Spice Routes and Silk Roads Michael Wood: The Story of India

Civilisation is made by many things but, most of all by human interaction, by contact and exchange.

Rich in resources, India has traded with the world since the beginning of history.

But commerce is never just about commodities,

it's the way civilisations adapt and grow, the way people learn about themselves and others,

discover new ideas and new worlds.

In the time of the Roman Empire, the opening of the Silk Road

and the Spice Route saw the beginnings of a world economy.

And at the centre was India.

Sometimes change in history happens in the unlikeliest of ways.

Here in India, 2000 years ago in the time of the Roman Empire,

these three things - the produce of a weed, of a grass

and of the lava of a beetle -

changed the course of Indian history,

brought about the growth of civilisation

and caused other countries to make great voyages

across thousands of miles of ocean, seeking the riches of India.

The Arabian Sea off the coast of Kerala.

Our boat is carrying timber, pepper and spices from South India

to the Persian Gulf, the way they've done it for more than 2,000 years.

It's easy to forget the great voyages of Columbus and Vasco de Gama were to find India.

And those voyages started in the days of the Romans.

We know about the Roman trade with India because of a guidebook

written by an old Greek sea captain

who knew Indian ports like the back of his hand.

It's full of the most wonderful detail that enables us to sample

the sights and sounds of India in the time of the Ancient Romans.

"And this was the time," wrote an ancient historian,

"when history became one, when the affairs of the Mediterranean, Africa and Asia connected."

From the 1st century AD, Roman trading ports dotted the shores of the Red Sea, East Africa and India.

Ah, here we are, yes.

'It started with the discovery of the monsoon.'

Aden, right.

HE SPEAKS IN NATIVE LANGUAGE

July, August time, monsoon?

You are sailing or not sailing?

In June...?

In July, August...?

-Dangerous time.

-Dangerous time.

It's so easy as a Western person to see things from a Western perspective.

We talk about these great voyages of exploration,

the discovery of the monsoon, as if Indian sailors didn't know about the monsoon all along.

But still, the Romans and Greeks DID discover the monsoon for themselves.

And the man who did it, according to the story, was a sailor called Hippalus in about 150 BC.

And what Hippalus discovered was this.

In June, the south-west monsoon begins to blow in this direction across the Indian Ocean.

The seas become heavy, it becomes dangerous to sail, but with strong enough ships

you can take that wind, coming out of the Red Sea, and it'll bring you across to India.

"It's hard going," says the Greek guide to the Indian Ocean, "but you can get there really quickly."

And then - this is the really great thing about it - in November,

a couple of months after the heavy winds die down, the north-east monsoon blows you back the other way.

And this is what they came for - the Spice Coast of Kerala.

And if you were a Mediterranean merchant, wouldn't you like to stay here?

But for distant worlds to make contact, they need the technology, and the Romans developed that.

And miraculously, you can see it today.

Here in Kerala, the traditional boat builders still build

huge, wooden, ocean-going ships, using methods brought to India 2,000 years ago.

How long is this boat?

-About 70 feet.

-70 feet?

Yeah, yeah.

They recently built a monster here, 170 feet long, bigger than biggest Roman ships,

purely by eye, without a single sketch.

So this is a modification of the ancient way of constructing.

Greek and Roman shipbuilders in Egypt, once trade with India opened up,

devised a special way of constructing the ships

in which they made the skin first with those interlocking joints,

mortise and tenons and a dowel through, so it was incredibly strong, could cope with heavy seas.

And then putting the frame in, the full frame in, after they'd constructed the skin.

And it was that technical advance, plus the knowledge of the monsoons,

that enabled the Greek and Roman navigators to open up the trade with India.

And what the Romans wanted was spices.

This is one of the pepper warehouses in old Cochin, built by Jewish merchants from Iraq long ago.

Sacks of pepper destined for the tables of Europe and America.

Kerala's Jews first came with the Roman spice trade.

I wish you could smell the air, it really is spicy.

You know that connotation - heady, dreamy, erotic even.

And all of it is the produce of native South Indian plants,

some of them weeds, like pepper, a Tamil word.

