Episode 2 Art of China

The Great Wall of China.

The largest man-made structure ever built.

5,500 miles long, it's one of the Wonders of the World.

But it is a paradox too.

Not only a symbol of Chinese Imperial might,

but of the constant threat posed by powerful invaders.

You don't build a wall like this if you feel safe and secure.

The period of strife

and change that led to the wall's construction coincided with

what's now remembered in China as the Golden Age of Chinese art.

From the Song to the Ming Dynasties, from roughly 1000 to 1600 AD.

For the preceding 3,000 years,

Chinese art had been overwhelmingly the art of the tomb and the temple.

Bronze idols. Terracotta soldiers.

But now its subject was THIS world

and those who live in it.

From an emperor so in love with art he forgot to rule his country,

to artisan sculptors carving ghoulish images from the rocks.

And refined scholars who fled the Imperial Court to find

themselves in nature.

Oh, it's so delicate!

This is the story of how troubled times can produce great art.

Exquisite porcelain to feed the guilty pleasures of an emperor,

breathtaking architecture to call down the blessings of heaven.

Each work of art another clue to understanding how this

extraordinary society came to terms with its own contradictions.

This story of Chinese art begins here, in the mountains.

The different dynasties of Chinese history can be

compared to a mountain range, and for me,

the highest peak of all, the Song dynasty.

The first great expressions of Song art were born amidst

the clouds and the mountain pines, monumental landscape paintings.

What a view!

You feel like you're standing on the top of the world.

The tops of the mountains are like islands, floating in a sea of mist.

It's the kind of scene that would

inspire a great Chinese landscape painter.

Why did the landscape preoccupy the Chinese mind

for so many thousands of years?

I think it's because, if you look at the unique nature of China's

belief systems, each of them places nature at its very centre.

The Taoist.

The one who follows "The Way".

He comes to nature because he wants to retune his soul.

For him, the natural world is a macrocosm of the human being,

the trees are nature's flesh, the rocks are nature's bones,

the rivers are nature's blood, the mist nature's energy.

On the other hand there is the Buddhist.

He comes to nature in order to disengage

himself from worldly desires.

The hunger for power, the greed for money, lust...

He comes to isolate himself, to purify himself.

And then there's the Confucian.

Well, the Confucian comes to enjoy the spectacle of the majesty of nature,

but he finds in its rhythms, in its patterns,

in its order, in its repetitions, he finds there a model for

human morality and human systems of government.

So, at the centre of each of these three belief systems, philosophies,

call them what you will,

at the centre of them lies the natural world.

One of the earliest Chinese masters of landscape painting was Fan Kuan.

His Travellers By Streams And Mountains, a paper scroll

painted in ink some two metres high, was created in around 1000 AD.

Tiny human figures are dwarfed by the magnificence of the mountain.

A daunting wall of cliffs.

Streams of water cascade to meet a torrent.

This is nature as power, nature as irresistible force.

Fan Kuan was a Taoist.

A man who followed "The Way",

wore course clothes and lived in the very mountains he painted.

Early spring of 1072 is the masterpiece of Guo Xi.

A painter of swirling mist, who emphasised change, not permanence.

He saw mountain scenery as a shape shifting image of the universe,

and even wrote a treatise describing its ever-changing nature.

Every boulder and tree born and reborn in the endless play of light.

His vision of a world in flux, may have

been shaped by Buddhist ideas about time and reincarnation.

There is one other great masterpiece from the 11th century.

Not a vertical scroll but a hand scroll,

which weaves all these different elements together

into a story about Chinese civilisation itself.

This is Landscape With Pavilions, by Yuan Guang Wi.

It was painted in around 1030.

It's an awe-inspiring panorama, a majestic vision of nature.

Cloud-capped mountains, but full also of wonderful little

details - filigree trees, fishing boats, it's full of weather.

There's mist, there's rain, there's a little figure down there...

holding his umbrella,

and you can feel the wind blowing against that umbrella.

The figures are tiny.

You've got these slightly bedraggled figures on donkeys,

dwarfed by the mountains.

Nature is immense.

