The Golden Age The Story of China

In the tenth century, China almost broke apart forever in civil war.

The soldier poet Wang Renyu witnessed

the destruction of his country.

"The barbarians have overthrown the Tang Dynasty," he wrote.

"Our cities have been abandoned. Our temple courtyards lie in ruin.

"China has entered a truly dark time.

"But things cannot go on like this forever.

"The way surely has not been finally lost. I believe heaven will

"soon announce a new dynasty."

And in around the year 960,

it did.

In the West, we see history as the rise

and fall of different civilisations.

In China, there's one civilisation, which has gone through

cycles of order and disorder.

And in the Middle Ages, like Europe after the Second World War,

the Chinese set out to build a brave new world.

In the story of China, we've reached the Song Dynasty.

We're in the city of Kaifeng in the middle of China.

MAN SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE Mushroom!

Mushroom, yeah, yeah, yeah, OK.

A thousand years ago, this was the greatest

and most exciting place on Earth.

Its creativity and inventiveness surpassed

and of course preceded the European Renaissance.

In the Song Renaissance, the Chinese set out to make the most

enlightened society on Earth,

with the best governance,

housing and food,

the best education and science.

And this is their story.

Since the great age of the Tang Dynasty,

China had shrunk dramatically.

After 907, it fragmented into 16 dynasties

in a little over 50 years,

warlords fighting each other for the Empire.

CEREMONIAL CRY

At this point, there was no certainty

that China would ever be reunited.

But as it says in China's famous novel,

The Romance Of The Three Kingdoms,

"It is a truth universally acknowledged

"that everything long united will fall apart

"and everything long divided will come back together again."

The Song would transform Kaifeng

from a provincial backwater into the greatest city on Earth.

And now it's rebuilding again.

After the struggles of the 20th century,

today's Chinese people are fascinated by the spectacle

of what their ancestors achieved

and they want to touch that time again.

And as always in Chinese history,

great events were foretold by signs and omens.

Here in Kaifeng, the most famous tells of the birth of two brothers

who, like Romulus and Remus,

would become the first emperors of the new dynasty.

Story goes like this -

at the time of chaos and war and destruction,

after the fall of the Tang Dynasty,

a man called Chen Tuan fled to the sacred mountain Huashan,

where he lived in a cave and became a hermit.

And he acquired prophetic visionary powers.

And one day he came off the mountain

and in the road he met a crowd of refugees

and there was a poor man carrying two baskets

on a pole on his shoulders.

And when the hermit looked into the basket,

there were two baby boys,

but the hermit saw dragons

and he roared out with laughter.

And everybody said, "Why are you laughing?" and he said,

"I never expected that the Mandate of Heaven

"would come back to earth so quickly."

Ah, great.

Ah, fantastic.

There's the surviving dragon,

the last dragon of Twin Dragon Alley.

Any day now, Twin Dragon Alley will be redeveloped

and soon only the memory will remain.

But that's Kaifeng for you, China's city of memory.

In 960, the older brother, Taizu, announced the new dynasty, the Song.

And he made the capital here a vast new metropolis of wood

and brick, thrown up in a feverish construction boom.

This is Song building manual,

commissioned in the early 12th century.

If you are of a certain social status

and if you can afford it

you can build your house according to these...styles.

So this tells you how to build a city, almost, doesn't it?

Well, for a city of over a million people you would need

lots of buildings.

Biggest city in the world, perhaps, at that point?

Yes, definitely, at that time.

'And to go with the new buildings

'was a whole new conception of city life.'

Kaifeng was a much more open city,

the lifestyle much more vibrant than the Tang Chang'an.

All sorts of shops, all sorts of restaurants, even fast food,

there's mention of fast food.

And there was no curfew. That was, er, very important.

Before this, residents in the city, these urban dwellers,

were supposed to stay in their own wards after the bell.

But in Kaifeng they were allowed to just flock to the markets

and...enjoy their time.

So all the pleasures of city life really start to unfold at this time.

Yes.

So a new capital for a new age.

The largest city anywhere on Earth until the 19th century.

And just like today's China,

the city became a magnet for people flooding in.

In a few years, it went from one square mile to 16.

Only a few ancient buildings survive today above ground.

One of them is the famous Iron Pagoda,

so called because of the metallic sheen of its tiles.

