Silk Roads and China Ships The Story of China

China, a global superpower, eyes set on the future,

its arrival on the world stage greeted like the appearance

of a new planet.

But it is not the first time.

In the seventh century, when Europe was in its Dark Age,

Tang Dynasty China became the greatest

power on earth and would be for

1,000 years until the rise of the West.

What's happening now has happened before.

I'm in Xi'an, the capital of the Tang, which 1,300 years ago was

the greatest and most cosmopolitan city on earth.

And what made it great was not only its economic and cultural power,

its sense of its own identity, but its openness to other cultures.

Standing over the square, the statue of one of the heroes

of that time, one of the great figures in the history

of civilisation, the Buddhist monk Xuanzang,

who brought the wisdom of India back here to China.

This is the tale of a time which even now the Chinese

see as a golden age.

In the story of China we have reached the Tang Dynasty.

It's often said that in history

China has been a closed civilisation,

introverted, cutting itself off from the world.

And there have been times when it has looked that way,

but since prehistory China has never been isolated

and has thrived on contact.

And the Tang Dynasty was a great age of international connection.

That time, vast numbers of foreign peoples poured into China with

exotic goods, foods and ideas, and even new religions.

And the great pathway of exchange was the Silk Road.

We call it the Silk Road today, but it wasn't really one road

but a series of land routes connecting China with

the Mediterranean and India.

And the Silk Road turned China,

for the first time, into a global civilisation.

Along it, just as today, were many cultures and peoples,

different religions,

different ways of seeing the world.

Thank you, thank you so much.

The magic of the Silk Road.

The magic of Central Asia.

There is Han Chinese, there's Uyghurs everywhere,

there's a guy from Kyrgyzstan - you can tell by his hat.

Just like it would have been in ancient times, you would've

seen Arabs and Persians, probably Indians along with

the Han Chinese on this very edge of Tang Dynasty China.

Greek historian Polybius has a very interesting remark about this.

He is writing in the 100s BC.

He says that in ancient times the histories of Europe

and Asia were completely separate,

they ran their own way, but from our age onwards

the history of Europe began to interact and engage with

the history of Asia and the history of Asia with that of Europe.

You could say it is the beginning of universal history

and it is happening in the Tang Dynasty.

But in history, when two civilisations first

come into contact, it's not always peaceful and not always enriching.

To really open up to another culture needs patience and humility,

to be willing to shed your own preconceptions.

And in the seventh century the Chinese were confident enough

to do that, to be changed by the experience of the other.

The story begins at the Chinese end of

the Silk Road in the old city of Luoyang.

Luoyang was the ancient capital of the Zhou Dynasty of 500 years

and for those centuries its poets

and scholars had praised it as a place of great culture.

"It was the real heart of China,"

they said, "in the middle of the middle plain of the Middle Kingdom."

And this is not just a story about empires and economies

but about what it is to be civilised.

Ni hao. Hello.

'It is about a new spirit in Chinese culture...'

Look at this. Magic world, Aladdin's cave.

'..a spirit that will give birth to the greatest age

'of Chinese poetry...'

Ni hao. Ni hao.

'..a time when poetry came out of the court into the streets,

'a witness to the times,

'expressing the human condition as never before...'

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

Famous poem of the Tang Dynasty.

'..knowing the insecurity of human life as the Chinese always have.'

This floating life is just like the water under the ice,

flowing eastwards day and night and no-one notices.

Isn't that great?

So it is a place rich in culture, rich in trade and merchants

and interested in foreigners.

And if you want to see just how interested, go a few miles

outside Luoyang where the most

famous Indian of all time is commemorated.

The Buddha.

The foreigner who most fascinated the Chinese through

the whole of their history.

The adoption of this Indian religion would

leave its mark on the very DNA of Chinese civilisation.

What better symbol is there of the impact of Buddhism

on Tang Dynasty China, indeed a symbol of the impact

of the exchange of ideas and civilisations, than this great cliff

pockmarked with devotion, and in the middle, that huge

image of the Buddha himself whose message had been carried

along what the Chinese called the Road Carrying the Jewel of Truth?

How that happened,

how China embraced Buddhism, is one of the great stories in history.

An adventure that generations of storytellers

have turned into China's favourite fairytale.