And another South Indian word - ginger.

Ginger shall be hot in the mouth, says Shakespeare.

It's about 60, 65.

And it's grown in Kerala?

The history of food is a part of the history of civilisation.

Food is an essential of life, and for all cultures, eating together, one of the life's great pleasures.

Indian was perhaps the first international cuisine.

And here you can see the beginning, born of the simple need to preserve food in the heat of the tropics.

This is what the Roman craze for spices and pepper was all about -

food.

Coriander, fresh, everything mixed, a little water.

Garam masala?

-Garam masala.

-Some wine?

-No wine.

-Sour vinegar. Sour vinegar.

A top Roman celebrity chef wrote a cookbook with 460-odd recipes,

350 of them full of pepper,

blasting away at the taste buds, from whole spiced flamingos

to dormice stuffed with peppercorns.

The stuffed dormice never caught on here in vegetarian South India, but many other commodities and ideas did.

The Romans wanted many things from India.

Spices, pepper and cardamom

and many more.

Gemstones, pearls

and one little known thing - peacocks.

They say South Indian peacocks were a favourite pet

among the ladies of the Roman aristocracy.

Fantastic!

But India was a golden sparrow then, not now.

India did not need much from Rome.

What we got is mainly gold,

as medals, coins, silver, copper, tin,

antimony and, of course, Roman wine.

There were 40 or 50 ports trading with Rome on the west coast of India.

The greatest was called Muziris, the first emporium of India, as the Roman geographers called it.

Everyone came here. The apostle Thomas, Doubting Thomas, is supposed to have landed here in AD 50.

The Syrian Christians have been here ever since.

Jews, later Muslim Arabs, all religions came here peacefully

and stayed on the banks of the Periyar river.

But Muziris itself has disappeared...

until now.

In 2005, the site of Muziris was found a mile or two inland

under a tangle of pepper vines and banana trees.

The clues which led the archaeologists here were Roman coins, beads and glass

and broken pottery dug up by the local people in their gardens.

How about that!

Oh, yeah.

Actually, can use further.

-So that is the plot where we excavated there.

-Yeah, yeah.

We found similar structures about three metres that side.

The regular trench we excavated.

The place was probably a Roman treaty port, next door to an Indian village, which is still here.

This is a habitation mound,

this whole area is...

spread with a lot of pottery,

bricks, tiles, everything.

Every cultural thing.

Everybody had been looking for the site of Muziris, hadn't they? Everybody wondered where it was.

We dug a trench measuring two metres by two metres

and at a depth of about one metre

we found a brick structure in this trench,

and further below we found a lot of amphora, what is known as Roman amphora pottery,

and small coin fragments.

And this is the best piece of amphora.

Oh, it's the bottom of an amphora, yes. It's fantastic.

I've seen these all along the route from Egypt,

the Red Sea ports and even in the Egyptian desert.

This amphora was used for importing wine

and also, to some extent, olive oil and a kind of fish sauce called garum.

In the temple here in Muziris, there was a statue of the Emperor Augustus.

So Queen Victoria wasn't the first Western ruler whose image stood on the banks of an Indian river.

I'm a great believer in the living presence of the past.

You've only got to spend an hour in a place like this and you can feel it all around you.

This is what it would have felt like 2,000 years ago.

The evening catch being unloaded, the stalls cooking food.

A Greek or a Roman standing on this spot now would recognise this scene.

But ancient South India was more than a string of trading ports.

It was a great classical civilisation whose centre of power lay over the mountains to the east.

Over the Western Ghats, the spine of India.

There are two passes which lead eastwards through the mountains of Kerala

and into the plains of South India,

both of them used by the railway engineers in later times.

These routes lead into the land Marco Polo called the most splendid province on earth.

The place the British thought the most fertile part of their empire - Tamil Nadu.

This is rice country - so fertile it gives three harvests a year.

And the capital of this southern civilisation was the city of Madurai.

To arrive here is to enter one of those thrilling places on earth

where the ancient past still exists alongside the modern world.

Just imagine, if classical Athens was alive today,

and the goddess of the city still presiding over her citizens.