We're out in the northeast corner of the old city here.

The Iron Pagoda is on a bit of raised ground in this corner.

The Emperor had built this artificial mountain

called the Hill of Longevity.

Wonderful, these Chinese names, aren't they?

Compared with Rome or Constantinople,

very little survives from Kaifeng's golden age.

And you can see why when you look below the ground.

Down here is evidence of 20 devastating floods

of the Yellow River since the Song Dynasty.

This pit is a metaphor for the story of the city.

I've called Kaifeng the city of memory,

China's capital of memory.

And in this pit underneath the West Gate you can see why!

That is the Qing Dynasty city wall,

the 18th and 19th-century Qing Dynasty city wall.

And this smaller brickwork here, the Ming Dynasty wall,

Tudor period - part of it carries on down.

And the Song Dynasty city wall...

maybe 20 feet below the floor level here.

It's an amazing thought, isn't it?

And the reason why?

That huge deposit of Yellow River mud,

which is only a few miles from the city.

These floods have been incredibly destructive all the way

through Chinese history, sweeping through the whole city,

destroying almost everything, even in recent times - 1842, for example.

No wonder, then, that city has been memorialised, if you like,

not in stone, not in great buildings,

but in words and in paintings.

"A million people thronged these streets," said a Song poet.

"There were restaurants as far as the eye could see.

"Everywhere there was music in the air.

"What would we give to see that age again?"

But we CAN still see Song Kaifeng...

in China's most famous work of art.

As historical sources go,

this is one of the most fabulous that exists in the world.

It's a scroll. It's nearly 20 feet long.

I'd need to unroll it across the middle of the street

if we were going to do that.

It's simply a depiction of the city as it was just before 1127

by a court painter, and it's the life of the ordinary people.

There is nothing like this in the whole of history.

It gives you the streets, the alleyways, the hutongs, the shops.

The taverns and restaurants, and all of them real places.

Mr Wang's house,

the Spice Shop,

Shenyang's Licensed Tavern.

Physician Zhou's Residence,

the Sugar Cane Shop,

Dr Yang's Clinic.

An amazing image of the sheer vitality of Song Dynasty China.

Here, 400 years before the European Renaissance

with its commitment to human values, was a city dedicated to

the prosperity and wellbeing of its people.

A city for the many, not just the few.

Not kings or warriors or the Church,

but the lives of ordinary people.

It's an image of themselves the Chinese have loved ever since.

So much so that they couldn't resist bringing it back to life.

A journey back into a golden age,

as one citizen recalled.

"They were such happy times.

"So many people and an abundance of things in the shops.

"The wonderful festivals.

"So many sights for the eye to enjoy.

"Above all, I remember the humane and congenial character of

"the citizens, always ready to help a stranger."

A good time to live, do you think? SHE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

"The lamp-lit nights, the sounds of music from the myriad taverns

"and wine bars.

"But you see then, this was a time of peace."

There are many legacies of the Song in today's China.

And one that's become celebrated across the world

is Chinese cuisine.

The Song thought that people should be well-fed

and eating became the great social ritual it is today.

Chinese cooking, of course, is one of the great

cuisines of the world and the oldest cuisine in the world.

But the beginnings lie in poor people's food.

'Here they fed both the posh and the working man.'

People have had to get used to making the best

out of whatever food source they could lay their hands on

and to make it palatable.

But by the time of the Song Dynasty, it's, well,

the first great restaurant culture of the world.

The Chinese people by then are the best-fed people

in the world, probably the best-fed that had ever been in history.

And there's wonderful accounts of the restaurant culture

of the time - 70 great restaurants here in Kaifeng,

the waiters rushing from table to table, taking the orders,

and rushing back from the hatch,

with three dishes of food down one arm and 20 bowls down the other.

And never making a mistake, says one contemporary.

And that restaurant culture brings you etiquette,

how to behave at table,

how to be considerate to your fellow diners,

not to rush, not to chew loudly, to be careful

when you're all eating from the same bowl.

And that in turn, of course, brings you a kind of foodie culture.

They've got cookbooks back in the Song Dynasty.

One of them has been reprinted ever since, the last time in 2004.

Pure recipes from the Mountain House Cookbook.

Oranges stuffed with crab meat.

