The Ming The Story of China

In all countries, the first duty of the state

is to protect the people -

from anarchy, invasion and insurrection.

But sometimes in history, the rebels become the rulers.

In the Story of China, we've reached the 14th century

and the beginning of China's most dazzling age.

Here in Nanjing, is the tomb of the founder of that age -

one of the greatest Chinese emperors.

And yet the man who built this...

was a rebel.

The story of the man who rose to this splendour is...

well, literally, incredible.

He came from the poorest peasant family.

His mother and father had given him away when he was a child.

He'd spent years as a wandering beggar,

as a penniless Buddhist monk.

He'd risen through the ranks of the secret peasant societies

fighting against the government

and won a series of staggering victories,

both against the government and against his peasant rivals.

When he became emperor, he gave himself the title Hongwu -

literally "above all mighty in war."

The Terminator.

He was suspicious, coarse, brutal, utterly ruthless,

but a creative genius.

And he founded one of the greatest eras of stability in government

and in society and high civilisation

in the history of the world.

The new dynasty was to be called "the bringer of light..."

Ming.

China has been a great power for most of its history

and yet repeatedly invaded and subjugated by foreigners.

When the future emperor Hongwu was young,

China was under the rule of the Mongols,

whose empire stretched to the gates of Europe.

But in the 1350s, the Mongol empire began to crumble.

In China, resistance armies rose against them in different regions.

SCREAMING

But then the land was torn apart

as warlords fought each other in civil war.

Chaos ruled,

but opportunity beckoned for the peasant general Zhu Yuanzhang.

Here in Nanjing, Zhu made his stronghold.

With his reputation for justice and good governance,

vast numbers of refugees flowed into the city -

a safe haven in time of war.

And now the people called on Zhu to declare himself emperor.

But he was a peasant and unwilling to take power.

So, he asked for a sign -

a tale told by the traditional storytellers.

That same year - 1368 - now the Hongwu Emperor,

he drove the Mongols out of North China

and made Nanjing capital of his new dynasty.

And now he sets out to rebuild the Chinese state,

not with Confucian ideas of virtue

which had inspired the Song Golden Age,

but by force and fear.

He surrounded his capital with giant walls

to show the might and legitimacy of Ming rule.

It's just epic, isn't it?

This isn't a castle, it's a gate!

Three great courtyards leading to the main gate.

From the moat, you've got to cover about a kilometre

to get through it into the city.

Believing himself to be guided by heaven,

Hongwu reshaped the layout of Nanjing

as a cosmic city based on ancient Daoist mystical beliefs.

The capital that the emperor had created was

the greatest city on Earth and it still has

the greatest set of city walls on Earth, 33km of them.

"Like a crouched tiger and a coiled dragon," it was said,

"snaking over hills and round the rivers and lakes."

It was thought to represent

the constellation of Ursa Major,

the Big Dipper along with Ursa Minor

and the 13 city gates matched

the 13 great stars.

The centre of power would replicate the harmonious order of heaven

whose mandate had now passed to the ruler of the Ming.

Hongwu now set out to put an all-powerful state

at the centre of people's lives.

His thirst for control is even stamped on the bricks

in the city wall.

Now, look at this.

This is a wonderful insight into Ming power.

Late 1300s, they got a census, they registered households,

the country was thousands of what I suppose what we'd call

tithings - groups of communities.

And 152 of these areas contributed to making

the bricks for this vast enterprise here.

And all the bricks are stamped...

Just look at that!

..with who made it and where it was made.

So, if you made a bad brick they knew who you were

and where to find you.

But for the real story of Hongwu's revolution,

you have to leave the city and go out into the countryside,

for here he thought was the true soul of China.

Born a peasant, Hongwu identified with the peasants.

He registered all land to make taxes fairer,

he had irrigation systems built

and reduced the demands for forced labour.

For him, the village was the basis of society.

Villages like this one - Tangyue in Anhui.

Here, the Bao family were head of their tithing

and they soon rose in the Ming state.

Let's just have a look at where we are.

I've got you're your lovely map here.

-Yes.

-This location is the east side of this village

and also a main entrance from the Shexian county.