But it's more than just a depiction of the natural scene. I think

this is a good example of how the Chinese painter approaches

landscape and often has a form of symbolism in his mind.

The great mountain peak is...

..as it were, the Emperor, surrounded by the lesser peaks who

are the 100 princes who pay him court.

So, the landscape expresses the structure

of human civilisation, and if you see this whole scroll

as a journey, it takes you from formlessness towards form,

towards structure.

Even when contemplating what seems like the wilderness of untamed

nature, the Chinese artist can actually be making

a comment on the true ordering of society.

But how do you order a society in the throes of great change?

This is the night market in the Chinese city of Kaifeng.

1,000 years ago, this little-known city, 400 miles

south of Beijing, was the capital of China and the Song dynasty.

Hugely cosmopolitan, as well as a thriving commercial hub,

Kaifeng, at the time, was THE most important centre of

trade in the entire Orient.

Now, as Europe was stumbling out of the Dark Ages into

the Middles Ages, here in China they were experiencing a great

age of enlightenment.

New discoveries, new inventions. Gunpowder,

the magnetic compass, printed money, and money was important

because, here in China, while Europe was still locked in feudalism,

they developed the first free-market, truly entrepreneurial economy.

China was vibrant, but above all, China was rich.

But the man who took control of this city and China in 1100, the

Song dynasty's most famous emperor,

was less interested in commerce than art.

The 11th son of the former Song emperor, Huizong never

expected to succeed his father.

Raised as an Aesthete, not a ruler,

Emperor Huizong was an idealist, who put art before all else.

900 years later, in modern-day Kaifeng, they still celebrate Emperor Huizong's rule.

Aptly enough, though a modern theme park which recreates

a painting commissioned during his reign.

It was created by this man, Zhang Zeduan.

Early in the 12th century,

he was charged with painting the Emperor's capital.

Which he did in intricate detail.

His work is now China's most famous painting.

It's called The Qingming Scroll, so fragile and precious that the

authorities only let you examine a high-quality replica.

And here it is.

So, I'm going

to imagine that I am the Song dynasty emperor, Huizong,

who can never go out into the city that he rules because he's too

illustrious and elevated for that.

The only way he can experience it is by looking at this painting.

The hand scroll's subject is the capital Kaifeng.

It's a cinematic representation of Song society

as it was nine centuries ago.

Essentially, it's a fantastically intricate line drawing.

What the artist is interested in is in detail.

And here we've got these rice traders, sitting on their bags of

rice, which are going to be loaded

onto these boats by these slightly misshapen labourers.

And in the background, paper money is changing hands,

a great new innovation in China of the period.

Hogarth would have loved this painting.

It's full of comic touches. Look at this!

Here's a boat that's lost its tow rope, and all the sailors are

gesticulating rather frantically at the people on the bridge for help.

Some do try and help, some are laughing, some are just gawping,

disaster may be about to happen, who knows?

And I love the scene on the bridge itself.

There's a character on a sedan chair,

and he's coming up against a rider, and they both won't give way.

It's like a Bentley and a Mini meeting in the middle

and there's road rage. "You give way!"

But for all its bustling prosperity,

12th-century Kaifeng was the capital of a vulnerable empire.

Nomads to the north coveted their wealth,

and Huizong underestimated their threat.

A man of letters, he put his faith in words

and ideas rather than weapons and neglected his army.

He believed a nation, like a work of art, could last forever,

if founded on principles of reason and beauty.

Kaifeng, or Bianliang as it was then,

nurtured a flowering of philosophy,

poetry and writing, but it was also central to the political

administration, as this rather quaint piece of street sculpture marks.

Confucian scholars, the army of bureaucrats who ran China,

came from all corners to this city to purchase their copies of

the Confucian classics and to sit their exams for the civil service.

Confucian ideas about state craft spread all the more rapidly

among the educated classes,

the literati, as they were known,

thanks to a new invention.

Moveable type, developed in China

some 400 years before

Caxton's printing press rolled in the west.

Few of Huizong's political pronouncements have survived.

But you can get a flavour of his rather dreamy

attitude from a celebrated painting.

Now, this beautiful little scroll painting, done on silk,

intended to be read from right to left...

was probably painted by Emperor Huizong himself.