Bean curd steamed with hibiscus flowers.

And each one of these recipes has got delightful

notes by the author telling you where he first picked it up.

Take this one,

plum-blossom noodle-cake soup.

"I picked up this recipe from an old scholar

"in the Zimou Mountains on a beautiful snowy night,

"and whenever I taste it

"the exquisite moment comes flooding back to me."

Let's just move some space.

'In a restaurant in old Kaifeng, we asked the chef to make

'one of these 11th-century recipes - adapted for the vegetarian.'

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

There's a type of mushroom, pear, and lotus seed.

-Lotus seeds?

-Seeds, yeah.

So you mix mushrooms and fruit? That's very interesting.

Cos they have this function of, like, er...deflammation.

Oh, wow.

It's delicious. SHE TRANSLATES

-He says it's his pleasure.

-Thank you. Great.

I'm going to finish this off, if that's all right.

Is that all right?

LAUGHTER

The Mountain House Cookbook was one of thousands of books

you could buy in Kaifeng.

Publishing boomed.

From vast imperial encyclopaedias to poetry, history and ritual.

And self-help manuals

for the literate man and woman in the street.

The Chinese had invented woodblock printing back in the Tang,

one of many great inventions with which they led the world.

And now in the Song they devised moveable type too,

although that never took off in the same way.

The first mention of this is slightly after 1040 by a person

called Bi Sheng, using clay to print with moveable typeset.

So each one of these is a Chinese character

-and they would form part of a page in a frame.

-Yeah.

But it wasn't...taken up?

No.

The Chinese made this invention, which has proved

so useful to the rest of the world, but they didn't find it useful.

Why?

It has to do with the Chinese characters,

because there are so many of them and, erm...

Say if you look at this page, almost every character is

a different one, so economically it wasn't viable, it wasn't efficient,

especially compared to just using a single woodblock print.

-Too cumbersome for such a vast range of characters?

-Yes.

'And you can see exactly why

'when East met West in the 20th century, with the typewriter.'

Each individual metal type is a Chinese character.

You'd have to choose the right one, by...navigating this.

And how many characters have they got for this machine, then?

Probably about 2,000.

So how many do you need to negotiate,

say, a newspaper in modern China, then?

About 3,000 or 4,000 for the average.

So strangely enough, although this seems very cumbersome,

to be carving woodblocks,

it's actually much more efficient.

'Especially if a book stays in print for centuries, as they do in China.'

So tell us about the readership in the Song, then?

Does reading percolate down into ordinary people?

Well, of course there are the more elite classes who...

who can read and who are expected to read.

But definitely literacy is spreading in the Song.

Even if they weren't able to read themselves,

they would be easily able to find someone who can do that for them.

One of the great things about the Song Dynasty is the attention

to...what we would call, I suppose, civic values.

They even publish books on old age.

This... You're not going to believe this,

but this is a book about... Well, it's called

How To Help Old People Live Better, Longer And More Fulfilling Lives

and it was written in 1085

and it's gone through editions in every dynasty of China ever since

and this is the latest 2013 printing.

How about that?

"Now, to care for old people,

"you have to look at the nature of their whole life.

"Everybody has things that they really like.

"Things that make them glad.

"Books and paintings, music.

"There are millions of things that people like.

"If a person frequently seeks out the things that they've loved

"all their life and focuses on their essence

"and has these things around them, it will give them endless joy

"and pleasure and their days will be joyful."

And today's citizens still follow the Song's self-help message.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so dancing is very good.

'So in its ideas about the good life

'the Song went beyond any earlier civilisation -

'even the ancient Greeks.'

And in science, the list of their inventions is incredible.

From gunpowder and blast furnaces

to the magnetic compass

and evolution theory.

The most famous scientist came from a village down in Fujian

on the south coast.

Su Song. There he is.

One of the great polymaths of the Song Dynasty,

and they don't come much more poly than him.

He was an engineer, astronomer, scholar and poet

but he also wrote treatises on mineralogy and zoology and pharmacology.

It's real left-brain/right-brain stuff, isn't it?

But their education enabled them to be both artistic

and scientific, endlessly creative and endlessly curious.

He reminds you of some of the great

figures of the Renaissance in Europe.