SHE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

The Emperor had a dream

and in the dream a strange man appeared to him with his skin

the colour of gold, framed by the sun and moon and stars.

And the court astrologers and diviners interpreted the dream.

But this man had come from the West

and it must be the Buddha himself.

The Emperor was fascinated and organised an expedition.

18 courtiers and scholars with all their attendants journeyed

out to the West to find out more.

They got as far as Afghanistan and there in a Buddhist monastery

they met two Indian monks who agreed to come back with them to China.

They came back here and were established in this monastery,

the White Horse Pagoda after the white horses that they rode,

and they translated the first Buddhist scriptures ever to be

rendered into Chinese. And they died here and were buried here.

This is the tomb of one of them, Kasyapa Matanga.

It's not the first exchange between India and China but from that

moment onwards the dialogue of civilisations will be continuous.

Now the story moves on in time to the year 600.

In the wider world the Roman Empire has fallen,

Byzantium is flowering and in China the Mandate of Heaven has

passed to a new dynasty, the Tang.

In a village outside Luoyang, a boy was born who would become

one of the most famous people in Chinese history

and his name was Xuanzang.

Xuanzang must have known this place very well

from childhood and known all the stories,

especially about the two strangers who had come from India.

"I was inflamed by a passionate curiosity,"

he says, "about the Buddha and about the origins of the faith

"and I applied for a foreign travel permit several times to no avail.

"Perhaps because I was a nobody.

"And in the end I took matters into my own hands

"and I left in secret for India."

He was 26 years old

and his journey would change the course of Chinese civilisation.

It is a story that has fascinated me over the years, travelling in his

footsteps between China and Central Asia,

across Afghanistan into India.

At that time Xuanzang said, "The Tang were new on the throne,

"China's frontiers didn't extend far.

"There was a ban on foreign travel.

"At first I had to move by night to dodge the border guards."

The real-life adventures of Xuanzang gave birth to some of China's

best-loved legends and characters.

EXPLOSION

The Tang monk and his crazy companions...

..the lustful Piggy, the dim-witted Sandy

and above all the faithful Monkey.

All of them changed by their magical encounters along the Silk Road.

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

In later novels and films it turned into the kind of fantasy

the Chinese have always loved -

both comic adventure and spiritual allegory.

On the real journey, Xuanzang tells of oceans of sand

and the exotic peoples whose lands he passed through.

"My fellow Buddhists tried to persuade me

"not to risk my life further," he said,

"but I must reach the West.

"If I don't there's no point in coming back."

Through time the story just grew and grew.

The travelling shadow puppet players still play it out in the villages.

And the city's storytellers say that to tell the tale in full

would take 110 days.

So today it's one of the great myths of Chinese culture.

A strange and wonderful afterlife for a real Tang monk.

Xuanzang is one of those rare people who turn up in history.

Visionary, great scholar...

..and yet possessed of incredible physical toughness

and bravery and stamina.

After three years and nearly 5,000 miles, he says,

"We crossed the great snowy mountains and came down into India."

He crossed the River Indus and entered the plains of India

with their teaming kingdoms and cities.

He travelled with Buddhist pilgrims down

the Grand Trunk Road to the River Ganges.

And finally he reached Bodh Gaya and the sacred Bodhi Tree

where 1,000 years before the Buddha had sat in meditation

and gained enlightenment.

"And when I saw it," Xuanzang says, "I lay on the ground

"and shed many tears."

THEY CHANT

He stayed in India for ten years studying the Buddhist teachings,

his noble truths about the human condition.

Then he set off home to take them back to the Chinese people,

to fire their imaginations as his story has ever since.

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

Four-year-old Xiao Yunhao is hoping to be one of the next

generation of Monkey storytellers.

The China he came back to in 643 was the largest

and strongest country on earth.

Its capital Chang'an, today's Xi'an, was one of the world's great

centres of civilisation.

And as for the Emperor himself, Taizong was at

the height of his powers and a stickler for protocol.

The emperor's first words to Xuanzang were, "Welcome back...

"..but you never asked permission to go."

"Well," said Xuanzang,

"I applied for a permit for foreign travel on several occasions

"but it never worked.

"Perhaps because I was a nobody."

He wasn't a nobody now. Crowds came just to look at him.

He was supposed to be very good looking which stood him

in good stead.

He was a very good-looking man.