He was a skilled artist.

And it takes us backstage, so to speak, into Huizong's palace.

The ladies of the court are preparing silk.

They're pounding silk, they're sewing silk, they're ironing silk.

I like her energy.

She's rolling up her sleeves, getting ready for some hard work.

These ladies are sewing.

This crouching woman with her fan is fanning the embers of a fire

so that that iron, it looks rather makeshift, piled itself with

glowing red embers, can be heated up to do its work.

They don't have ironing boards, they hold the silk taut.

A wonderful sense of energy in the picture.

This lady is leaning back to hold the piece of silk taut

as it's ironed.

I like the detail of this little girl horsing around.

The figures are represented almost like cartoon characters.

He's got no interest in the background,

no interest in the detail. What he's interested in is the activity.

And the activity is loaded with ritual significance.

First of all, silk. The painting's actually done on silk.

Silk was one of the was one of the great sources of Chinese prosperity.

The production of silk was hugely important to the wealth

of the state, and as part of palace ritual the ladies of the court,

the first day of spring every year,

they would atually participate in the processes of silk production,

silk refinement, the creation of clothing,

all the way through to the end product itself.

But at the same time, it's a very important statement for Huizong

himself, of order being observed at court.

Having all the women of the Imperial Court brought together in this

way, preparing the emperor's new clothes.

In another way, what they're actually working at is

the fabric of government.

The picture is a demonstration that everything within the palace

is functioning properly. Everything is in order.

And though Huizong isn't in it, it is by implication all about him

and his power.

Huizong used his power above all to collect pictures

and commission exquisite artefacts,

still believing that a perfectly-refined life on his part

would induce the gods to protect him and safeguard his rule.

The greatest monument of Huizong's devotion to art

and the life of the mind is not in China,

but here in Taiwan where the National Palace Museum contains the

greatest concentration of imperial Chinese art anywhere in the world.

Nearly all of the museum's holdings from the Song period

and before were once in Huizong's own collection.

Under his reign, ceramics were to become regarded as art

and taken to new heights.

Simplicity, purity, austerity, spirituality.

These are the essential characteristics

of Song dynasty civilisation.

And they are expressed to perfection by Song dynasty porcelain.

Look at that beautiful white Ding ware.

This blackware with the glaze

that seems almost to be bursting into flames before your eyes.

And here, most beautiful, most highly-prized of all - Ru ware.

There are only 73 of these pieces in the entire world,

and five of them are behind that glass case.

Huizong's preference was for simple forms.

Appreciated for every nuance of colour. Every ripple of glaze.

In the daytime, this museum is packed with people seven deep

trying to get a glimpse at these. They are...

They are the Mona Lisas of the world of Chinese ceramics.

Why are they so highly prized?

Because of the fineness of this glaze.

Its craquelure has been compared to that fine cracking

that you see in ice, also to fish scales.

There's a lovely story about how this ware originated.

It is said in Chinese legend that Emperor Huizong himself had a dream

and in that dream he saw the colour of the sky after the rain had

stopped, in a clearing.

And he described the dream to his craftsmen and said,

"Which of you can create me a ceramic the colour of my dream?"

There it is.

During the later years of his reign,

Huizong became obsessively preoccupied

with fortune and the gods.

He sent envoys across his empire to record lucky signs or symbols

of divine favour - rainbows, unusually-shaped clouds,

auspicious animal behaviour.

In 1117, Huizong requisitioned rice boats meant to feed his people

and had these strangely-shaped rocks transported all the way from a lake

in southern China to the Imperial Garden at his palace in Kaifeng.

In Chinese culture, rocks have the power to bring good luck.

Huizong not only collected the strangely-shaped rocks,

but he painted them too.

Professor Chow is an authority on Emperor Huizong

and his troubled rule.

Do you think painting for him

is part of the mental discipline of being a ruler?

I don't think he knew how to rule a country.

He was a great painter.

He was brought to that position to do things that he had no idea.

I don't know if he was able even to manage his household

when he was the prince.

He was not brought up as an emperor or prepared to be an emperor.

He never imagined he would become emperor.