So, here is the main ritual centre in the Ming dynasty.

So, we've got a street, we've got an academy for education and a temple.

-Yeah.

-So, the village is making... People are making money now.

Yes.

And the family used their money to build ancestral halls

for their men and their women,

who did their duty as loyal wives and mothers under the new order.

'The Bao story is told in the old printed edition

'of their family history,

'first put together in the Ming.'

So, how many copies of something like this would be produced?

Hongwu had been an outlaw in these hills

and his bitter experience of the time of anarchy drove him

to compile an all-embracing set of laws and punishments -

the Great Ming Code.

It drew on a thousand years of Chinese law,

but its severity has never been forgotten.

Here, one local story has been turned into a play

showing Ming law at work.

An innocent woman is condemned for the murder of her new husband.

Accused of infidelity, she's tortured and executed

by a harsh magistrate.

SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

But the body on the dam wasn't her husband.

He turns up, but too late.

Hongwu's strict law had taken its course.

But as the tale is remembered by the people of this town,

the letter of Ming law was not always justice.

So, like other autocrats in history,

Hongwu wanted to force people to be good.

In a country so vast and so diverse,

the state had to be seen to be strong.

"If I'm lenient," he said, "how am I a good ruler?

"How will the people live peaceful lives?"

Hongwu's rule rested on the hard realities of power.

But his grandfather had been a village diviner

and the emperor also believed implicitly in divination.

"I rest neither night nor day," he said,

"to restore the ancient customs of the people."

By returning to the roots of Chinese culture,

he thought he could find the Dao -

the true way...

the right direction.

The Wu family firm have been making these divinations compasses

since the Ming.

The Ming dynasty itself would last for nearly 300 years.

But Hongwu's reign would be a turning point in Chinese history.

He concentrated power in the person of the emperor himself.

It would prove a dangerous legacy.

In 1398 he died

and China was plunged into crisis.

If a person of such authority,

of such stature, dies...

Who takes over?

And is the next person in line as able with the same kind of vision?

Could he do the job?

As his successor, Hongwu had named his grandson.

But the boy's uncle rose against him.

He took the excuse of weeding out disloyal ministers,

and staged an uprising.

And then after three years of civil war

he took the throne and became the Yongle Emperor.

Yongle - it means perpetual happiness.

And when a tyrant calls himself that you have to watch out.

Having done away with his nephew, he ruthlessly purged his enemies.

Of course people knew he was a usurper, but there were rumours also

that he was illegitimate -

that he hadn't been the son of the first emperor, Hongwu.

So he ordered all the ministers of the previous ruler

to swear allegiance to him or die.

And among them was the chief minister, Fang Xiaoru.

Loyal, severe, honest.

He was ordered to write the edict

proclaiming the legitimacy of the new emperor.

He threw his brush down. "I would rather die," he said.

"You are not the true emperor.

"Where is your nephew?"

The emperor ordered his death, but with the most cruel sentence

that was possible under Chinese law -

death by nine degrees.

That meant that not only you died, but your parents and

your grandparents and your children

and your grandchildren and your brothers

and your cousins and your nephews,

to nine degrees of relationship.

And the emperor paused and said,

"But make it ten."

And now Yongle took a momentous decision.

In 1403 he ordered the building of a new capital

at his own power base 700 miles to the north.

There, on top of the old Mongol capital, he built a vast new city -

Beijing.

This is Tiananmen Square in the heart of today's Beijing,

and it's a great place to get a sense of the majestic scale

of the Ming Dynasty city.

Over there Tian'anmen Gate -

the gate of heavenly peace.

With the famous portrait of Chairman Mao above it.

You go through the gate and you're into the imperial city

and the forbidden city in its very heart.

The construction of Beijing took a million men 20 years.

Like other autocrats in history, Yongle wanted to create

an architecture of absolute power.

But Ming Beijing was more than an imperial capital,

it was also a vast ritual space

where the emperor petitioned the powers of heaven

to ensure that fertility of the Earth

and the stability of the social order.

Well, this is the end point of that great way

that we traced all the way from Tiananmen Square.

It's the altar of heaven.