I think it is difficult to underestimate how much

Xuanzang really aroused people's interest in him.

So many people came to welcome him,

so many people came to have a squint at him.

In fact he had to shut his doors and say, "No more visitors, please,"

so that he could get on with some work.

"It was my life's task," Xuanzang said,

"to bring the Buddha's teachings

"to the people of China for the benefit of generations to come."

The Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi'an was built to house the manuscripts

he brought back.

Most were lost long ago in wars and revolutions

but for a few precious fragments.

-So these are in Pali.

-Yeah.

-This is the language of South India

and Sri Lanka.

657 books

in 520 packages

on 20 pack horses.

It must make you feel very proud to be monks here.

THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE

The Emperor now commissioned Xuanzang

to translate the Buddhist scriptures into Chinese.

In the history of civilisation it's a project comparable to

the Arabic translations out of Greek...

THEY CHANT

..or the Bible from Greek into Latin.

With the permission of the Emperor he got quite a team together.

He had 12 people in his team of Buddhists

who knew about the literature

and he had eight people also in the team

who were phrase connectors, is what they're called.

People who tried to put things into Chinese of the time.

It was all part of Taizong's insatiable appetite for learning.

He was one of China's great rulers,

a model of the Confucian virtuous man.

He was a philosopher prince, poet and rationalist,

and he thought that ruling was inseparable

from the patronage of culture.

And now Taizong wouldn't leave Xuanzang alone.

Xuanzang was supposed to be doing all this translation work

but he didn't have time.

He had to spend all his time at court trying to fulfil

the emperor's need for conversation.

He was a man who was consumed by curiosity.

The Emperor himself said the scriptures of Buddhism,

"are as unfathomable as the depths of the sea

"or the height of the sky.

"In comparison, the teachings of Confucius and Laozi

"and The Nine Schools are just a single island in a great ocean".

The Emperor was so impressed by his bearing

and intelligence that he asked him to hang up his Buddhist robe

and to become his prime minister.

"Help me run the country."

And Xuanzang refused him.

He said, "It would be like taking a boat out of the water.

"Not only would it cease to be useful

"but in time it would rot away."

Xuanzang Died in 664.

His ashes are buried in the little monastery of Xingjiao Si

near Xi'an.

Spared in the cultural revolution of the 1960s at the command

of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai himself,

too precious to the collective memory of the Chinese people.

Over the centuries Buddhism would profoundly touch the Chinese soul,

as it still does.

And back then, perhaps this Indian religion brought something

they felt their culture lacked.

A spiritual path based on

personal conscience and compassion.

For me it is almost a homage to a fellow traveller.

I travelled most of his route through Xinjiang

and the northwest frontier of Pakistan

and all the way across India to Patna.

And to think, he did most of that on foot.

Here is Xuanzang, the great traveller.

I can't believe that he had sandals on the Hindu Kush!

Huge framed backpack here made out of bamboo.

Can you see the bamboo strips?

With all the scrolls of the manuscripts stored there.

Of course, actually,

he had all that stuff in cases.

It is a symbolic picture.

And finally the lovely touch here of a lantern to

illuminate his journey at night.

After he had returned from China, Xuanzang kept in touch with his old

Indian friends by letter.

And those letters, though unknown in the West,

are among the most moving documents in the history of civilisation.

In fact, in my opinion, they tell you what civilisation really is,

written by a member of one culture who had lovingly and totally

immersed himself in another.

He writes the news.

"The great Emperor of the Tang," he says, "is joyfully supporting

"Buddhism and ruling with justice and mercy like a compassionate

"Chakravartin," the old Sanskrit Indian word for a great ruler.

But it is his letter to the abbot of Bodh Gaya which is

the most touching.

Indeed all the more so

because they belonged to opposed schools of Buddhism.

MAN READS LETTER

"A great while has elapsed since we were parted,"

he writes, "which has only increased my admiration for you.

"I am sending you my very best wishes.

"Of the works that we brought back from India I have already

"translated 30 and two more will be finished by the end of the year.

"And there's one more thing.

"On my way back from India I lost a horse-load of manuscripts

"fording the River Indus.

"I am sending you a list of the books in the hope that

"perhaps you can get them translated and sent to me.

"This is all for now.

"Best wishes, the monk Xuanzang."

YELLING

In the seventh century Xi'an was the greatest city in the world...

