Episode 1 The Silk Road

This is the story of a trade route that changed the world.

A route that was over 5l,000 miles long.

It began with a single commodity.

A material spun from the cocoon of a moth

that became the clothing of emperors.

This was the Silk Road.

It ran all the way from China's ancient capital

through Central Asia,

through mythical cities such as Samarkand,

or Persepolis, until it reached the bazaars of Istanbul.

The merchants of Venice.

It ran through deserts and oases.

I'll get to see the Silk Road treasures of Iran,

now once more opening to travellers like me.

I'm starting to think that I may have actually been

an Iranian merchant in a former life.

And it ran through valleys and over mountain passes.

From Alexander the Great to Genghis Khan,

emperors and princes fought to control the Silk Road.

It was worth fighting for.

Along its many miles, there was money to be made.

But the peoples on the Silk Road not only bought and bartered goods,

they also exchanged ideas and techniques

on which Western Europe would one day depend.

Paper, gunpowder and musical instruments.

The Silk Road cut across borders

and brought cultures into contact and conflict.

In this episode, I'll travel 2,000 miles

in the footsteps of the ancient Chinese envoy

who first made the Silk Road possible.

I'll meet the goddess who discovered silk

and I'll find out that on the Silk Road,

business didn't even stop for death.

He was expecting to collect on those loans in the afterlife.

I'm a historian,

and Venice has always had a special fascination for me.

It has a central, vital place in European history -

but there's something strange about it. Something mysterious.

Charles Dickens once described Venice as an hallucination.

When he visited here in 1844,

he was unable to rid himself of the feeling that somehow,

strangely, weirdly, Venice wasn't a European city at all,

but an Oriental one which, in his own words,

"was troubled by the wild, luxuriant fantasies of the East".

He wrote to a friend, "The wildest visions of the Arabian nights

"are nothing to the Piazza of St Mark.

"Opium couldn't build such a place."

Wherever he looked, he saw the Orient.

Windows everywhere that belonged to the Arab world.

Venice is full of traces of the trade on which its wealth was based.

Memories of a network of business connections

known today as the Silk Road

that once stretched across the Mediterranean Sea,

into the very heart of Asia.

Once you're aware that these traces are there to be seen,

you find them everywhere.

The Doge's Palace in St Mark's Square.

The ornaments to its roofline

and the repeated pattern of squares on its facade.

Well, these aren't European at all.

They're modelled on Muslim styles of architecture.

North of the Grand Canal, approaching the edge of Venice,

we find this.

Does he look Italian to you? I don't think so.

Statues like these advertised the presence of people

who traded in the exotic artefacts and produce, not of Europe,

but of another world entirely.

And then, around the corner, a stern-looking fellow

with a strange metal nose and a pack on his shoulders.

The fading letters spell out the word Rabarbaro.

It's the Italian word for rhubarb,

a plant that first came here from China along the Silk Road.

No Silk Road, no rhubarb crumble.

And here's my favourite.

A house, so the story goes, built by three brothers,

the Mori brothers, in the 1120s.

The Palazzo del Cammello.

The House of the Camel.

But it's not merely a matter of decorations and carvings.

It goes deeper than the skin of this old city.

Commerce is always about more than just the exchange of money.

If I walk away from a trader with a set of Chinese bowls

or a barrel of gunpowder, a ream of paper,

or a text explaining the principles of algebra,

I'm obviously carrying more than the objects themselves.

I'm carrying ideas.

Ideas that can change my life, that of my country,

sometimes completely, whether I want to admit it or not.

So here's my question -

exactly how much does Venice

and all of Europe really owe to the Silk Road?

So I'm going on a journey from China through Central Asia,

through Iran, to Turkey and back here to Venice.

A very similar journey was made by Marco Polo,

the Venetian travel writer, trader and explorer extraordinaire

more than 700 years ago.

When Marco Polo returned to this great city, he wrote a book.