Instead he was brought up as a rich man, as a man with great taste,

knowing how to enjoy his life, how to do art, how to kill his time.

Instead of managing the country, he was expecting

something to come down from heaven to help him.

And when a flock of cranes,

traditionally seen as messengers of the gods,

landed on the Imperial Palace, Huizong tried to perpetuate

the moment by painting it.

Not so much a work of art as an act of denial.

A doomed attempt to keep the forces of history at bay.

But those forces were already beginning to turn on him.

For some years, Huizong had been using silk to pay off mercenary

tribesmen from the north.

An attempt to protect his vulnerable northern borders from invasion.

It was a ploy that was doomed to fail.

By 1126, it was all over for the emperor whose passion for art

and antiquities had blinded him to the dangers towards which

his country had slipped.

Kaifeng was burned to the ground by his allies turned enemies

from the north. Huizong was taken prisoner

and would die in captivity nine years later.

The remnants of the Song dynasty were pushed south

and China fell into a period of division and violence,

worsened by the deepening threat of nomads from the north.

The popular art created around this time shows just how uneasy

the Chinese felt during this period of turmoil.

The cave complex at Dazu, 1,000 miles south-west of Beijing,

contains one of the most spectacular assemblies of Buddhist sculpture

anywhere in the world.

Much of it created towards the end of the Song dynasty.

They vividly embody and enact the nightmares of a generation.

The Dazu cave carvings reach their climax in this enormous

depiction of the terrors of hell.

These are the punishments that await those who have not shown good karma,

good behaviour in their lives.

They will be reborn into these tormented existences.

What it shows us are the various versions of Buddhist hell.

This is the hell of freezing cold and boiling hot.

You freeze and then you're thrown into this cauldron

for the demon to stir you. Look at the flames that lick up.

Stirred with glee by a demon with an animal's head.

This is the hell of being sawn in half.

HE MAKE SAWING SOUNDS

His feet are bound to a frame, he's suspended upside down.

Look at how much fun, look at the relish with which he's sawing

this poor unfortunate upside-down sinner.

All of these hells are designed to speak very vividly to the

ordinary people of the Song dynasty.

Their own tools, their carpentry tools, their agricultural tools,

are the actual weapons that are being used to torture them.

The style of these sculptures isn't remotely sophisticated,

refined, elegant. It's graphic, violent, almost cartoon-like.

This is popular art.

What hope is there of escape?

Well, the one ray of hope is to be found in the upper level

of carvings.

Above you have these ten rather forbidding kings

who stand for dharma, for the Buddhist law.

They stand in judgment over humanity.

The only ray of hope is provided by the Bodhisattva in the middle.

It's her mission to bring light into this darkness.

I have to say the overall effect is of a very little bit of light

and an awful lot of darkness.

Over the next 150 years, the threat from the north persisted,

but this time it was the Mongol hoards.

First under Genghis Khan,

who advanced on the Song forces now entrenched in southern China.

The art of the Song courts would reflect these troubled times.

Chen Rong's Nine Dragons created in 1244.

One of the great masterpieces of all Chinese art.

It's like a bolt from the blue.

This image of mythical beasts,

scaly creatures with their staring eyes, fighting the abyss,

doing battle with whirlpool, tsunami, flood and deluge.

What's the picture about? Nine dragons. Nine, an auspicious number.

The dragon, great symbol of power, potency, fertility.

It's what the emperor wears on his robes.

It's what he decorates his palace with.

It's a symbol of Chinese might.

I think this great scroll, ten metres long,

is a kind of extended prayer for help in troubled times.

Think what's happening in 13th century China.

Genghis Khan is on the move. The Mongol Empire has been founded.

Theirs is a world full of threat.

Who's going to win?

The dragon?

Or the whirlpool?

The artist doesn't know.

It was, of course, the whirlpool.

In 1279, the Song were finally defeated by the Mongols,

absorbed into what was briefly the world's largest empire

stretching all the way from the Pacific Coast to Eastern Europe.

In that same year, Genghis Khan's grandson, Kublai Khan,

proclaimed himself leader of a new Mongol dynasty

and gave China the capital it still has today.