..half a million people, where the biggest European city

had only a few thousand.

It was a dynamic place of new styles, new fashions and new music.

PEOPLE SING

The city, it was said, was laid out like a vast chessboard.

About five miles square and we are just here at this corner.

Tang Xi'an was strictly regulated.

That was the way Chinese cities had always been,

vast gated royal enclosures where public access was controlled.

Xi'an had 108 wards,

all of them under curfew.

So this was Anxi Ward in

Tang Dynasty times, in between a palace area

and the great government area over there.

So it was quite posh, quite well-to-do.

There was...

..mansions of court musicians, a princess lived down the road.

Looks like you can still buy some of their garden ornaments, doesn't it?

The city was low-rise. Palaces, residential quarters,

gardens, almost every ward had Buddhist and Taoist temples.

Ni hao. Ni hao.

You see all the things for temples here.

Incense, that's because right back to the Tang Dynasty there was

a huge temple in this area.

And it is still a Taoist temple today,

the Temple of the Eight Immortals.

There you go.

The Temple of the Eight Immortals.

The theatre quarter and red light districts were here,

the hostels for candidates for the civil service exams,

and all tastes were catered for.

Fortune-tellers, ancient Chinese craft.

Later, later!

There were special funeral streets.

One of them features in a famous Tang novel.

I love all these pilgrimage knick-knacks.

My family are really fed up with me bringing them back to London.

It may seem hard to square all this control with an outward-looking age

but the Tang was a centralized state

where everyone was registered in the censuses.

Social harmony came from knowing and keeping your place.

Here is the Drum Tower.

Much later, of course, Ming Dynasty, but there was a drum tower

in the middle of Tang Dynasty Xi'an, beating the drum for the curfew.

A very strictly-regulated city.

You couldn't be found outside your own ward at night, for example.

So the 600 beats of the drum, you had to be back home.

DRUMBEATS

In the seventh century the West Market

was the Central Asian quarter.

Here were the Silk Road merchants, Uyghurs and Persians,

and they brought all their exotic foods with them.

Cherries, barbaries, apricots, peaches from Afghanistan.

Xie xie.

Oh, my God!

I'm coming back there. Beautiful! Xie xie.

Fizzing with energy, the capital city matched

the ambitions of the Emperor Taizong on himself.

In this period China changes from a feudal order

to a bureaucratic state with civil service exams.

And the state becomes synonymous with Han Chinese civilisation.

Which is why people today look on Taizong's reign as a golden age.

I'm a great admirer of Li Shimin, Tang Taizong.

He was like a lot of founding emperors -

he was very ambitious, very ruthless, excellent administrator

and probably a bit of a control freak.

He did a lot to establish the rule of China.

It was Taizong who decided that the Silk Road should be

brought under the umbrella of Chinese civilisation.

Only a few years after Xuanzang made his journey west,

Chinese armies marched in his footsteps.

The Tang emperors sent their armies up the Silk Route

here into Central Asia and they captured the great city of

Gaochang here in 642.

And you could say that the modern idea of a greater China, including

all these territories, can be traced back to that time and this place.

The goal was to protect China's luxury trade with the West

but it was also political -

to make China the great power of Asia.

China was now at its biggest extent before the 18th century.

It had become a continental civilisation

and will see itself that way from then until now.

Driven by a thriving economy and a rising population,

this is the time of the colonization

and development of the south

as China's centre of wealth and trade.

The big story of the Tang Dynasty between the 600s

and the 900s is the shift to the south.

At that time, a Chinese official writes,

"Every stream in the Empire was full of ships.

"Thousands, tens of thousands of great ships moving constantly

"back and forth, always circulating, and if they stop for a single

"moment 10,000 merchants would be bankrupted."

It's the beginning of China as a commercial society

and the beginning of great trading cities, and none of them

was more important than the one that grew up at the junction

of the Grand Canal going north-south and the Yangtze River going from

the west to the east, the number one city of the Tang Dynasty in trade,

Yangzhou.

If Xi'an was the centre of the imperial administration,

Yangzhou was China's commercial heart.

It is the beginning of the industrial south.

You can still get a feel of the Tang in the core of old Yangzhou.

And the key to the success of the city and to the rise of the south

was one of China's great practical achievements, the Grand Canal.

Built at the start of the 600s the canal connected the north

and the south with the river routes east and west.