This is the site of the most sacred rituals in the Ming Dynasty state.

I find this an incredibly moving place,

even when you're surrounded with all the business of tourism.

This altar symbolizes that Chinese surge to find

harmony between the three layers of the cosmos, symbolized in this -

the Earth, humanity and the heavens.

Reaping the benefits of stability,

in the early 1400s small market towns sprang up everywhere,

and China's economy began to grow and diversify.

In a gigantic engineering project, the Grand Canal

was refurbished for 1,000 miles between Beijing and the south,

ferrying raw materials, timber and rice up to the new capital.

It's still a mainstay of the Chinese economy today.

So this is a nice way of life Mr Hu. I like the calmness of it.

WOMAN TRANSLATES

How much of the year do you spend on the boat?

Helped by the Grand Canal, in the 15th century China's economy

became once more the largest in the world.

Although the renovation was an imperial project,

there's thousands of small operators - individual boat owners,

like Mr Hu here, who conduct their own business.

A person wrote at the time, "Travel up and down the canal

"and everybody is doing business."

So the Ming saw the spread of a mercantile mentality across China -

making money out of trade.

The population rose to between 150 and 200 million.

Incredibly, in the 15th century, when less that three million

lived in Tudor England,

a third of the people of the world lived under Ming rule.

So after the shock of the Mongol occupation China was restored,

and in Chinese eyes the borders of the Ming were again

those of civilisation itself.

And now, rather like today, China went out to the world.

In the early 1400s, decades before Columbus and Vasco da Gama,

they sent seven great voyages westwards, under Admiral Zheng He.

One of the fleet assembly places was the bay of Quanzhou

on the coast of Fujian.

Here in this great natural lagoon is what the Chinese in

the Ming Dynasty called the gathering place of the ships.

This is where those huge expeditions

waited at anchor for the monsoon winds.

Huge fleets - 63 ocean-going vessels -

the biggest of them with 28,000 crew,

just imagine it,

heading out to the barbarian countries of the west.

Zheng He was a high-ranking Muslim courtier - a eunuch.

He wasn't sent to explore or trade, let alone to conquer,

but to receive tribute and show off the glory of the Yongle Emperor.

As for the ships themselves,

little was known till the modern excavation

of the Ming dockyards in Nanjing.

What they found suggests the largest boats

could have reached 240 feet long -

the biggest wooden ships yet made.

And they're building a replica now in Nanjing.

Mike, if you look at this assembly shop for a boat,

it's pretty sizeable, isn't it?

It's sensational. It's absolutely amazing.

This is not complete yet, it's only half the size.

'It has six main decks, with watertight compartments

'and a great decorated stern towering 60 feet above the keel.'

-All these planks, they're naturally curved.

-Yeah.

'Incredibly, it's said Zheng He had 60 of these large vessels.

'What they called the treasure ships.'

It's just an absolutely fantastic, isn't it?

From the inside it looks much bigger than outside.

It's amazing, amazing.

And how many masts would a big ship like this have had?

There are six masts, all together,

with the two main masts in the middle.

The tallest one is 38 meters.

-That's huge. It's big mast.

-That's huge.

Because only that kind of size of sail and mast can drive this boat.

You remember Zheng He's inscription says,

-"And our sails, billowing like clouds."

-Yes!

"Pushed us on day and night"

-Exactly! That's the exact description!

-Fantastic.

When we have all these sails in full wind it'll look like that.

There's nothing approaching the treasure ships still afloat today.

But an ocean-going junk sails out of Hong Kong

for a children's charity, and I hitched a ride.

And today, as China reaches out again to the west,

Zheng He has become a national hero.

A symbol for the new self-confident world

of Chinese expansionism and naval might.

The great Ming voyages were made possibly by Chinese inventions -

the stern rudder, watertight compartments

and the magnetic compass,

which they already had in the Tang Dynasty.

So how did they navigate?

Well, didn't have charts like modern charts, but Chinese merchants

had sailed to the Persian Gulf before and east Africa

as far back as the Tang Dynasty.

And this is one of the portolans that they used.

Very schematic maps of direction of travel.

A bit like a London Tube map, almost.

