caves,

that ruler was immortalised on a monumental scale.

Ha.

The statue that we're trying to get a peek of, well...

is fully 35 metres tall.

-HE PANTS

-Come on, hurry up, I know you're tired.

We've risen so far above the madding crowds

we've actually come level with the mountains, but...

this is what we're here to see.

The central cult image.

Look at that...

The great image of the Buddha.

Look at those staring, tranquil eyes.

But...what's the great surprise?

The great surprise is that this Buddha...

(this Buddha is a woman!)

And not just any woman.

It's a portrait of Empress Wu!

The only female emperor in all of China's history.

A deeply controversial figure.

Much maligned after her death by Confucian scholars.

More objective historical record tells us

that China was hugely prosperous under her rule.

She expanded its territories,

she laid out vast areas

of previously royal land for agriculture.

She promoted business,

she promoted female rights, she was one of the great one-offs

in all of Chinese history and I really like the fact

that SHE is the tutelary deity

of this great labyrinth of Chinese creativity.

Professor Ning Qiang spent seven years living at Dunhuang,

decoding the life and rituals depicted in the art

of just one extraordinary cave.

Perhaps because his specialist subject

is the life-affirming art of Buddhism

he's that rare creature,

a Chinese art historian with a truly infectious sense of humour.

So, you spent many years here writing and working

-on your dissertation.

-Indeed!

Does it bring back memories for you to come...?

Oh, indeed.

And my favourite moment is sitting near the tree,

enjoying my tea and "Look, it's a Buddha."

-Although I can't see the Buddha's face because of the building.

-Yeah.

But it's in my mind, you know, you just feel it.

The Buddha, the tree and you.

You are sitting with history and you ARE history, see.

I like that.

Didn't the Buddha reach enlightenment sitting under a tree?

Indeed, yes it's the same thing! Indeed!

The professor's cave contains the first known Chinese image

of the Buddhist western paradise - The Pure Land.

A painting that looks like a faded but richly-embroidered piece of silk

and which shows the blessed healed of all illness or deformity,

listening to music among scented trees

in a garden where magical waters flow.

Stark contrast with the barren deserts outside.

On the opposite wall

there's a picture of an actual Buddhist healing ritual.

Apt, since Buddhism helped to heal the Chinese soul,

bruised by conflict and tyranny.

Tell me a little bit about these figures.

When I saw this, I was absolutely struck by, well,

particularly this dancer which is so delicately, beautifully depicted.

You know, the healing ritual requires a kind of celebrative environment

for the Buddha, right? So you have dance and you have music.

Dance are called...

HE SPEAKS CHINESE

..or foreign whirly dance

and you just turn around and very fast

you wave your scarves.

But you never leave the small carpet so it is called "whirly dance".

And look at these musicians.

I love this scene.

They are just a combination of musicians

from different regions, you see, probably from India.

-I was going to say, she is from India.

-Yes.

So here, what you are looking at, is actually

the dance and the music culture of the Silk Road.

Having been on this journey through Chinese art...

for a long stretch of history...

one is looking at bronze vessels

and then suddenly there's the terracotta soldiers

but you don't really have a sense of people's lives from the art,

-when suddenly...

-Yes.

-..you come here and it...

it all explodes.

That's the excitement of Dunhuang art.

The past is another country,

but at Dunhuang you can still travel through it

with your eyes and your imagination.

Here, at last, are the people of ancient China,

fully revealed in art.

Falling in love.

Falling into prison and being released.

Liberty or containment?

The Chinese have always been striving for freedom

while contending with those who would control them.

That's the great revelation of the recent archaeological finds.

We knew it was true of Communist China

but now, it seems, it's always been so.

Ever since the people of Sanxingdui, with their idiosyncrasies,

were succeeded by the fiercely controlling Shang Dynasty,

with its mastery of the written word.

Followed by the chillingly bureaucratic First Emperor.

Dunhuang is exhilarating

because it's such a triumphant assertion of Chinese freedom.

Freedom of belief.

Freedom of expression.

This is life itself, body and soul.

Even the startled donkey - ears pricked up,

trembles with the sense of individual consciousness.

I think it's also a discovery that's changed

the Western stereotypical view of the Chinese cultural identity.

Often, we in the West tend to think of the Chinese as a people who have

too much regard, perhaps, for their own traditions.

A people who are still teaching their children,

2,500 years after Confucius died! Teaching their children

to recite his sayings by rote.

A people who leave... too little space in their lives

for creativity, imagination, free will,

the eccentricity of the individual.

But Dunhuang disproves all that. Dunhuang proves that

once upon a time, the Chinese had 1,000 Picassos in their midst.

And I think THAT'S why this place really does belong

at the centre of any story of Chinese art.