That's Madurai.

"At dawn," says a Tamil poem of the Roman period,

"Madurai wakes to the sound of the Vedas, and the air is perfumed with the scent of flowers."

Tamil Nadu is the world's last surviving classical civilisation.

Its people still live comfortably, both in modernity and in sacred time.

Part of the global culture, but also the guardians of humanity's older traditions.

And, as in Roman times, they still worship the city's goddess, Meenakshi.

So Meenakshi you especially go to for marriage?

Yes, especially for marriage.

Also for babies?

SHE SPEAKS IN NATIVE LANGUAGE

Her son attends an internet college here, she has come to pray to god.

Ah, right, for success in his studies.

Today, Tamil is India's last living classical language.

2,000 years ago, Madurai was the centre of South Indian culture.

Wow, this is extraordinary, isn't it?

So this is the manuscript.

This palm leaf manuscript is a late copy of an epic poem composed here in Roman times.

It's only 100 years old? So, still in Tamil Nadu 100 years ago,

they were writing palm leaf manuscripts.

So this is how ancient scribes wrote?

-One letter...

-INDISTINCT

Typewriting machine.

Right to left.

-Really?

-Rare, rare.

-Rare.

-Represent rare manuscript.

-That's confusing, isn't it?

-Rare manuscript, left to right.

-Normal script, left to right.

Rare manuscripts, right to left.

I see, coal and oil. Soot and oil.

Yeah, yeah, OK.

It's absolutely great, isn't it?

Wow!

So, there you are, an ancient Tamil business card.

The old Tamil poems mention Greek and Roman traders

bringing gold to Madurai in exchange for pearls and textiles.

The city still has 6,000 goldsmiths working in the gold quarter.

-Your fathers did it before you and grandfathers?

-Yes.

-It runs in the family?

My father, my grandfather, my grand-grand-grand father...

Everywhere around you, you're seeing what a pre-modern city would have looked like.

Indian textiles have been coveted since ancient times.

I'm not sure it's quite my colour!

-There's more colours.

-Very nice. This is pashmina...?

'Cotton, of course, is native to India.'

-Beautiful!

-This is specimen of shirts.

-It's lovely.

'But it's how the Indians dye it that has always dazzled visitors.'

-You can make one of these in one hour?

-One hour.

-One hour?!

No wonder the Greeks loved it, hey?

The ancient Tamil poems talk about the Greeks wandering around

with jaws dropping at Madurai, and they still do drop, don't they?

This building, market, 450 years ago.

This is a big market, like a stock exchange.

Madurai's a marketing town.

Marketing town. It's a centre.

-Pilgrims are still coming here, but to do shopping.

-Happy shopping.

They do happy shopping here!

What the Indians wanted most of all was gold.

India today is the biggest importer of gold in the world,

although not much of it gets into circulation because the Indians,

as the Ancient Greeks observed, love above all to decorate themselves.

So this is a necklace...of coins?

It's traditional, when we get married and those kind of special occasions,

our parents give us a dowry of gold.

Second thing, we like to decorate ourselves with ornaments.

May I lift up? So, this is the necklace made out of very small coins?

Size of the little gold coins that the Romans sent over here.

Ah, Goddess Lakshmi, goddess of wealth.

Of wealth, yes.

Roman writers talk about 100 million sesterces

being sent over to India, and the interesting thing is, back then they were used for adornment, too.

They weren't used as circulating money.

Romans complained about the balance of payments in their day,

just as the Indian government is today.

So that's how India began to trade with the Mediterranean by sea.

The first glimmerings of a global economy.

The rulers here in Madurai would even send their own embassies to Emperor Augustus in Rome.

But at that moment, far to the north, events were unfolding

that would spread Indian trade and culture and religion by land as far as China.

Beyond the great chain of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau,

a powerful new nation was rising in the deserts of Central Asia.

They would come to rule in India

and galvanise commercial and cultural exchanges

between East and West along a new trade way - the Silk Route.

This is Merv in Turkmenistan in Central Asia.

And it was in the first century BC out here in Central Asia

that the merchants of China and the Western world met for the very first time.