Top of the page is actually India. North is that way,

you sail this way from China,

and the main landmarks are all actually

written down in little boxes.

The area of Mumbai there.

Further on, the area of the Gulf of Cambay,

and then towards Pakistan,

the Makran Coast and Iran.

And there's an associated handbook which gives you

the distances between the different ports and the star directions, too.

The seven voyages between 1405 and 1433 went across the

Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea,

and down the coast of east Africa.

They brought back new knowledge, rare foods and plants

and exotic animals.

Even a giraffe, which the Chinese identified

with the mythical unicorn -

an auspicious sign for the Yongle Emperor.

But after the sixth voyage, Yongle died.

And after one more expedition the new emperor, Xuande, called a halt.

So why did they stop?

Ming Dynasty at that point was the greatest power on Earth, -

maybe 200 million people.

They'd been the great scientific innovators.

They'd made the great inventions with which the West would

later dominate the world.

For some western commentators it shows that Chinese lacked

the will to pursue the boundaries of knowledge.

It would be like stopping Moon exploration at Apollo 8.

But maybe there's something else.

Maybe it's about how you use technology.

And perhaps the Ming scholar-bureaucrats in the end

realised that their interests were better served pursuing

the traditional goals of Chinese civilisation -

of achieving harmony between human kind and the cosmos

within the borders of China.

The truth is, dominating the wider world was not on the Chinese agenda.

For the Ming, after all, China was the world.

But there may have been a more pressing practical

reason for giving up on sea power -

the threat from their old enemies, the Mongols.

Out to the north, Ming armies made almost annual expeditions

beyond the mountains into the vast steppe lands of Mongolia.

And then in 1449 the Zhengtong Emperor was defeated

and captured by the Mongols -

the greatest military fiasco in the Ming period.

And that led to a massive rebuilding of the Great Wall

and a new mood of defensiveness.

This is the Juyongguan Pass -

one of the most famous passes in Chinese history.

As important in Chinese history as the Khyber is

in the history of India.

What you're looking at now, mainly the creation of the Ming Dynasty.

You can see the Great Wall snaking down from the mountains

all around us, coming down to this point, and down there, too.

And it's coming down here to a great fortress.

The Chinese emperors called it the First Fortress of the World.

See the series of gates where the road originally ran out to Mongolia.

The garrison town rooftops over there, and up there

the Buddhist and Daoist temples that served the people who lived here.

Bristling with weaponry,

armoured bowmen on the walls and the watchtowers,

beacons to alert the defences,

as the Ming Emperors start to define China as a Han civilisation again,

against what lay in the world beyond.

But at home, China was changing.

Especially in the rich cities of the south like Suzhou.

Ming China had begun as an agricultural state with

a stifling command economy, but now the growth of the market

gave birth to a new urban moneyed class,

who would begin to loosen the grip of Ming autocracy.

Suzhou, they said, was heaven on Earth.

Like Renaissance Florence, with its high culture

and its palaces and mansions.

These days you can even stay in them.

This was the house of the Fang family.

They were only middling merchants, but as you can see,

they lived the good life.

And in your Ming Dynasty guest room

there's fine furniture, as you can see,

a wooden bath that the servants would fill for you in the evening,

and a lovely four-poster bed hung with muslin mosquito nets -

very necessary here in Suzhou.

30 rooms, ancestral hall and a shrine room

and a little family school.

All belonging to the one extended family.

The Fang family had joined a new world of conspicuous consumption,

of private wealth and taste.

On their table the finest blue-glaze porcelain bought by the

new rich from their local art dealers,

and made by thousands of indentured workers in the state pottery kilns.

To meet the consumer demand old arts reached new heights under the Ming.

Among them lacquer making.

It's a craft that demands incredible attention to detail.

The best work was so coveted that Ming collectors travelled

hundreds of miles to buy the top brand names

from the most famous houses.

Now the Gan family are reviving the old techniques.

These gorgeous things would soon become all the rage in Europe, too.

Exported by Ming merchants, paid for by New World silver,

as China connected with the growing world economy.

And wealth brought leisure. Time to read for both men and women.