I suppose you could say that he's the Chinese Leonardo,

but to put it more correctly, Leonardo is the Western Su Song.

This is Su Song's pet project, an astronomical clock.

His proud hometown has just rebuilt a working replica.

45 feet high, its mechanism a water clock,

driven by an endless chain drive.

Inside the clock, there had to be a clock captain

standing like the captain on the bridge of a boat 24 hours a day

and periodically topping the water level up in the tanks.

CLUNK

WATER CASCADES There you go.

Wonderful imagining this in the middle of Kaifeng,

ringing out the hours 24 hours a day for the citizens

as they go about their business.

BELL CHIMES

It's like the Song Dynasty's Big Ben.

Scientific exploration thrived in the Song,

in part because there was no theological straitjacket

holding back speculation on the nature of time and the universe.

Look at this.

You see the goddess of mercy. It's a real women's cult here.

Isn't this fantastic? It's a people's temple, this.

Taoism and Buddhism were the official cults of the Song Empire,

but religion wasn't an area where the government

intruded into people's lives.

Though always watchful of foreigners,

the Song, just like the Tang, had many Muslim

and Christian communities, which still survive.

And in Kaifeng so do the last of the Chinese Jews.

MAN BLOWS SHOFAR

This is Chinese Rosh Hashanah.

Under the Song, the population of China doubled.

100 million in the year 1000, it was 200 million by the late 1200s,

more than a third of the world's people.

And with a huge urban population,

just like the British in the 19th century, the Chinese invented

many games and sports, including what they called "kick-ball".

We British, of course, pride ourselves on having invented

the world's greatest game

and in the sense that the rules of modern football

were established in Britain -

in Sheffield, to be precise, in the 1860s - that's true,

but as usual in this story, the Chinese got there first.

Football was massive in the Song Dynasty, a thousand years ago.

SHE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

So I suppose you could say, as the Chinese would,

"Zuqiu hui jia le" - football's coming home.

CROWD ROARS

It wasn't a mass sport, of course. There was no such thing then.

But football in the Song was a spectator sport

with clubs, handbooks, rules, and fans.

STIRRING MUSIC PLAYS

The Emperor's not arrived yet!

WHISTLE BLOWS

COMMENTARY IN CHINESE LANGUAGE

Oh, wow!

Different ways of playing the game in the Song Dynasty.

The favourite one, the goals were posts about ten metres high,

coloured net hung between them

with a hole through which you had to shoot the ball.

And of course, being China, ethical conduct was vital.

In Song football, it was play up and play the game.

Abusing the referee was un-Confucian,

and professional fouls unthinkable.

WHISTLE BLOWS

Well, almost!

And football wasn't just for the elite.

China was opening up socially,

and that went for government too.

There was definitely a lot of social mobility

going on during the Song.

The social classes were in flux in some sense.

People from all sorts of backgrounds

could engage more closely,

who were more sensitive towards the social situation.

They became involved in government too.

New schools for learning opened up

and...academies were established

as well, that sought to teach the classics

and also to...foster good character.

It was the great age of Confucian social values

and how they set about creating that ethos is startlingly modern.

As you can see, it's freshers' week here in Henan University in Kaifeng.

The story of universities goes back a long way in China,

much further back than in the West.

And, amazingly, here in Kaifeng in the 11th century

there was a national university.

In 1069, the Emperor expanded the student body from 1,000

to more than 3,000.

They had financial support and board and lodging.

And the big idea was to draw in students from the provinces,

talented youngsters perhaps even from middling or lower families,

to come into the metropolis for the best education.

And the goal, as the Emperor put it himself,

for the morality of the culture.

As educationalists say today,

the ethos is the thing.

For the examinations, the students studied literature, history

and Confucian classics.

The Emperor and his advisers were looking for

tomorrow's administrators to govern a harmonious Confucian society.

There was a new class of literati who previously, perhaps,

didn't have the chance to sit through the examination system

but now they had.

Confucian teachings were really

at the core of these civil examinations.

And because they had such an important role to play

in those examinations

and that so many people took examinations,

it meant that it was a way for Confucian ideas to really

permeate into society.

You could say that it was a meritocratic society

where excellence in learning was really prized.

Meritocratic, but not universal.

Half of the population were excluded from this educational revolution.

Women.