Now, I'm going to take one with me instead, to write in - a journal,

but also a scrapbook,

somewhere to put photographs of the places and people that I will meet.

I'm also going to have a few sketches to put in here, as well,

of the people, of the creatures I might hope to meet.

Sketches of princesses, of conquerors.

Now, today, these pages are blank,

but come with me, watch me fill them -

and the first thing I'm going to put in here is a map.

This is China and this is where my journey begins.

In the 3,000-year-old city that once upon a time was China's capital.

Xi'an.

Every evening in Xi'an's old city, the market comes to life.

Xi'an has always been seen as the beginning of the Silk Road.

The streets are bustling and narrow,

but I feel a little like Charles Dickens did in Venice.

I'm not entirely sure where I am.

Chinese writing is everywhere,

but China and Chinese food is rather harder to find.

Hm. Lamb kebabs, which I'm pretty sure is a Turkish dish.

Everywhere I look, there are people wearing Islamic prayer hats.

And this is nothing new. It's not some recent wave of immigration.

I think you'll agree, I could be forgiven if I became confused.

And the fact that there's been a Muslim community here

since the 8th century is entirely due to the Silk Road,

to the lines of trade and communication it established.

The Muslims who came here weren't tourists or captives,

they were traders.

And all around me in Xi'an's ancient city

is the world the Silk Road delivers.

The market, trade.

And it reminds me that consumer society is nothing new.

Even something as simple as this.

White China, blue decoration.

Now, China's porcelain was incredibly fine,

but further down the Silk Road,

I'll find local versions in inferior, thicker clay

with the same basic shapes, the same basic colour scheme.

In this single object, you can begin to see the power of the Silk Road.

Everything sells on the Silk Road -

and where trade leads, cultures follow.

The next morning, the market's closed for business.

In the gardens just beside it, the world seems Chinese again.

What could be more Chinese than this collection of buildings?

These eaves, these roofs, this dragon.

But once I've reached the largest building

which stands in these gardens, plainer than the others,

but still apparently very Chinese, I find this.

RHYTHMIC CHANTING

It's a mosque. The Great Mosque of Xi'an.

There's been one here since the 8th century.

As mixed messages go, this has to be one of the biggest I have ever seen.

TARDIS levels of strangeness.

Outside, one place, but inside...another.

Trade brought these people here and religion came with them

as inevitably, as naturally as their luggage.

China was a magnet to traders. For more than a thousand years,

it was a place of innovations and inventions.

And, with a regularity that I, as a Westerner,

feel I have to take personally,

they came up with these things time and time again

hundreds of years before we did.

I'm still in Xi'an, visiting a museum

dedicated to just one of those vitally important inventions.

But which one?

It's not immediately obvious what's going on here.

This man appears to have it in for a pile of moistened vegetable matter.

He passes his work on to these ladies,

who remove the last traces of bark.

Then a man thrashes at it in a bath until it's broken down entirely.

What are they up to?

Ah, it's paper.

One of those ideas that seems so obvious once you've had it.

China may have developed paper

before the time of Christ, for wrapping medicines.

Writing came later -

but China's official histories have always dated it 105 AD

and named the inventor.

It was a court eunuch,

a civil servant named Cai Lun, who invented paper.

The absence of testicles in the Chinese civil service

were seen as a positive advantage.

There were fewer distractions.

Cai Lun was completely focused on his career.

Now, it has been claimed that he took credit for an invention

that wasn't really his -

but he was immediately promoted and has been remembered ever since.

Here's a new statue of him.

As well as paper, many other things were invented in China,

travelled along the Silk Roads and transformed European life.

From the relatively trivial, the umbrella,

to the absolutely vital, such as printing.

Then there's gunpowder and the magnetic compass

and certain kinds of suspension bridge, certain kinds of pump,

techniques for deep drilling, rotary fans, wheelbarrows,

crossbows, kites, the casting of iron, canal locks.