From that moment, the Silk Route was open.

There are still little places where people come to do worship.

And it would be the Silk Route which would be the catalyst

in a new and brilliant phase in the history of India.

That's just amazing, isn't it?

Like the interior of a volcanic crater.

This is just the citadel of ancient Merv,

and the citadel was one tiny corner of the vast city

built in the time of the Ancient Greeks and Romans.

Doesn't that give you an idea of the wealth and importance of the Silk Route?

The empire that controlled the Silk Route began as a confederation of tribes

who had migrated from the edge of China across Central Asia to conquer Afghanistan and then India.

They called themselves the Kushans.

The story of the Kushans' forgotten empire takes us to Kabul in Afghanistan,

where they first made their capital on the edge of the Indian subcontinent.

I filmed this 10 years ago during the first war with the Taliban.

When they came to rule in India, the Kushans adopted Buddhism

and fostered a great flowering of Buddhist culture here,

all paid for by their control of trade on the Silk Route.

These pieces of Kushan Buddhist art in the Kabul museum have now been smashed by the Taliban,

just as they blew up the famous Buddhas of Bamiyan.

Look, here's a...

here's a Greek-period Buddha.

This headless statue of a Kushan king was also pulverised.

But what has survived is a crucial inscription

in Greek letters addressed to a great king of the Kushan empire.

It was this text that led to the decipherment of their lost language.

It was in 1957 that the French archaeologists in Afghanistan

discovered a complete inscription, and that was, of course, the key.

It was something to get your teeth into - complete sentences, verbs.

For a linguist, it's very tiresome having texts on coins and seals

because they're just phrases, just names and epithets, and no complete sentence.

The excitement of the code-breaker!

And the decipherment has continued as further artefacts have come out of war-torn Afghanistan -

letters, contracts, deals, even magic spells.

More insights into the Kushan culture that survived for centuries here in Afghanistan.

This is a legal contract, and the custom was to write serious legal contracts like this,

to write it in two copies, and then one copy would be rolled up, as you see here, and sealed

so that it couldn't be altered, and then the second copy would be left open to be read.

It has opened up a lost civilisation, hasn't it? Or at least a civilisation that most of us knew nothing about.

Where did the Kushans come from? And what led to them using Greek?

The Kushans were probably the chief clan, really, of the people known as the Yueh-chi.

That's the Chinese name for these people. They're first attested in Chinese sources.

And they come from somewhere in China, far to the north and east,

and they gradually came to what is now Afghanistan,

to the northern part of Afghanistan, in about the second century BC.

And it was only after they arrived there that they came to know

the Greek script, presumably their language had not been written before that.

And they learnt the Greek script which is known in the area ever since the time of Alexander.

And now a second inscription has thrown dramatic new light

on the greatest king of the Kushans, Kanishka, and his vast Indian empire.

This inscription is not nearly as well-preserved as the inscription of Surkh Kotal,

but it's an even more important historical inscription

because it describes the deeds of the great king and the extension of his power across India

and the cities which had submitted to him right across the north of India.

But from other sources we know also that the Kushans extended their power

well into what is Chinese Turkistan, deep into Central Asia.

So, above Tibet, up towards the Aral Sea and down towards the Bay of Bengal.

That's right, it's a huge area.

The new inscription also tells us about the great king himself.

It also describes his genealogy - himself, Kanishka,

and his three predecessors - his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather.

He describes himself as the righteous and as the autocrat.

He has this wonderful word "autocrat", which is a Greek term, of course.

And he says that he received the kingship from Nanna and from all the gods.

So he was the ruler with divine right, apparently.

So, like the Moguls and British after them,

the Kushans were outsiders who became rulers of one of biggest Indian empires.

An empire that controlled the Silk Route and stretched all the way

from Central Asia deep into India, connected by the Khyber Pass.

The Khyber Pass really came into its own as the connecting trade way

between India and those great desert oases of Central Asia.

Under the Kushans, trade grew, the economy thrived,

and soon they followed the earlier Greek and Indian rulers here by minting coins for trade.