But ironically, it's through the writings of a woman

that we get one of the best insights into the world of the Song.

These students are studying her work

in today's university in Kaifeng.

She's the poet Li Qingzhao.

Li Qingzhao.

She's one of China's greatest poets.

Her father had encouraged her to write poetry from an early age

and attend male poetic gatherings.

And she was already famous and in print when she was 17,

when she married a student from the university here in Kaifeng.

And they spent a lot of time here in the great old Buddhist temple

in the middle of town,

wandering its courtyards,

making rice-paper rubbings of its inscriptions.

But recent feminist criticism here in China

is giving us another view of her altogether.

The strains within her marriage in a society dominated by men,

the ambitions of a brilliant woman to find a voice

that was not only interior and personal, but public and political.

She was criticised by some at the time for saying things,

for writing poetry.

Women were not supposed to write poetry. This was a man thing.

And poetry was one of the major ways of social interaction amongst men.

You would go and drink a cup of wine

and you would compose poetry with each other.

You would say two lines of a poem

and I would give you the next two lines.

You would create new poetry in that way.

Women could do this,

but increasingly there were courtesans who did this.

Respectable women didn't participate with men doing it.

They still wrote, but we don't have very much surviving.

-A lot of women wrote poetry, didn't they?

-A lot of women did write poetry, yes.

-Being published is a different matter, perhaps.

-That's right, yes.

Paradoxical period for women, isn't it, the Song?

You know, so many social advances,

women's voice appearing strongly, perhaps, for the first time.

And yet, foot binding starting to become widespread.

It's very mixed, because women become crucial to this political

notion of loyalty, they have their equal part to play in that.

But at the same time they are also being...

Their rights that they have previously had,

their economic rights, are being taken away from them.

So women could be highly educated, but to play their part

in male-led Confucian society, women were to cultivate loyalty

to father, husband and state to ensure national cohesion.

So wrote the leading conservative, the historian Sima Guang.

But in the late 11th century, right up to the top,

the old way of doing things was challenged.

The leading light in the reformers was a man called Wang Anshi,

a Southerner, who'd spent 20 years in local government.

Ni hao.

Wang pushed reforms across the board.

Fairer taxes, government loans for the poor,

new degrees in law and science.

Breaking down class barriers in the name of economic efficiency.

With growing threats on its frontiers,

the state had an enormous defence budget,

and Wang thought a more open society would make the economy work better.

The Confucian classics, the old way of doing things,

were put in their place.

They had to have practical application.

And of course the old-fashioned Confucian bureaucrats were horrified.

And they took their case to the Emperor,

here in the palace in Kaifeng.

The Emperor favoured the reformers,

but the conservatives in his council saw root-and-branch reform

as potentially destabilising in uncertain times.

In the winter of 1070, the great conservative opponent

of the reforms, Sima Guang, petitioned the Emperor.

He said, "We don't need these new laws.

"What we need are good men trained in the old ways."

"Look at the last 1,500 years of Chinese history," said Sima Guang.

"You'll see the periods of peace add up to only 300 years, if that.

"This shows how hard it is to create order

"and how hard you must work to keep it once you've got it."

And he ended with this -

"I fear, at the moment, that our house may not be able

"to shelter our nation from the rains

"and the storms that are to come."

It's one of the great what-ifs of history.

At this point, towards 1100,

China could have become the first modern society,

with the most egalitarian system of government anywhere

before modern times.

Why that didn't happen

was due to events beyond their control

which would eventually overwhelm them.

The last 50 years of Song China saw climate change and famine

and the incessant drumbeat of foreign armies on the frontiers.

The Mandate of Heaven was not yet lost,

but the harmony had gone.

A contemporary wrote,

"The problem was the wasting of national resources.

"Public opinion wanted defence spending,

"not grand building projects."

The achievements of the Song Dynasty for 100 years were

amazing across every field of human endeavour.

TRADITIONAL CHINESE MUSIC IS PLAYED

In 1101, the last great emperor of the united

Northern and Southern Song came to the throne, Huizong.

He was a Renaissance prince, surrounded himself

with poets and thinkers.

He was an accomplished painter.

In his wonderful gardens, he listened to symphonies

by Buddhist musicians.

But as he plunged deeper into

his introverted speculations

about sacred kingship, he lost touch with reality.