This was the golden age of Chinese fiction,

with novels like the Plum in the Golden Vase,

where middle class morals were now the subject

of Sex and the City satire.

Such confusions of pleasure were a long way

from the austere world of the first Ming Emperor.

Even fashion was now no longer the preserve of the ruling class.

And as regards designer labels, well,

Suzhou was all the rage.

If it wasn't made in Suzhou,

people said, people just didn't want to wear it.

The hems go up the hems go down,

and the fuddy duddys complained these new people,

with their newfangled fashions,

are erasing the class differences

which were implicit in the old, traditional styles of costume.

In the cotton and silk industries demand skyrocketed.

And Suzhou silk was the best.

In every village around Suzhou, they said, the people devoted

all their energies to earning a living from silk.

A proletariat of textile workers was emerging,

but critics now asked was all this pursuit of wealth

making a better world?

-Hello, how are you?

-Hello, fine.

I'm just looking at your beautiful silk.

Yes, this a very traditional material.

-May we have a look?

-Which one do you like?

Yeah, the one... It looks Chinese imperial gown, doesn't it?

Maybe this one. OK.

-This is the kind of thing the Mandarins used to wear.

-Yes.

This is like gold colour. In the pattern is long life.

The meaning is very good - the long life.

And here is five bats.

-Beautiful.

-Yes.

And people buy this to make dresses or clothes or what?

For making wedding dress. For Chinese wedding dress.

Maybe Chinese man, the jacket is nice.

-For men too? Really?

-Yes.

Like this one, maybe.

I show you.

-Oh, that is beautiful.

-This is nice.

You know here is a dragon.

The dragon, for a man, it's a perfect pattern.

Oh, right. So it's strength?

The dragon is strong and brave?

And good luck as well?

Yes, it's like a king!

-Like a king. The symbol of the king. Yes, of course!

-Yes!

-Yeah, the emperor wears dragons!

-Yes.

So to paraphrase Dr Johnson, if you were tired of Ming Suzhou,

you were tired of life.

And when you'd made your money and retired, you came home

and left your mark with a lovely garden.

This was one of 90 gardens in Suzhou.

Adorned with playful poems and inscriptions,

it was a feast for the senses.

A far cry from Hongwu's day,

when the land was simply there to be ploughed by the peasants.

These private gardens in the Ming Dynasty were rich men's passions.

Passion being the operative word.

They travelled hundreds of miles to bring back

weirdly-shaped stones to place in the garden.

They dug artificial hills, like this one,

on which they placed gazebos where you could

take in the different view points -

the Distant Fragrance Hall where the lotuses were planted,

the Magnolia Hall, and even better,

the Scent of Snow and Rosy Clouds Hall.

The pleasures of the Ming...

for some.

The gardens were nature in miniature.

And as for nature at large,

Ming thinkers had a lot to say about that, too,

in a time that saw the rise of tourism and guidebooks.

Especially in the remote highlands down to Yunnan and Vietnam.

Here the Ming had opened up new territories

with exotic tribes and peoples.

And intrepid travel writers now describe their landscapes and geology.

The most famous Ming travel writer was Xu Xiake.

Xu wrote about nature and feeling like the European Romantics.

In his records he sounds like a 19th-century natural scientist.

But in all his wanderings, from the heartland to the edge of Ming China,

what we never sense is the existence of a world beyond.

And the world beyond was getting closer.

In August 1582 a visitor arrived in the tiny Portuguese trading post

of Macau on the South China Sea.

It was an event of no apparent significance

in the greater scheme of things.

But its repercussions would be world-shaking.

The visitor was an Italian Jesuit called Matteo Ricci,

and his mission, unbelievably, was to convert China to Christianity.

The founding of Macau had been part

of the extraordinary expansion of European powers

in the few decades since Columbus discovered the New World.

Small maritime states on the Atlantic seaboard,

they were nothing compared with the greatness and antiquity of China.

But with their new knowledge, and propelled by Chinese inventions,

it was the Europeans, not the Chinese,

who would seize the time.

And it all began with a simple trading deal.

This is the old fortress on the top of Macau.

Portuguese had made their earliest explorations

of the Chinese coast in 1513-14.