And it is still crucial to today's economy.

Originally built 1,500 years ago, Shaobo Lock today

handles over 70 million tonnes a year.

It's an amazing scene.

It goes on all through the day, does it?

Yes, 24 hours a day.

-24 hours a day!

-Yeah.

-Wow!

It took five million men to build the first section in 605,

eventually running north to a small place called Beijing.

And it was built 1,000 years before the Industrial Revolution in Europe.

On the up is number three and in the middle is number two

and behind is number one.

Mainly carrying heavy materials.

Erm...

-Coal.

-Coal.

-And building materials.

-Building materials.

China is building everywhere!

Fantastic!

Just as today, such projects were only possible with

a command economy.

And with it, the Tang transformed China.

In the seventh century the economy boomed.

The canal shipped 165,000 tonnes of grain each year just to feed

the new garrisons in the south.

And standing at the intersection of China's waterways,

Yangzhou became a new kind of city.

It's the first sign of the beginning of the modern.

The city never slept.

It is probably the first large city in history to employ

artificial lighting on a grand scale.

Even the barge traffic on the Grand Canal was able to keep moving

through the city until well after midnight.

So Tang Dynasty Yangzhou was always open for business.

And so too, of course, was the entertainment industry,

the taverns and music bars

and the brothels described with delicate euphemisms

in Tang Dynasty poetry as Yangzhou's "ten miles of summer breeze."

In the 830s it was all immortalized by the poet Du Mu

in a tag which has hung around the city,

for all its ups and downs, from that day to this -

"the Yangzhou dream."

And as the south grew rich they looked for new

outlets for international trade,

not only by land but by sea, all the way to the Persian Gulf.

So here in the south in the Tang Dynasty we've got

the beginnings of what I suppose we could call the maritime Silk Road.

Long-distance international trade organized by merchants

here in cities like Yangzhou.

And they're selling very top-end stuff -

silks and fine cloths and exotic tableware.

They are selling mass-produced ceramics designed with

the Western consumer in mind and they are also selling

what will become the most popular drink in the world -

tea.

Tea had begun in the south on the subtropical hillsides of Yunnan.

Originally drunk for health, by the Tang

its use spread everywhere and the first books had been

published on its beneficial effects.

It has never looked back.

They exported silk, too,

coveted since Roman times by Westerners

who were prepared to pay jaw-dropping prices

for garments fit for an emperor.

Here is a dragon, it's a dragon.

So you might think China's role today as a global mass producer

is a new phenomenon in world history but it's not.

It has been estimated that Tang China had 55% of the world's GDP

with its vast internal market, from local village craftsmen

and women to the Imperial factories,

and from everyday ceramics to gorgeous works of art.

Tang China was a giant engine of growth.

So let's view the early medieval world in a different way.

Tang China was the superpower.

They exported Confucian ideas, Buddhist religion,

their written script and their language,

adopted across East Asia and Japan.

The Japanese even imitated Tang Xi'an in the architecture of

their capital, Nara.

China's influence on the East

was as profound as Rome in the Latin West.

In the East, in the seventh century,

all roads led to Xi'an.

And if you want a symbol of the age,

just outside Xi'an stand the statues of 108 ambassadors

from Central Asia to Japan,

and Vietnam to Persia.

The diplomatic pecking order of the Tang foreign office.

This was the time when China went out to the world

and the world came here to China.

HE CHANTS

And Islam also came to China in the Tang.

Peacefully, which was not always the case in history.

We believe during the Prophet Muhammad's time,

peace be upon him,

encouraged our ancestors to find technology developed in China.

Seek knowledge as far as China.

It had been the year Xuanzang arrived in India

that the Prophet had died in Arabia,

telling his followers to seek knowledge as far as China.

HE CHANTS

Today we speak Chinese Mandarin and the local dialect

but in history we used to speak Chinese,

Arabic, Farsi and Mongolian.

Four languages, some time.

And this time, Tang Dynasty China was the centre of the world.

Xi'an was the centre of the world, I suppose.

-Superpower.

-The superpower.

To welcome an alien religion

would hardly have been possible in the West or the Islamic world

before modern times.

It shows that while the Chinese believed in the superiority

of their civilisation,

they also knew there were many paths to enlightenment...

..that all knowledge was useful in understanding the cosmos...