When much harder choices were needed,

choices about military expenditure and defence budgets...

..and deployment of armies,

as the barbarian forces gathered on the frontier.

And when the crisis came, as he himself admitted,

"I myself was mediocre, and in the end I failed the nation."

The Song shared the East Asian landmass with many other states,

and in the 1120s Jurchen invaders swept down from the north.

In 1127, the Siege of Kaifeng began.

It's one of the greatest,

most poignant tragedies in Chinese history.

Just imagine the scene.

Thick snow swirling down from the sky.

On the horizon, the gate towers of the outer city are on fire

and many of the houses are burning.

And here inside the walls of the inner city are hundreds of thousands

of terrified citizens of Kaifeng, still resisting, hopelessly.

The food's run out, the markets are empty.

There are rumours, even, that people are eating human flesh.

And the government now try to buy off the invaders,

but they've no cards left to play.

When they give gold, the invaders want more.

They want millions of ounces of gold and silver.

They want precious silks and fine wines.

They want antiques, temple bells and ritual vessels.

They want the musical instruments played by the imperial orchestra.

And they want people, they want craftsmen,

but especially they want women.

They want the ladies-in-waiting from the imperial palace,

they want the 1,500 female musicians who used to

play before the Emperor, they want the wives and daughters

of the royal family and the courtiers and the leading citizens,

all to be delivered to their great camps

to the north and south of the city.

And of course many of those women committed suicide rather than go.

And so the city which symbolises the very best that civilisation

had yet achieved on Earth was brought to nothing.

In a bitter poem on the government's incompetence, Li Qingzhao

reflected on the catastrophe.

WOMAN READS IN CHINESE LANGUAGE

"An age of glory passed like a lightning flash.

"The troops of the Northern Barbarians

"appeared as if they had dropped from heaven.

"Tatar horses paraded in front of your banqueting hall

"and trampled pearls and emeralds into the fragrant dust.

"What a waste of time it was

"for great artists to carve your name into polished cliffs.

"The Mandate of Heaven passed from you but you didn't see.

"Times change and power passes.

"It is the pity of the world."

HE SPEAKS IN CHINESE LANGUAGE

The Emperor, Huizong, and thousands of his courtiers were seized

and taken north, where they died in captivity.

But his brother fled beyond the reach of the invaders

across the Yangtze river and vast numbers of refugees followed.

You get a great sense of a Chinese medieval village from here, don't you?

The big difference would be that today

the houses are made out of brick and concrete.

Then, they would have been wooden-framed, wooden-fronted houses

like those old ones over there.

And the people here were not scholars and bureaucrats -

they were boatmen and dockers and warehousemen.

And among the millions who fled south was the poet Li Qingzhao.

"Those who lived in the west of the Yangtze river basin fled east.

"Those in the north fled south.

"Those in the hills fled to the cities.

"Those in cities fled to the hills."

Hello.

"And in the end there was no-one who was not uprooted.

"And I myself, Li Qingzhao, fled upstream,

"crossed the river near the rapids and got to Jinhua.

"There I found a place to live in the house of the Qin family.

"There, after all the terror and all the hardship,

"I found some peace of mind."

MUSIC AND SINGING

And so the patient and long-suffering Chinese people

set out once more, as they have so often,

to rebuild, refusing to give up on the Song dream.

And it was here in the South in the 12th century that Chinese

civilisation was reborn, in what we call the Southern Song.

Up to this point, the South has been politically,

and to some degree economically,

somewhat more peripheral to the North,

but now it's the moment when that completely changes.

More and more people are settling in the South, more and more

commerce and so on is developing in the South, and the economy booms.

China is, in a sense, moving.

It's moving from this very northern orientation,

a northern east-west orientation, to a much more compact

southeastern orientation that tends to be how we think of China now.

The site they chose for the new capital

was a then-unimportant place called Hangzhou,

standing on the West Lake,

one of China's loveliest spots.

The Chinese have a proverb -

in heaven there is paradise,

but here on Earth there are Suzhou and Hangzhou.

In fact, the story goes Hangzhou was chosen

because of the beauty of its landscape.

And here they set out to recreate the lost city of dreams.

There's a wonderful Chinese description from that time,

which gives you a sense of the landscape that has enchanted

Chinese poets and painters for more than a thousand years.