And then in 1557 the Ming government allowed them

to actually settle on this peninsula and to live here.

Not a formal treaty,

and the Ming government looked after them very carefully.

They had a landward wall with garrisons to make sure

that they didn't come out of here, except at the allotted times -

twice a year, when they could sail up to Canton to trade.

It was the Europeans' first foothold.

Here in the south, Ricci worked for 15 years

learning to speak Chinese like a native.

And then, in 1598, he set off overland to Beijing.

The China he travelled through, he wrote, was the

best-governed state on Earth,

and a deeply moral civilisation.

But Christianity, he thought, would be the completion of their faith.

To achieve that, his idea was to go to the very top to find

a Chinese emperor like Constantine,

who'd converted the Roman Empire to Christianity.

-He's an honorary Chinese person?

-Yeah, and a great person.

'He didn't succeed in that,

'but astonishingly there are 70 million Chinese Christians today.

'And in a sense you could say their story begins with Ricci.'

When he was in Chaozhou he wrote two important books.

One is a true doctrine of the Lord of Heaven -

that's Catholic doctrine.

And another one is Euclid's elements.

Euclid's elements?

That's very important, you know, mathematical books.

Even after Matteo's death, people at that time,

they say, "Oh, we have never had a foreigner

"to be buried in the capital."

And one important official at that time said,

"One worthy only for the Euclid's elements can be buried here.

"That's enough!"

So you can see how important the works he has done.

Most Chinese scholars were more interested in that

new knowledge than what one described as

"the Christian's strange theology."

Ricci prepared for the emperor a map of the world,

on which the Chinese learned of new continents,

and saw that the world was far bigger

than they'd ever imagined.

And in Ricci's western science, the Mandarins found

even more astonishing revelations.

"These Westerners are passionate about astronomy,"

said one of the Chinese scholars.

"And they've brought instruments with them

"connected with that science."

"And they believe that the Earth hangs in the firmament,

"and that it's a globe. And that if you go all the way round westwards,

"you end up going eastwards."

"And if you go all the way up northwards, you go over

"the top of the world, and then you travel southwards

"and come back to where to you started."

As you can see, it's an astrolabe. Oh, but what an astrolabe.

Of course it enables you to take very accurate sun measurements and time measurements.

The Chinese had used a lunar calendar

prior to the arrival of the Jesuits, and Matteo Ricci,

and now they're, with imperial patronage,

have switched their science to a solar calendar,

which is much more accurate, of course.

But the implications of the new Western science

were about far more than cosmology.

They were a challenge to the entire system of thought

developed by the Chinese over so many millennia.

With Western ideas and Spanish silver from the Americas,

Ming China was being drawn into the wider world.

'The question was, how would it respond?'

Hello.

'Ricci himself died in China in 1610.

'In the end, China had converted him, not the other way round.

'He'd come to love and admire the Chinese

'and what he called their 4,000-year-old tradition.'

Ricci's Chinese diary was published after his death,

and in it he makes some thought-provoking

comparisons between the Europeans and the Chinese.

"Though they have a well-equipped army and navy

"that could easily conquer the neighbouring nations,

"neither the king nor his people

"ever think of waging wars of aggression.

"In this respect it seems to me," says Ricci, "that they are

"very different from the peoples of Europe

"who are forever disturbing their neighbours,

"and entirely consumed with the idea of supreme domination."

But Ricci also saw a fatal insularity in the Chinese worldview.

"The extent of the Chinese kingdom is so vast,

"and its borders are so distant,

"and yet their lack of knowledge about the world beyond the oceans

"is so complete that they think their kingdom

"includes the whole world."

By the early 1600s, as the world was changing around them,

the emperors were losing touch with the people -

shutting themselves up in the Forbidden City,

shunning the hard work and moral purpose needed to run the state.

We've an insight into those times from the writer Zhang Dai,

who came from a rich land-owning family here in Shaoxing.

You can still make out the shape of the Ming Dynasty city -

a great rectangle framed by tree-lined canals.

This was a great cultural and economic centre.

And this is where the Zhang family had set up in their beautiful estate,

in what Grandad Zhang called the Happiness Garden.