Once the Silk Road was established,

there were moments when ideas and commodities were traded along it.

Now, paper is a good example.

Until 751, it was an exclusively Chinese technique.

But then Muslim and Chinese forces met in battle

way out beyond China's western borders, in a place called Talas.

The Chinese were defeated.

And amongst those captured were a band of hapless papermakers.

Within 50 years, paper was being made in Baghdad,

but it wasn't until the 12th century that it reached Europe.

But none of this could happen until there was a Silk Road -

and that didn't happen until after China became a single kingdom.

Xi'an is home to the Terracotta Army,

the construction of which was ordered by the man

responsible in the 3rd century BC for creating China.

China is named after him. He was the Qin Emperor.

When he died in 210 BC,

his clay god was ready for installation in an elaborate tomb.

8,000 life-sized figures,

130 chariots and 600 horses.

A marriage of art and power.

The dust from the army's construction has long since settled.

But this business in Xi'an

is dedicated to producing exact replicas,

using red clay from the same pits.

We could easily be in the 3rd century BC.

Qin Emperor has just died,

work on the last few ranks of his funeral guard is underway.

There were deliberate attempts to convey a variety of faces.

Look into their eyes.

Here is a ruthless veteran of the wars of conquest.

And here's a young man who's only just signed up.

And here are some soldiers who disappointed the emperor.

And here is the figure of the emperor himself.

There's more than a hint of self-satisfaction

about his bearing, don't you think?

And if there's a sense

that the faces of all the soldiers are portraits,

then perhaps this is, too.

Perhaps some memory is preserved here of the face of the man

who first forced China, despite itself, to become one realm.

And, of course, in real life,

these glorious robes were all made of silk.

The company's founder, Mr Han, has been working

on these figures for more than 20 years.

Why do you think the emperor chose to be buried with his soldiers?

So, planning to fight in the afterlife.

What do you think he would've been like if you'd met him?

Do you think his soldiers would have been frightened of him?

From the Terracotta Army,

we learned that the unification of China was no accident.

It was achieved by force of arms.

Even in death, the Qin Emperor wanted to leave a reminder

that China was armed to the teeth

and that he and his successors wanted more.

Enough is never enough.

The court of the Qin Emperor was dangerous.

One sacked advisor fled the court and left this opinion behind...

"The King of Qin is like a bird of prey.

"There is no beneficence in him.

"He has the heart of a tiger or a wolf.

"If his ambitions for the empire are fulfilled,

"all men will be his slaves."

This army shows that in the century before the Silk Roads opened up,

China was ready for conquest and expansion,

but it can show us something else, as well.

Humans are all life-size and the horses must be, too.

But they're all tiny.

In the Qin Emperor's day, all China had was little ponies,

almost too cute for combat -

and that remained true for decades after the emperor's death...

..until a world-changing journey took place.

It's a journey that China has recently decided to celebrate

outside Xi'an's ancient city in a carefully antique style.

On a roundabout in the middle of a business district.

I'm not sure what I'm seeing here, I haven't been in China long enough,

but I strongly suspect that art and power are still in bed together.

50 years after the death of the Qin Emperor,

there was a new dynasty in charge, the Han dynasty.

And there was an emperor, Wudi,

who wanted to deal with the barbarians

who plagued the edges of his territory.

The Chinese called these people the Xiongnu.

Now, the Xiongnu, quite possibly the people that we call the Huns,

were experts at mobile warfare,

and they were more than an irritant. They were a threat.

There were rumours of other people far to the west,

potential allies in the war against the Xiongnu.

So the emperor sent an envoy, Zhang Qian,

on a mission of discovery.

And here he is.

It was a long and difficult journey,

and what this sculpture commemorates

is what he brought back more than ten years later.

China's horses were tiny, but the nomads had fabulous steeds.

So much more impressive than anything in China

that Zhang Qian declared them heavenly.