Like a camera panning along the horizon from the blue grey hills,

across the tranquil surface of the lake,

and there where the landscape flattens,

glittering like fish scales,

the brightly glazed tiles of a myriad rooftops.

Here, there was every single conceivable amenity of civilisation.

So in Hangzhou, Song civilisation was restored -

from the people's culture to practical government.

There were fire stations

and hospitals, old people's homes - and even dance pavilions.

When the Italian Marco Polo came here in the 13th century,

he called it the best city on earth.

There were shops selling beauty products, make-up and face cream,

eyeliner, false hair.

And if shopping in Hangzhou hadn't worn you out,

you could repair to teashops or wine bars or storytelling houses

or huge public theatres.

And if that wasn't enough,

at the end of the evening you could go to fabulously appointed,

exclusive hostess bars where the most famous courtesans of the time

would serenade you with beautiful music - there was even a gay club!

But to really understand the remaking of the Song world,

you have to leave the glitter of Hangzhou behind.

That's lovely.

Out in the countryside, south of the river,

the Southern Song planted hundreds of new towns and villages

to supply the capital with food and coal and timber.

And here, at the grassroots,

they passed on the cultural ethos of the Song.

Even now in the old county towns

you can meet descendants of the governing class.

Ni hao.

Hello!

Wow! Look at this.

'This is Qishan town, an old Song trading place.'

Here in Mr Xie's crumbling family house, the signboard proudly

salutes his ancestors who passed the Song civil-service exams.

Hello, hello, hello, hello! Hello, hello, hello, hello!

Let me just ask you about the sign above - what does that say?

And despite all the upheavals of the 20th century,

the old ideals are still passed on.

Upstairs in the altar room,

wooden plaques name the ancestors stretching back a thousand years.

How many ancestors are commemorated here?

Wow! So it's one of the biggest family lineages in China?

So touching.

'Across the generations, the thread connecting the living with

'the dead, the Song ethos of virtue, duty and Confucian morality.'

In the 1100s, here in the South, great thinkers like Zhu Xi

shaped the Confucian ethos of China until today.

Zhu Xi wrote China's most influential book after Confucius,

a handbook to family rituals.

It was said you could find one in every home

in China in the 19th century.

It's about the mutual dependence of family and ancestors.

As Zhu Xi said, part of the state's effort

to guide and transform the people.

But the old cycles of Chinese history now returned to haunt them.

In the 13th century, the world was turned upside down by the Mongols.

Led by Genghis Khan,

their armies swept west as far as the walls of Vienna.

They overran Northern China,

creating the most extensive empire in history.

And then they gradually spread their power into the lands

of the Southern Song by land and sea...

..until the last terrible battle.

It was March 19th 1279.

Dark day in the story of China.

We're here almost exactly on the anniversary

and it was a day just like this, with rain and drizzle.

By the evening, you couldn't see the far shore.

The Song commanders had not defended the narrows here,

so the Mongol fleet was able to sail through into the lagoon.

And there the Song navy faced them.

They had about 1,000 ships

lashed together to form a floating fortress...

..their decks protected by wet mud to stop the effects

of the fire projectiles from the Mongol catapults.

When the battle began, an eyewitness says,

"The air was full of fiery traces of the Mongol firebombs."

But when the tide rose, the Mongols were able to encircle the Song fleet

and in the end the battle was lost and the young Emperor was trapped.

And then the Emperor's loyal minister, Lu Xiufu,

made a famous speech to the little boy -

"The affairs of our state have come to this,

"but we must not disgrace the nation."

And he took the boy in his arms

and he jumped into the sea to commit suicide.

The little boy's pet white parrot began to screech

and flap its wings until it overbalanced the cage

and fell into the water after its master.

So ended the glory of the Song.

So in the later 13th century China was defeated,

under alien rule, shocked to the core.

The Mandate of Heaven was suspended but it was not lost.

For China's cycles of order and disorder will continue.

Another great age will arise, as in China it always does.

One of the great eras of high civilisation in world history.

But they won't follow the brilliant experiments of the Song

on the path to modernity.

Instead, the experience of defeat will give birth

to a new kind of despotism.

The new dynasty will be the Bringers of Light...

..the Ming.