It was a boom time, the population increased several times in a few generations, and you can still find

traces of that boom time in the bazaars all the way between Kabul and Peshawar in the coins.

Basilios.

King Apollodotus.

On one side an Indian elephant, and on the other side, with the local script, a hump-backed Indian bull.

And then the Kushans themselves, the people who really opened up

the Silk Route to trade, sacrificing at a fire altar with an Iranian god - Oshto, is it,

on one side? Although on their coins you get the Buddha, you get Atheni,

"Hercules, Shiva, the gods of everywhere between the Mediterranean and India.

"Architect of the great salvation,

"Kanishka the Kushan, the righteous, the just, the autocrat, who obtained

"the kingship from all the gods, inaugurated year one and proclaimed his edict to the whole of India.

"May the gods keep him ever fortunate and may he rule all India for 1,000 years."

The Kushans had conquered north-west India in about 80 AD,

filling a power vacuum left by the collapse of local dynasties.

And their first capital inside India was the ancient city of Peshawar in today's Pakistan.

Peshawar's has been a caravan town ever since, making its money from its old Silk Route contacts.

Babu said that this was a garden city.

He said, if you put a blind man towards Peshawar, the moment he is within the environment of Peshawar,

through every smell and beautiful air, he will say, "I am in Peshawar now."

This is the Krishti Akbari, during the time of the Akhbar.

-The Moghul bricks.

-Yeah, the Moghul bricks.

And still the wooden gates we have. Look at this, see the wood?

It's just fantastic, isn't it?

This is the area which was really owned by very rich people,

rich families with their very commercial background,

and they had their business investment in Bukhara.

So, really this is... Salaam.

So, this is really the riches of the city coming from the Silk Route,

the old Silk Route connections with Central Asia, Bukhara, Samarkand.

Exactly, because the trade has been the transport

for years from the north to the east.

Peshawar has played like a host, whether they were invaders or they were travellers or they were riders.

So, this was the place where they intermingle with the people

for endless cups of the green teas, sipping their green teas.

Endless cups of green teas!

And one of the richest cargo on those camel caravans

that used to ply down the Khyber right up to the 1970s was silk.

Raw Chinese silk, to be turned by Indian weavers into works of art.

Seven months time to make one each.

Fantastic!

All one piece, no joint in this.

And look at the back also.

Pepper on their tables, peacocks in their gardens, silk on their bodies.

"We must be mad," grumbled Pliny in Rome, "bankrupting ourselves for India."

Gosh, the work is very fine, isn't it?

-Yes, sir, thank you very much.

-Very fine.

That is just knockout, isn't it?

You should be careful, because it's slippery.

Yeah, it's been a bit washed by the rain, hasn't it?

Yes.

It's for the country, for the world, and to my mind this culture belongs to everybody.

-It's not only ours.

-Yeah, yeah.

It's a human culture.

Right in the middle of Peshawar, they've started the biggest excavation ever in the subcontinent,

and it's turning out to be a revelation about the Kushans' role in Pakistani and Indian history.

Each layer is marked by 10, 15 kinds.

Even the British are already stratified!

-So, the Moghuls are about six feet down?

-Yes.

So, that's 500 years.

You can see that at about ten feet you are covering about 1,000 years.

The Kushans about 24 feet deep.

Yes, about 24 to 26.

And you still haven't got the bottom yet.

No, no, we haven't reached the bottom. These are the Greek levels.

So, this is a continuous profile of 2,300 years,

and this is the earliest living city in the whole of South Asia.

The earliest living city in the whole of South Asia.

-So far.

-So, what was it about the Kushans' rule

that brought about this boom time in population, in towns and economies?

There seems to be some kind of almost revolutionary opening up of the world in the Kushan period.

Why do you think that is?

Very simple question. And I still say that to the Pakistanis

and particularly to my people.

Because of peace, because Buddhism was the religion of peace, no war.

And Buddhism is the vital clue to the story of Kanishka.

When The Buddha himself was here in Gandara, he made a prediction.

500 years after his death, a mighty king would rise.

At the stated time,

Kanishka came to the throne, and he ruled the whole world.