Beijing, Peking as it used to be known.

It's world-famous, but how many people know

that it was actually built by the Mongols?

They didn't want their new city in the north of China close

to their ancient homelands,

to seem like an invader town, they wanted it to look Chinese, so they

actually modelled it on a template laid out in the Confucian classics.

They built a city in grid formation.

They made some changes.

They did away with the old barriers and gates within a Chinese city,

separating one area from another.

After all, they were nomads,

they liked the free movement of people, the free movement of goods.

If you were a fly on the wall 700 years ago,

you might have thought that it was business as usual

in Mongol China but you'd have been wrong.

The Mongols regarded the indigenous Chinese people as untrustworthy

and most of the literati, the scholars who traditionally

ran the country, were banned from government jobs.

This meant that artists and men of letters were marginalised.

Painters and calligraphers came from the literati class.

But what would emerge from this adversity was a spectacular

surge of artistic creation.

This is Autumn Boating On A Maple River,

painted by Sheng Mao in 1361.

The Mongol, or Yuan dynasty as it's known,

marked a new dawn for the literati painters,

the Chinese scholar artists who had now become ostracised.

Under the Yuan dynasty,

the intellectual elite of China felt disenfranchised and isolated.

They collectively turned away from the centres of power

in a kind of frenzy of disgust and retreated to nature.

They literally upped sticks, left the cities

and moved to the rivers and the landscapes.

They lived among farmers and fishermen.

And at their centre was a charismatic recluse called Ni Zan.

In many ways he was contradictory.

Obsessively fastidious, he washed his hands all the time

and doused himself in so much perfume that apparently you

could smell him in a place five minutes after he'd left it.

And yet he spent 20 years of his life living on a simple

houseboat, devoting himself to painting, calligraphy and poetry.

He saw all three as aspects of the same one activity.

And together with his friends, he invented what was an entirely

new form of Chinese landscape painting - the art of misery.

I've come to the Shanghai Museum to see one of the greatest

examples of this new kind of art, an art of self-expression.

It's one of Ni Zan's scroll paintings entitled Six Gentlemen.

And it's so precious, it's hardly ever displayed.

So, I have to make my way to a secure area in the basement to see it.

My instructions are...

..to wait here.

Good timing. Yes, we are ready. You're ready? Fantastic.

Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.

Hello, I've got an appointment with Ni Zan.

Gosh, I feel like I'm entering Fort Knox.

The Fort Knox of literati painting.

So, is this the Ni Zan?

(Wow.)

I can't wait.

We in the West are used to the idea of going to an art gallery

and we can just see its greatest treasures like that.

There they are on the wall, the Rubens, the Van Gogh,

whatever it might be. Chinese art is not like that.

Chinese scrolls are so delicate, so fragile that many of these

works of art are only exhibited once every ten, once every 20 years.

So, it really is a privilege to be able to see one of the great

masterpieces by the principal painter of the literati movement.

ANDREW GASPS

'The painting's title Six Gentlemen is a loaded metaphor for what was

'going on in China at the time.'

Oh, goodness.

Oh, it's so delicate.

At first sight, it looks like nothing much.

Six Gentlemen, six pine trees on a mound,

an expanse of dead space,

bit of water

and a distant line of hills.

It's a very minimal depiction of nature.

There's a huge contrast between this relatively modest, intimate,

very important, intimate scroll,

this depiction of an almost nothing

like an out-of-the-side-of-the-eye glance at a piece of landscape,

a piece of dead space, a piece of hill,

and those great, huge monumental depictions of landscape.

Here, the artist is using landscape very much as an expression

of his own emotional core.

And there is...

..a wonderful sense of these trees almost...

They represent, they are fragile, they are slender,

they are in a difficult place.

They have planted themselves on stony ground

and yet they stand and yet they persist.

This tree almost seems to have a human foot.

Can you see that?

It's anthropomorphised.

He painted the same image again and again and again and again and again.

This was the image in his mind's eye.

It stood for his own determination to persist.

Ni Zan was also a great, great calligrapher

and this piece of calligraphy is as important,

certainly in the eyes of any Chinese connoisseur

looking at the painting, it's as important as the image itself.