..and the position of humanity in it.

And that idea is expressed in one of the most astonishing monuments

in the whole of Chinese history.

It's a stone inscription recording the coming of Christianity to China

as far back as the 630s.

This is one of China's great national treasures,

one of the select list of the A-list monuments

that can never leave the country,

and as an account of the interaction of civilisations

it's really hard to beat. Let's start at the top.

Those nine characters say

"a monument commemorating

"the propagation of the luminous religion of the West."

That is Christianity.

In 635, it says, a wise man from the West,

perhaps from Persia, called Raban,

decided to bring the Christian scriptures to China.

Observing the path of the winds,

through great perils he made his way all the way to China,

presumably on the Silk Route,

and arrived here in Chang'an. The Emperor, it says,

received him here in Chang'an and the Christian scriptures

were translated in the Imperial Library.

And then the Emperor considered them in his private apartments

and was deeply convinced by their truthfulness

and issued this proclamation in 638.

"The way for humanity, at different times, different places,

"did not have the same name.

"And the great Sage, at different times and different places,

"was not in the same human body.

"Over history, heaven ordained

"that true religion would be established in different countries

"and different climates so that all of humanity could be saved.

"And we've considered the Christian scriptures and have decided that,

"in all their essentials,

"they are about the core values of humanity

"and we have decreed that they be propagated throughout the Empire."

But the story of China is one of cycles of creation and destruction.

And in the next century the Empire faced a perfect storm of crises.

It began out in the West.

Battles against the expanding Muslim caliphate,

savage internal rebellions

reported by one of the great Tang poets, Li Bai.

"Last year," says Li Bai,

"we were fighting out to the north beyond the Great Wall

"and this year we're fighting far out in the west

"on the Kashgar River.

"We've washed our blades in the streams of Parthia

"and grazed our horses amid the snows of Tian Shan."

There it is. There's Tian Shan.

What a place to imagine it, here in Jiaohe,

Tang Dynasty-garrisoned town with its watch tower and beacon platform.

"But," says Li Bai, "the beacon fires are always burning.

"The marching and the fighting never stops and nor does the dying.

"You should know that the sword is a cursed thing

"that the wise man uses only if he must."

Out in these vast expanses the Tang Empire was overstretched.

And in the end they abandoned the west.

China would only regain it in the 18th century.

The crisis came under the Emperor Xuanzong,

the apocalyptic eight-year rebellion of General An Lushan

which saw the end of the Tang dream of a greater China.

The oasis of Turfan was one of the Tang garrison towns

out in the western deserts.

So when Li Bai writes his poem about fighting in the west,

-it's this area he's talking about.

-Mm, yes, I think so, yes.

In about 755, because of the rebellion

of An Lushan and Shi Siming,

the central government became much weaker so the stationed troops

were returned to inland China to fight against

the army of An Lushan and Shi Siming.

-An Lushan. So this was a very big shock.

-Yeah, a big war lord.

-Yeah.

An Lushan, a bogeyman who chilled hearts back in Xi'an.

Far to the northeast he gathered armies to take revenge

after the Emperor had killed his son.

At home, the Dynasty had lost touch with the people.

The tombs of the eighth-century royals near Xi'an

show their pastimes and pleasures, polo and hunting

and courtly parties, oblivious to the gathering storm.

These are wonderful images outside the tomb chamber.

They're courtly ladies, just attendants.

In their stylish fashions they could be fin de siecle, Paris,

couldn't they? Central Asian fashions.

These are the vogue in the early 700s.

The faces are so animated, you can almost imagine their conversations.

The gossip, the rumours.

Courts that were seething with anxiety.

I'm afraid we Chinese never manage to live more than 50 years

without some terrible cataclysmic event.

-The cycles of Chinese history.

-That's right.

And it had been a particularly good period up until the Emperor -

the brilliant Emperor -

began, allegedly, to love his concubine, Yang Guifei,

the precious concubine, too much.

And he left quite a lot of the work of governing the country

to various people, especially to this concubine's family and so on,

which was absolutely disastrous.

The story goes that the Emperor sent his men over the land to find

the most beautiful woman in China.

They failed, of course, but then,

when he was bathing here in the hot springs,

he saw the 18-year-old daughter of a high official...

..the warm water running down her glistening, jade-like body,

as the poet Bai Juyi tells the story.