At first he despised the Buddha's law,

but one day he was out hunting a white hare when he met a shepherd boy.

Some say the boy was Indra in disguise.

And he was building a small mud stupa.

The Buddha said that, after his death, you would build

the greatest building in the world to house the remains of his body.

So, Kanishka ordered a stupa to be built around the boy's mud stupa.

But however high his stupa rose, the small one always exceeded it, until eventually

it rose 700 feet high.

So, legend says that Kanishka made the greatest building on earth -

a giant domed stupa.

Across Asia he's still remembered as one of the four pillars of Buddhism.

But all trace of his great monument has vanished.

We know the site lay outside the town, in open fields

where traces were located a century ago by a French explorer.

He says this, "If we set out from the Lahore Gate and take the Cherat Road or Khaz al Kani..."

-Yes, Khaz al Kani this way.

-OK.

Today the site has been completely swallowed up by modern Peshawar.

THEY SPEAK IN LOCAL DIALECT

-About two, three kilometres from here.

-OK. That's fantastic.

This is the largest graveyard of Peshawar.

OK. Shokria, shukria.

Thank you very much.

HE SPEAKS IN LOCAL DIALECT

Ah, great, great. Does he know anything about the story of the place?

THEY SPEAK IN LOCAL DIALECT

Great news. This gentleman knows this was the place,

Shah-ji-ki Dheri, the mound of the great king.

He doesn't know who the great king was, but that was the place. Thank you very much!

THEY SPEAK IN LOCAL DIALECT

This is it?

HE SPEAKS IN LOCAL DIALECT

-That is the mound?

-Yes.

The stupa is described by several Chinese Buddhist pilgrims of the late Roman period.

This whole great mound here was the complex that Kanishka built

with not only the giant stupa but a huge monastery with other buildings.

It extended over vast areas.

And it's just been plundered for bricks by the locals for centuries.

And, as so often in the subcontinent, the site is still sacred.

-Sufis still come here?

-Yeah, yeah.

-Every year.

-Every year?

When I was in Calcutta, they have a big stone model of a stupa from here from Peshawar.

And I drew the monument.

I think this is what it looked like.

The Chinese pilgrims talk about five stages.

Sometimes they say the stupa itself was 300 feet, but I think maybe that's too big.

And then on top was a huge kind of wooden structure.

You would have had great flags coming out at an angle, blowing in the wind, huge long silk streamers.

"Of all the stupas in the world,"

the Chinese said, "not one could compare to this in solemn beauty and majestic grandeur."

When the Chinese pilgrims came here 500 years later, they say

that everybody agrees this was the most wonderful stupa in the whole of the inhabited world.

You can imagine coming into the plain of Peshawar, can't you, with this gigantic structure?

"It radiated brilliance. And when the breeze blew, the precious bells sounded in harmony."

Like all great rulers of Indian history, the Kushans accepted and supported all religions.

In their patronage of Buddhism, they developed a new art form, representing the Buddha's story

as a series of miraculous fairytale events, inventing the way we see the Buddha today.

Melding Greek and Indian style, they created an international art

that was transmitted down the Silk Route and conquered the whole of the eastern world.

Legend said that Kanishka buried a small portion of the Buddha's ashes under his great stupa.

Thank you very much.

And tucked away in a corner case in the museum

is a small bronze casket, found on the site, which had contained ashes.

But even this intimate gift is a testimony to the open-mindedness

of the rulers of this vast, multi-cultural empire.

And outside, a series of images that's just wonderfully typical of Kanishka's era.

There's the Buddha on the top with his "fear not" gesture,

but the figures by him, the devotees, are actually great Hindu gods.

There's Indra with his flat crown, and there with his long hair,

Brahma, the creator god.

If we move it round,

there's Kanishka himself,

wearing the royal garb of the Kushan kings.

The great big boots that have clod-hopped all the way across the Hindu Kush.

The big coat that look like a Tibetan chuba, and the double crown, the king of kings.

Maharaja Kanishka.

You can see why Kanishka and the Kushans chose this as their capital,

looking towards the Khyber Pass and those routes in central Asia...