After Zhang Qian returned with tales of these heavenly horses,

magnificent animals of great stamina,

which you could ride, if you were brave enough,

which descended from dragons which sweated blood,

it was all too much for his emperor to resist.

Here was the perfect warhorse, which is exactly what China needed

to defend and extend its borders.

So almost immediately, Zhang Qian was sent back

to do the first ever iconic Silk Road deal.

He would exchange silk for these heavenly horses.

Zhang Qian's journey would lay the very foundations of the Silk Road.

But before I retrace his steps, I'm travelling 700 miles

from Xi'an to the green hills near the city of Chengdu.

I want to learn more about the miraculous commodity

on which all this was based - silk.

And there's someone I want to pay my respects to.

The person who discovered that fibres from the cocoon

of the silk moth could be unwound and woven.

Archaeologists have found and carbon-dated traces

of silk manufacture from about 5,000 years ago.

But, pardon me, that's mere science.

The Chinese prefer to believe that the discovery

was made by a goddess in about 2,000 BC.

Good afternoon, Silk Mother.

The Silk Mother dominates this lush, green landscape

two hours' drive from Chengdu.

The worship of the Silk Mother is about 4,000 years old

and still continues.

This statue is recently built.

Mrs Woo and Mrs Liung are its caretakers.

Very kindly, they've agreed to talk to me...

at the same time.

Why do people still revere the Silk Mother?

Do you teach your children to revere the Silk Mother, as well?

The Silk Mother wasn't always a goddess.

Over 4,000 years ago, she was merely human. An emperor's wife.

Her name was Leizu,

married to an emperor who was himself more a myth than a reality.

He reigned from 2697 to 2597 BC.

A whole century.

In myths, emperors lived that long.

One day, she was drinking tea in her garden

underneath a mulberry tree

when the cocoon of a silk moth fell out of a branch into her teacup.

She tried to pick it out, but ended up pulling on a thread.

Because in scalding heat, the cocoon had begun to unravel.

And she pulled and she pulled and soon,

every branch of every tree in the garden was covered in silk.

So grateful were the Chinese people for her discovery

that they promoted Leizu. They made her into a goddess.

Every year at the same time,

the silk manufacturers of China harvest their cocoons.

And I'm lucky enough to be here when it happens. It's late October.

It's almost as if they re-enact the Silk Mother's discovery every year.

Local farmers arrive with their cocoons, the unique source of silk.

4,000 year ago, before the Silk Roads were established,

it would have been impossible to see this anywhere else in the world.

Silk moths could be found only in China.

Inside each of these cocoons,

there's a living caterpillar in the process of transforming into a moth.

I'm really not sure what to make of this place.

The first thing that hits you is the smell. It smells a bit like a farm.

And there's this weird noise,

sort of clicking and clacking as they sort through the tables.

It really is very odd.

The cocoons are sorted for colour and quality.

And then, this.

Each cocoon is a tiny tragedy.

They're plunged into boiling water to loosen the threads

of which they're made,

so the making of silk has two outcomes.

A pile of tiny, sodden caterpillar corpses...

..and this extraordinarily beautiful glossy thread.

It looks like human hair.

As though a million Rapunzels have just donated.

Silk was and is magical.

The strength of its threads rivals anything we can synthesise.

When woven into fabric, it has a natural sheen.

It can be made into luxuriant materials with soft, buttery folds

or into almost transparent wisps,

an invitation to extremely bad behaviour.

Silk itself has been used as money

and it has become the very stuff of history, too.

Traded for jewels and jade, traded for weapons and cosmetics,

traded for slaves, traded from East to West.

The Romans would desire its secrets,

and eventually, after centuries of envy, and by espionage, secure them.

It would become the ultimate commodity.

This extraordinary thread was the engine of the Silk Road trade

and between about 200 BC and 1400 AD,

it was of absolutely vital importance,

not just to the history of China or to the history of Central Asia,

but to the history of the world.