The Emperor had dreamed of a beauty who could topple an empire.

Meanwhile, a girl in the Yang family came of age.

And when she smiled she could melt the heart with a single glance.

And from that day the Emperor missed every morning court.

But then one day the ground was shaken by the war drums of a revolt.

An Lushan came in with his Tibetans, went straight to Chang'an.

Soldiers carried the Emperor and his favourites

out of the capital overnight,

it was so desperate an emergency.

But when they got into the hills - because he was making for Sichuan,

which was hilly, where he thought he would be safe -

his bodyguards, a small group of people,

rebelled and said they were not going any further

as long as the Emperor had this favourite, and favourites with him.

And the favourites had to be slaughtered.

Among them was the Lady Yang,

strung up on a tree on a silk cord.

The great rebellion of the An Lushan period was extremely hard on China.

An enormous number of people were killed or displaced.

And we know from the census that were taken before that happened

and after it, 35 million people were missing.

As government broke down, eight years of horror unfolded.

It was a national catastrophe, described by China's greatest poet,

Du Fu, in lines remembered ever since by the Chinese people

in times of trouble.

WOMAN READS POEM

"Guo po." Just two words. It means the state has been demolished

and it doesn't exist any more. There's no state left.

But "shan he zai" -

the mountains and the river still remain.

In all the 3,000 years of Chinese poetry,

the world's oldest living poetic tradition, it's Du Fu,

the poet of this terrible time,

who is their most loved because he spoke in the people's voice.

He's still part of the school syllabus today

so every Chinese child knows how the Tang fell...

Hi, hello.

'..not from their history class but from poetry.'

-Nice to meet you.

-Ah, very good, you speak English. Wonderful!

'And here at the secondary school in Yanshi outside Luoyang,

'they've an extra reason to know all about it.'

-This is the tomb here?

-Yes.

-Ah!

'Because Du Fu's grave is in the school grounds.

'He wasn't famous when he died. The inscription says...'

GIRL READS INSCRIPTION

"The tomb of Mr Du, government deputy irrigation inspector."

Terrific, xie xie. Wonderful, wonderful.

LAUGHTER

Fantastic! Fantastic.

As the Tang world collapsed,

one last brief poem by Du Fu tells how he met again,

south of the river,

a famous musician once high in the king's favour.

MICHAEL READS POEM

Who is the prince of the Qi, Qiwang? Does anybody know?

Is he a big, important person?

I know Qiwang is the brother of the Emperor Tang Xuanzong.

-He's the brother of the Emperor Xuanzong.

-Yes.

Great. So a very important man, then.

Du Fu is recalling...

the palace of Qiwang's.

Now, this phrase here...

HE READS THE POEM

Which you read beautifully, if I may say so, it was very, very good.

And then this line here is so fantastic - don't laugh at me.

HE READS THE POEM

"The falling flowers time, season, is here again

"and in this time I meet you again."

The falling flowers in Chinese poetry,

can you explain to me what this means?

Anybody?

I think it means, you know, flowers are falling down

and the period of the season is gone.

And it also means that Tang Dynasty is gone.

And at the same time he meets his old friend

and the old memories - the beautiful memories -

come back and he feels very sad.

So falling flowers is not just blossom falling,

it's a feeling of melancholy in the heart.

And the Tang Dynasty is falling,

there is a mood of Autumn and sadness

and he meets the man who was once this great figure.

Such a simple poem, isn't it?

Just four lines and yet it's full of fantastic ideas.

Thank you for being patient!

Xie xie...

..to you!

So the state was broken

but the landscape survived

and so did the people.

It's a very high-class social media piece here.

The ninth century was a time of famines and more rebellions.

In the end, the Tang lose their nerve and start to look inwards.

In the 840s they even launch a persecution of Buddhism,

now a symbol of un-Chinese ideas.

And so the Mandate of Heaven was lost but as the Buddha had said,

and the Chinese have always known too well,

all things must pass.

On the 1st of June, 907, the last Tang Emperor abdicated,

bringing to end an age of amazing creativity.

An age by which the Chinese still define themselves today.

A time in which Xi'an here rivalled and then surpassed Baghdad

and Constantinople as a city of the world.

For a time, China will plunge into anarchy,

but a new age of greatness will soon arise,

as in China it always has.