It speaks of the origin of the painting.

It tells us that Ni Zan was invited by his host to paint this

picture and he didn't want to do it because he was tired.

It was late, his host greeted him with a lamp.

With a lamp, very important detail.

So, it's night-time when he gets to the house,

when he paints this picture and yet this picture is in the daytime.

It's Ni Zan's way of emphasising that these are images that

come from the mind.

They're not images that come from the outside world.

The tragic image of the outcast literati artist, as characterised

by Ni Zan's six pine trees, has had an enduring appeal in China.

TRADITIONAL SINGING

In the remote countryside,

the six gentlemen still congregate to this very day,

even though their names have changed,

and some of them nowadays are women.

The tradition of the elegant gathering, in which musicians,

poets, calligraphers and painters come together to share inspiration

is still very much alive.

This is a collective performance where the artists not only

work individually but ultimately come together.

In Chinese culture,

writing and painting are two expressions of the same impulse.

And there's no better way to understand that

than in one of these elegant gatherings.

The painter performs his art using the brush

and the calligrapher performs her art using the brush

and in a sense, they're both attempting to do the same thing.

See, now the painter has begun to work on the same sheet

as the calligrapher.

He's using the same brush and the same ink.

That's very much the spirit of the elegant gathering as well,

that goes back to the Yuan period when the artists got together,

the literati got together to keep each other company,

to show group solidarity and that was

when this idea began that they would actually write on each

other's paintings, paint on each other's calligraphy.

Each work of art was itself a kind of statement of literati

solidarity, art was a form of self-defence.

Not all artists fled from the court of the new Yuan dynasty.

A generation before Ni Zan, one of the most celebrated of the

literati painters had created this work, specifically for the Mongols.

This is Grooms And Horses of 1292 by Zhao Mengfu.

The image of the horse calculated to please China's nomadic

rulers from the steppes.

The faithful attendant, a self-portrait of Zhao Mengfu.

Seen by some as a collaborator, a traitor even,

Zhao Mengfu later regretted his decision to serve the Mongols.

He retreated to the mountains where his art would radically change.

Now, together with Ni Zan, Zhao Mengfu is perhaps the most

celebrated of the literati painter-calligraphers of the

Yuan period and this is perhaps his most radical masterpiece.

It's called Orchids And Rocks and it's astonishingly pared down.

It's...

..absolutely expressive of this Yuan notion of scholarly misery.

This is the reject's vision, the worm's-eye view of the world.

It's come down to...

a single square metre of turf.

What's he looking at?

A scribbled piece of rock, two dead twigs,

brambly twigs with thorns sticking out of them

that look almost like scars stitched into the surface of the picture.

Some twitching insects, a few fronds of grass,

that is what the world has shrunk to.

That's what it's shrunk to for these rejects from society.

It's a tremendous image.

It's so raw. It's such a modern-looking image.

If I didn't know what it was and I simply looked at it unseen

and blind, I would guess 1920.

But no, no, no.

This is the 13th century.

Zhao Mengfu's paintings are highly prized, but examples

of his calligraphy are venerated like holy relics in modern China.

This is seen as the handwriting of the Chinese soul.

Zhao Mengfu's calligraphy is

so precious that I'm only allowed a few minutes with it open

and I have to wear a surgical mask which makes me feel even

more like a doctor standing over a patient on the operating table.

It's a beautiful piece of work and, essentially,

it's a short poem, a gift to one of his closest friends,

and its subject is water, different kinds of water.

Here, we've got the characters for cloud, fog,

moisture and what's wonderful about Zhao Mengfu's calligraphy is

just how beautifully expressive it is.

This cursive line that seems almost to

flow across the page like water,

the liquidity of the word moisture where he's almost allowed

the ink to get out of his control,

but then caught it into the gesture that shapes the mark

and as he moves across the page,

it becomes ever more flowing as the water flows more rapidly,

the script flows more quickly and it ends with this beautiful,

almost dribble of a signature, Zhao Mengfu.

Zhao and his fellow exiles identified with water,

ancient Taoist symbol of resilience.

Cut it with a knife, it heals.