And without the cultural contact, it inspired the changes it generated.

The ideas and inventions that arose along the Silk Road,

well, we Westerners would still be counting on our fingers,

writing on leather and thinking that the earth is flat.

When Xang Qian set out on his journey to the West,

China had had silk for at least 2,000 years.

His journey would end that monopoly.

Silk would go West, just like Xang Qian.

His journey was arduous, risky, slow.

Mine will be more comfortable.

I want to get to one of the places he'll have passed through,

or near to,

a city which, in his day, sat at China's Western edge.

It's a place called Dunhuang,

over 1,000 miles, 24 hours, two trains.

It's not exactly a bullet train, it's more of the turtle train.

I meant tortoise!

HE LAUGHS

After Xang Qian, this journey to the West became commonplace.

Not just because of horses, but because one of the first things

that arose from his journey

was a trading partnership with another race

who would become of central importance to the Silk Road history.

Xang Qian made contact with a group of people

whose stock-in-trade was trade itself.

The Sogdians, who lived in the heart of central Asia.

They could sell anything.

If only they were alive today, Alan Sugar would be spoilt for choice.

He'd probably hire the lot.

The Sogdians were of Persian descent.

Here, we see them bearing tribute to the Persian Emperor,

accompanied by a camel, their pack animal of choice.

The Chinese sent more envoys to these Sogdian traders.

China reached out to the West, trade began to flow and with it,

ideas, religions, commodities of every sort.

Cosmetics, rare oils, works of art, weapons of war and slaves.

On the Silk Road, everything and anybody was for sale.

There would be deals, there would be battles,

and Europe's future,

when it would discover the new and startling things

the Silk Road had to offer, grew closer.

Imagine that this train contains not people,

but ideas and inventions

that will arrive in Europe and change everything.

Imagine that it contains paper, stirrups, gunpowder, compasses.

That's the power of the Silk Road.

It brings change. Unstoppable, inevitable change.

Change on the Silk Road could be fundamental,

it could travel in almost any direction.

Xang Qian's journey brought him to Dunhuang.

He was near what would become the middle of the Silk Road,

a territory occupied by one people after another,

conquered, reconquered, taken and lost.

In the second century after Christ,

that process of constant change brought Buddhism to China.

By Xang Qian's day, Dunhuang was a vibrant focus for Buddhist culture,

with a complex of almost 500 caves,

full of Buddhist imagery, statuary and art - the Mogao Caves.

They've been included in UNESCO's list

of World Heritage Sites since 1987.

Inside, they are monumental, massively varied.

There are Buddhas who could step on you and never notice.

Amidst it all, there was room for images that evoked

the sometimes unpleasant realities of life along the Silk Road.

Well, here's proof that this trading business wasn't all fun and games.

Here, we've got some bandits with their swords

lying in ambush for some Silk Road traders.

But the biggest moral we can draw from these caves

has more to do with relations between East and West -

our failure to grasp how much Europe owes to the Silk Road.

As the 19th century drew to a close,

a huge cache of documents was discovered here.

Documents dating from between the third and 10th centuries AD.

Archaeologists from Europe, Russia and even Japan

descended on Dunhuang.

Imagine, for the next few minutes, that you're one of them.

You are an explorer and archaeologist,

Hungarian-born, British by choice.

The year is 1907 And your name is Aurel Stein.

Here you are. Neat, freshly washed and combed.

The embodiment of Western civilisation and all its values.

You discover that the Mogao Caves are in the charge of the abbot

of the nearby Daoist monastery.

You meet the abbot and you take a picture of him.

He looks a bit simple and shabby.

And that's how you treat him.

Shabbily.

You expend a certain amount of energy on charming the abbot

and you gain access to the cell where the documents were found.

You discover a solid mass of manuscript bundles,

rising to nearly ten feet.