..across westwards to the Mediterranean

and eastwards above Tibet to their ancestral home on the edge of China.

And yet they also ruled 1,500 miles or more that way across the plains of India.

So, by AD 130, when the Emperor Hadrian ruled the Roman Empire in the west

and the Han Chinese far to the east, the Kushans under Kanishka ruled the middle of the world,

from the Aral Sea to the Bay of Bengal.

HE CRIES OUT

Around that time, Kanishka conquered the plains of India and made his new Indian capital the city of Mathura.

An early English traveller in India said that when you come down the grand trunk road from Afghanistan,

it's only when you reach Mathura, with its sacred turtles in the river

and monkeys scampering through the streets, that you get the flavour of the real Hindustan.

Mathura then was an international city.

Sacred to the Hindu God Krishna, whom the Greeks and the Kushans

identified as Hercules, it was a famous pilgrimage place, as it still is today.

See, we've lost all this in the west, haven't we?

But if you'd had come to Canterbury in the time of the Canterbury Tales,

with the hundreds and hundreds of coaching inns for the pilgrims,

it would have been like this, a city teeming with pilgrims like this at festival time.

Where have you come from?

We come from Madhabad!

Madhabad? This is a very long way.

-And your husbands?

-Husbands are there!

You've got rid of them!

You got rid of husbands!

-Yeah!

-Nine ladies, only ladies.

Well, I hope you have a very happy rest of your Tirthayatra.

The ancient Greeks called this city Madoura ton Theon - the City of the Gods.

If you'd been here in the second century AD at the height of the Kushan Empire, you would have seen

Greeks, Romans, Bactrians, Persians, maybe even the odd Chinese.

All the result of the opening up of the Silk Route

and the contacts between the Mediterranean world, India and China.

It was an incredibly exciting time, and this city was at the centre of it.

Dynamic economy, very diverse ethnically in its religious life,

just the place to be, and that explains why you have

such tremendous achievements in ideas and in art here.

MEN CALL OUT

A great historian of the Roman Empire, Edwards Gibbons, said

this period, second century AD, was the happiest time for humanity in the whole history of the world.

Like the Moghuls and the British, the Kushans were outsiders,

a foreign military elite ruling the people of India.

But by encouraging long-distance trade and religious tolerance,

the Kushans brought peace to a vast area for more than two centuries.

And with this peace, they could foster the arts, literature and science.

They were behind the development of Sanskrit as a language of international scholarship

in the east, like medieval Latin in the west.

And another important area of their patronage was medicine.

One of founders of Indian tradition of medicine, Ayurveda,

is said to have been Kanishka's guru and chief minister.

His name was Chanaka.

Here in Mathura, the Gupta family are doctors who for many generations

have followed the tradition handed down from the Kushan era.

300 different medicinal plants are growing here for healing different kinds of problems.

So, everything for your medicine, you grow here yourself?

Yes.

This is called amaltas, aregveda.

It is a family of cassia fistula.

That's very good for constipation.

A system based on natural cures, Ayurveda was transmitted east

in the early centuries AD by Buddhist monks on the Silk Route to China.

This is now aloe vera, which is going very famous now all over the world. Aloe vera gel.

And this is what the ladies use for their skin cream and all this sort of stuff?

May I look?

Sure, sure.

Oh, yeah, look at that. How about that?

This is the gel.

Ayurveda is a science of life.

The whole body and whole nature is made by natural five elements -

earth, water, fire, air and ether.

50 years old...

So, the Kushan era was a great time for the codifying of India's traditions of knowledge.

Like all ancient Indian sciences, Ayurveda originally

was orally transmitted from master to pupil, father to son.

Only later was it committed to writing.

And this in a form of poetry, so the people can remember the poetry

because it is difficult to remember the full book.

So, just the poetry, poetry.

All disease names, disease symptoms, medicines,

descriptions, are in the poetry form.

How long, far back in time does it go?

This is like all the literature on the earth's planet.

It started near about 5,000 years before, like 3,000 years before Christ.

But the most important legacy of the Kushan age in world history was brought about by

Kushan Buddhist monks and traders who travelled the Silk Route and took Buddhism to China.