Disturb it, it always finds its own level.

It's one of the masterpieces of Chinese calligraphy.

And my time is up.

Thank you for showing me the Zhao Mengfu.

Xie xie.

Goodbye, sir.

A growing resentment towards their Mongol oppressors

led to Han Chinese revolts in the mid-14th century.

And by 1368, the indigenous Chinese had finally reclaimed their country.

A new Ming dynasty was born.

With the Mongols gone,

the Chinese rapidly regained their old entrepreneurial zest.

The merchant class prospered, exporting goods -

particularly pottery - across Asia,

the Middle East and even into Europe.

The city of Jingdezhen had,

for centuries, been the ceramics capital of China.

But it was the manufacture of porcelain here during

the new Ming dynasty which was to give China its first global brand.

The world couldn't get enough of this fine Ming porcelain,

created by Jingdezhen's ceramicists and painters.

But then neither could the Emperor.

The city's defining moment came

when the Imperial Court requested the best porcelain

for the ruler of the Ming dynasty himself, to be made here.

An imperial kiln was constructed in the city in 1367.

And from its ruins,

archaeologists have retrieved some truly remarkable finds.

Over the past 20 years, a team of technicians has been working

with shards of porcelain recovered from the imperial kiln.

They've been piecing them together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

Not only have they managed to reconstruct

a number of wonderful porcelain pots and bowls,

they've also been able to rewrite a small piece of history from the Ming past.

We're looking for Professor Jang.

'On a wet Jingdezhen morning, I met Professor Jang

'from the Ceramic Archaeological Research Institute.'

How lovely to be here.

'What surprised the archaeologists is that

'some of the perfect Ming porcelain had been deliberately smashed.'

Extraordinary! Now, tell me something about these pieces.

For example, this one.

Why was it destroyed?

TRANSLATION:

So the archaeological evidence tells us

a great deal about his belief that what he owned had to be

exclusive to him, because this is actually a perfect piece.

There's nothing wrong with the firing, there's nothing wrong

with the painting, there's nothing wrong with the design.

It's simply that the Emperor wanted there to be only two

in the world and both of them were to be his.

What they didn't want - the one thing they really didn't want -

was for the Emperor to go to someone else's house and see this bowl.

I think my favourite object... This is my favourite thing.

I'm very intrigued by this. This is an intact object.

It hasn't been smashed.

It's this perfectly decorated, wonderful survivor.

It's absolutely exquisite. It's got birds, it's got an auspicious crane.

What's it for?

This is... This is... Oh, that's it.

There's his name on the bottom.

"Created for the Emperor."

And it's...

this wonderful relic of an entirely bygone age.

If we put the lid back on it, it's as if we're

putting the lid back on the world of the Ming dynasty itself.

The Ming emperor

presided over an age of contradictions.

80 years before Columbus and Magellan, Chinese ships

laden with porcelain sailed all the way to Africa.

Yet later during the Ming,

trade with corrupt foreigners was discouraged by the Imperial Court -

a Confucian slap on the wrist which the merchants mostly ignored.

Thanks to the merchant class,

theatre and other popular arts flourished during the Ming -

everything from graphic novels to boldly designed playing cards.

But at court, where the scars of Mongol invasion had been reopened

by new wars with the old enemy, a siege mentality prevailed.

Chinese art had to be elegant, old-fashioned, safe.

Now, the trick in these museums of scroll paintings is that

you have to stand quite close to the glass and then the light comes on.

Why are we here?

We're here because I'm interested in the painting of the Ming dynasty

and the way in which it reflects this rather frozen,

bureaucratic attitude to life that the Ming emperors hard.

If the ladies of the court had their bound feet,

the painters of the court had their hands bound

because in the Ming dynasty,

you had to be a member of the Imperial Academy to work as a professional painter

and in order to get into the Imperial Academy,

you had to copy the styles of the artists of the past.

So look at this. This is by Dai Jin,

but it's called Landscape After The Style Of Yan Wengui.

He's painted it as a pastiche

of the great Song dynasty landscape painter.

Here we've got a very beautiful depiction of bamboo in wind.