You later calculate that's almost 500 cubic feet of documents.

You also note that in other caves, there are paintings

dating from the Tang Dynasty -

that's from the 7th to the 9th centuries.

You take your pick, having to rip them off the walls.

You also take your pick of the documents,

including the Diamond Sutra,

the earliest printed book ever discovered,

dating from the 9th century.

And then you convince Abbot Wang that £130 is more than enough

for all of these treasures.

And then you leave.

You load 29 cases of your plunder onto the backs of camels

and take everything back to Britain.

That, as they say, is how we rolled in 1907.

Aurel Stein was no worse, and certainly no better,

than the other archaeologists from Germany, France, Russia,

who saw China's weakness in those years

as a opportunity to plunder her past.

For Mr Wang Zhu-Dong, the director of the Mogao Caves,

the wounds are still fresh.

How do you feel about the fact

that so many wonderful treasures were taken away from you?

Could you talk a little

about the extraordinary variety of material that was in the cave,

and particularly, all the languages that the documents were written in?

How...

would you like to move forward,

considering that all of these treasures

are now spread around the world?

Do you think that they should be brought back?

This truth would have been lost on Aurel Stein.

He returned many times to Dunhuang to strip it of antiquities.

On his second visit, in the desert,

he discovered a postbag lost in the fourth century,

containing undelivered letters,

several written by the silk road's legendary traders -

the Sogdians.

Translated, they revealed the stock phrases

of Sogdian courtesy and goodwill.

"It would be a good day for him who might see you happy.

"It would be a good day for him who might see you healthy and at ease".

And my favourite one of all -

"When I hear news of your good health,

"I consider myself immortal."

Written as they are by Sogdians,

most of the letters are about business,

reports to employers of what they have to sell,

what's selling well, what is selling badly.

Silver, linen, unfinished cloth, pepper

and powdered white lead - a cosmetic - are referred to.

All the letters dated from early in the fourth century.

They speak to us across a gulf of 1,700 years.

One of them was written by a Sogdian woman named Miwnay

to her errant husband, called Nanaidhat, who had abandoned her.

After the standard Sogdian messages of goodwill,

her real feelings become apparent.

"Behold", she writes,

"I am living badly, not well, wretchedly.

"And I consider myself dead.

"Again and again I send you a letter,

"but I do not receive a single letter from you.

"And I have become without hope towards you.

"My misfortune is this -

"I have been in Dunhuang for three years, thanks to you.

"Surely the gods were angry with me on the day I did your bidding.

"I would rather be a dog's or a pig's wife than yours".

It's a tantalising glimpse into her life.

We know no more.

And we want to.

Was she OK?

Did she get home? Did she remarry?

Or did she die here?

Have I walked over her grave?

Lives we can understand,

real lives were lived here,

began and ended here.

Dunhuang is full of such memories.

Memories, too, of real choices.

The fact that, at every oasis, at every city along the silk road,

the trader faced moment of decision.

In this case, it was, "How shall I cross the desert?"

And then other little worries came hurrying along.

Where can I sell what I'm carrying?

Will what I'm carrying survive?

Will I?

Today, tourists can hire camels for a ride across the dunes.

They are the right kind of camels, Bactrian, two-humped.

The Chinese had known the breed for centuries by the time Zhang Qian

set off on his journey and, for centuries more,

it would remain the most important pack animal along the silk road.

So, yes, ride camels -

but this is where the authenticity begins to stutter slightly.

Come in, number 591. Your time is up.

The camel trek brings the tourists to Crescent Lake.

A real enough oasis. Certainly once a real stop on the silk road.

But, by the 1990s, the oasis had largely run dry.

Apparently, ever since, it's been regularly topped up.

The desert is entirely real, but today it is tame enough to walk in.

Tame enough to write on.

It's no longer what it was...

which was terrifying.

The desert that stretched to the west of Dunhuang

was the stuff of fables.