Across the country the gap between rich and poor was widening,

while Zhang wrote about the life of the rich, like a Chinese Proust.

But the prosperity of the Ming had been

bought on the backs of the poor,

while the rich still lived the good life,

like the Edwardian aristocracy on the eve of the First World War.

This is a very beautiful hotel.

'This is Zhang's house. It's now a hotel.'

Hello. Yes, it's very nice to be here.

'Zhang was typical of his class in the late Ming.

'He had leisure and no responsibilities.

'A career writer in a proudly literary city.'

..2,500 years old.

-2,500 years old?

-Yeah, yeah.

I don't think we've got towns as old as that in England!

Looking back, Zhang saw that society was corrupt and unjust.

"I had it all in my youth," he wrote.

"I was a silk stocking dandy addicted to luxury.

"But it was all an illusion."

Social critics were now asking whether the pursuit of wealth

had eroded the idea of service to the state.

Some blamed the imperial system itself.

"Let's throw the scoundrels out," they wrote.

And died for it.

In the 1630s the crisis came.

Beyond the lantern-lit pavilions,

gangs of unemployed roamed the countryside,

the silk workers went on strike,

peasant rebellions raised their flags.

And then even nature seemed to turn against them.

The Yellow River broke its banks, overwhelming the dykes

so carefully restored by Ming engineers a century before.

Whole cities and towns were wiped out.

Epidemics and famines killed millions.

The old cycles of Chinese history had returned to haunt them.

And for the first time,

China's rulers had discovered the limits of autocracy.

Along the coasts, the government could no longer give protection

to communities against bandits, outlaws and pirates.

More and more, the people were left to their own devices.

'Here, in one village in Fujian, a public-spirited local,

'a retired civil servant, came back home to help out.'

Hello.

'Here he set up charities.

'And in 1604 paid for walls to protect the village

'when the local government had run out of cash.

'His family, the Zhaos, are still here.'

It's like a mini-fortress, isn't it?

'In the centre of the village he built a great fortified tower house.

'A refuge for the whole village in time of crisis.'

That's absolutely wonderful, isn't it?

Because the soldiers have to watch the outside,

and there's only windows for the outside on the top floor.

You can see the landscape all around from the top floor.

HE LAUGHS

-Hi. Thank you.

-Please sit down.

So, Mr Zhao? Very nice to meet you. Hi.

'And as in so many places in China,

'the Zhao family still know their ancestors story.'

At that time there were many pirates, pirates on the sea.

And pirates attacked at them.

So Zhao Wen came back to build this,

Zhao's family's castle.

The harsh justice of the first Ming Emperor,

a guarantee of order was another world now.

As Mr Zhao's son observed in 1619,

"The days of peace seem a long time ago."

And in 1644, the end came.

HE SHOUTS ORDERS

In the north, in Manchuria,

the Manchus had created a powerful new state.

And sensing China's weakness, their armies surged down onto Beijing.

To avoid capture, the Emperor Chongzhen hanged himself

from a tree on Coal Hill, overlooking the Forbidden City.

The tree is still there, with his memorial.

Next year the Manchu armies swept across the Yangtze.

If they resisted, the rich cities of the south were devastated.

In Shaoxing, Grandad Zhang's Happiness Garden was wrecked,

along with the family mansion.

And the Chinese Proust, Zhang Dai,

fled to become a penniless Buddhist monk.

"As I think about the things that I did in the past," he said,

"I write them all down.

"To beg forgiveness.

"In life, everything has a payback.

"The rags I'm wearing now are payback

"for the fine furs and silks that I once had.

"The straw that I sleep on is a payback for the soft beds.

"The smoke in my eyes and the dung in my nostrils

"payback for the voluptuous fragrances of the past.

"This sack on my shoulder, a payback to all those who used to carry me.

"For every kind of sin, there is a kind of retribution."

"I was nearly 50 years old that year of 1645," Zhang wrote.

"My country was shattered and I had lost everything.

"Looking back, it was as if my life under the Ming had been a dream."

Next time: China's last empire, the glory of the Qing,

and the fateful coming of the British.