Buddhism reached another great nation, China,

around the second century.

I always was

showing my sort of respect to the Chinese Buddhists

because historically they are elder students of Buddha.

We are younger, so I always respect them.

Buddhism is one of the rich India's traditions.

Of course, recent time,

certain sorts of ideology or certain sort of political reasons,

there's a lot of destructions happen,

but time changes and things become more open.

So, it is really very right that China,

Chinese, again as a student of Indian master!

Nearly 2,000 years on from first receiving the Buddha's message, the Chinese government has announced

it wishes to find harmony by rediscovering its Buddhist past, seeking again the wisdom of India.

As for Kanishka, his end is a mystery.

All we have is a strange legend from China.

Riding his world in circling steed, Kanishka had conquered three of the world's four regions.

Only the east remained.

So, he set off on one last war of conquest

with an army of Hu barbarians, who were riding white elephants.

But when he reached the snowy peaks of the north, a mountainous wall

of ice, his horse reared up, unwilling to go any further.

The King spoke to his magic horse.

"I have ridden you on all my victorious campaigns.

"Why do you hesitate now? Why will you not go forward on this road?"

I wonder, my king.

Will the conquest of the East satisfy you?

Your hunger is boundless.

What will you do when there are no more worlds left to conquer?

On seeing the king's magic horse hesitate,

his army spoke amongst themselves and decided to get rid of the king.

VOCAL PERCUSSION (KONNAKOL)

The legend tells a tale of assassination and regime change here in Mathura.

History gives us no clue.

We know Kanishka died around 150 AD and was succeeded by others of his dynasty,

but could there be a distant echo of these events in Mathura's famous cycle of mystery plays?

The tradition of drama here in Mathura goes back to the ancient world.

Every year, a cycle of plays is performed about the god Krishna.

SHE SINGS

These plays tell the story of the overthrow of a great tyrant here in Mathura.

His name is Kans, or Kansa.

HE SPEAKS LOCAL DIALECT

Now we come to the best bit, the killing of the wicked tyrant of Mathura, Raja Kans.

EVIL LAUGHTER

Great as the Kushans were in the history of India, they were, after all, foreigners.

Just outside Kanishka's former capital of Mathura,

there's one last clue to the fall of India's forgotten Emperor.

Could we just ask, do you know place called Tochari Tila?

HE SPEAKS LOCAL DIALECT

Raja Kanishki.

Raja Kanishki!

They found a statue of King Kanishka.

Oh, there's a mound in front, yeah. Can you see?

This is Tochari Tila here? Ah, right.

The place still preserves one of the ancient names of the Kushans from the time

when they lived on the edge of China before their long march into history.

Unfortunately, the dig wasn't very well done back in 1912,

but what they found in this little mound was a temple

about 100 feet long by 60 feet wide Inside, a big circular feature,

and statues of the great kings of the Kushan dynasty.

The biggest mystery, though, is when the excavators

picked over the remains of the place, the place had been devastated by vandals, destroyed,

right at the end of the Kushan period, not in some later period by the Huns or Muslim invaders.

And one statue in particular, great royal statue,

seven or eight feet high, had been smashed to bits with almost deliberate venom.

And today, in Mathura Museum, you can still see the headless statue

of Kanishka, the King of Kings, ruler of all India.

"May his reign last for 1,000 years."

In the early centuries AD, the Kushans had opened up

India's horizons, creating a vast multi-racial empire.

They put India onto the international map, linking it to the trade systems of the world.

They laid the foundations for what would follow in the Middle Ages,

adding another layer to story of India through peace, trade and tolerance.

But above all is the simple civilising influence of contact,

exchange and dialogue.

In the second century, AD the Indian subcontinent had the world's biggest population, as it does today,

and one of the biggest economies.

And now, as the wheel of history turns full circle, that age looks like a precursor of our own.

Next in The Story of India, the genius of early Indian technology,

the astounding living traditions of the south...

..where God is the great dancer.

And in medieval India, they didn't just invent zero - they even wrote the first great manual on sex!

The next chapter in The Story of India is the Golden Age.