Bamboo, that ancient Chinese symbol of the upstanding,

bending to the wind - strong follower of the Emperor.

Here it's placed in a void very much in the style of the Yuan landscapes.

And here, this is by Yao Shu, sitting alone in the woods,

its subject is melancholy, misery,

it's Ni Zan all over again.

The trouble is, that Ming art was frozen in its respect for the past.

It venerated the Chinese-ness of Chinese culture to such

an extent that it produced an art of ossification, almost completely

but not entirely because it also left space

for an art of dissidence.

Artists who failed the imperial exams struck out on their own

and they created this -

oh, you've got to turn it on again.

- this wonderful flowering...

Flowering is the right word because the subject is itself

flowers, but look at this.

Isn't that fantastic?

This free anti-academic, almost abstract, expressionist,

explosion of vegetation.

Painted by Xu Wei,

even his calligraphy is riotous.

Blooms such as these could never have flourished in the airless

world of the Imperial Court.

Just as Western painting was entering the Renaissance, Chinese

imperial painting was in decline.

The rulers of the Ming dynasty expressed their values most

forcefully, not in painting, but in architecture.

In the heart of Beijing is the emperor's palace,

the Forbidden City.

It perfectly embodies the Ming dynasty's conservative

brand of Confucianism,

enthroning the emperor, father of his people, in a daunting

citadel of stone.

So, imagine you are a 15th century European visitor to China

and this is your first look at the Forbidden City.

You've never seen anything like it before.

These five bridges lead you towards

the Gate Of Supreme Harmony.

Everything here is symbolic.

The five bridges stand for the five Confucian virtues - filial piety,

respect, compassion, kindness, etc.

And they cross this canal which has been artfully designed

to mirror the shape of a Confucian official's belt.

That side is the Hall Of Military Excellence.

That side is the Hall Of Cultural Excellence.

War, learning.

Yang, yin.

All of the buildings are configured to reflect celestial harmony.

The five bridges, as well as symbolising the Confucian

virtues, stand for the Milky Way.

We've now crossed the Milky Way

and we have entered, or are entering, Heaven.

According to Chinese astrology, the emperor is the son of Heaven.

The Forbidden City is his palace

and, therefore, the centre of the universe.

This is the gate that leads us towards the emperor.

The roofs are yellow.

Yellow is the colour of the emperor.

No-one else in Beijing is allowed to have a yellow roof,

and the roof is guarded by these mythical creatures.

Look at them - one, two, three, four, five, six, seven

at each level who exist both to draw down celestial power

and to ward off evil.

Every last detail is charged with symbolic significance.

Look at these cloud-wreathed pillars.

Look at these images of coiling dragons.

The roof painted, every last inch painted.

So, this is the gate. It is only the Gate Of Supreme Harmony.

Step across its threshold and there

is the Hall Of Supreme Harmony.

The Hall Of Supreme Harmony, the emperor's throne room,

is THE destination for the modern tourist.

But for me, there's an attic sale feel about the modern display -

just some old furniture and other bric-a-brac in a darkened room.

SPEAKS CHINESE

But that too tells a kind of truth about this

place as the epicentre of the Ming dynasty.

A dynasty that expended much effort on pretending to be more

all-powerful than it actually was.

The Forbidden City is magnificent,

but its architecture is the architecture of wish fulfilment,

designed to protect an emperor who ultimately could not be

protected, and to keep at bay powers that could not be resisted.

Which brings us back full circle to the Great Wall.

The wall too was completed under the Ming dynasty,

and is itself very much a reflection of the anxieties of the time.

It's come to stand, I think, in the public imagination as a great

symbol of China's imperial sense of its own impregnability,

but, in fact, it's actually the largest confession

of weakness ever built.

It was breached on hundreds of occasions and, eventually,

China fell again to another invader from the north, the Manchu,

who formed the last of the nation's great dynasties, the Qing.

And so the pattern of Chinese history,

so vividly reflected in its art, repeated itself once more.

Sometimes inward looking, sometimes responding to the shock of invasion.

But the greatest threat of all still lay far beyond the borders

marked out by the wall in what we now simply call the West.

And what happened when China met the West?

Well, that's another story.