130,000 square miles of extreme aridity.

A graveyard for the unwise silk roader -

the Taklamakan.

People are unsure of where the name derives from, or its exact meaning -

but none of the possible translations are very appealing.

The place of ruins.

The abandoned place.

The place to leave behind.

You couldn't go through it, there was no water.

West of Dunhuang, you made your choice.

You go to the desert's north, or its south.

Eventually, you came to a gate.

There was once one here,

and the Great Wall of China stretched out on either side.

This is the Yangguan. The Yang Pass.

You paid your toll and passed through.

If you were a trader, you thought about your return.

What you might exchange your silk, your cosmetic, your paper for.

You thought about profit.

But exiles came this way, too.

This was China's western edge.

It became a place that inspired poetry about loss,

the painful separation of friends.

"On the long road from the Yang Pass, not one person returns.

"Only the geese on the river fly south for the winter".

Or...

"The morning rain of Weicheng dampens the dust.

"The guesthouse is green, like fresh willows.

"Let's finish one more cup of wine, dear sir.

"West of Yangguan, you'll meet no more old friends".

Here, at the edge of the Taklamakan, the Chinese authorities

have done their best to supply what time has destroyed,

or history never provided.

This shaded viewpoint,

wagons abandoned by the silk road traders

and the Yang fortress,

ruined by centuries of desert weather

and recently rebuilt, cast in concrete.

Inside, pillars carved with camels and caravans

supply the necessary silk road branding.

And, of course, there is another essential ingredient.

Our old friend.

Here is Zhang Qian,

astride another one of those heavenly horses.

The more I follow in Zhang Qian's footsteps,

the further along the silk road I go, the more I find that China

has put a great deal of effort into bringing it all back to life.

The obvious reason is that the silk road is becoming a tourist route,

which requires tourist destinations.

Less obviously, China is reopening doors into its past,

many of which have been shut since the days of Mao Zedong.

History is once again permitted.

I've made my choice.

I'll take the Northern passage along the edge of the Taklamakan.

I want to get to an oasis city, called Turpan.

And I'm beginning to wonder if, somewhere,

I might see a heavenly horse for myself.

I've travelled 500 miles.

I'm still well within China's current borders.

But it really doesn't feel like it.

It feels as though I've gone much further.

The writing on the wall looks like Arabic.

I'm surprised, just as I was by the Great Mosque in Xi'an.

Here in Turpan is a world of Islam.

Mosques and minarets and faces that are not Chinese.

These people are Uyghur,

and the Uyghur are a vexed question.

Their history is far from simple.

The Uyghur have been here since the ninth century.

The Chinese authorities treat them as a single minority,

but even the briefest look at their faces reveals a mixed heritage.

Some look Caucasian, some look Turkish, some more Mongol.

A few might even be Chinese.

And that is their story.

They arrived here from lands that had been conquered by the Mongols,

settling around the edges of the Taklamakan desert.

The language that they spoke was related to Turkish.

But, once here, they interbred, converted to Buddhism,

and were eventually conquered and converted by Islamic forces.

On the silk road, tribes, even entire races,

get knocked from place to place, like billiard balls.

The Uyghur are living history,

and Turpan itself

is a cupboard containing several sorts of yesterday.

One of them is an ancient tradition -

that of Chinese wine.

I'm here at entirely the wrong time of year to see grapes on the vines.

If I were here in summer,

I'd be sweltering in 40-degree heat at the very least.

50 degrees is more common.

But now people are getting ready for a winter

that will be well below freezing, pulling the vines off their frames,

so that they will be less exposed to the cold.

It's going to be quite a long day.

Grapes have been grown here for about 2,000 years.

Some people say they were brought here by Zhang Qian.

That, to me, it seems a bit...

neat. As if everything momentous that happens on the silk road

has to be attributed to that miraculous Chinese envoy.

The truth appears to be that when Zhang Qian passed this way,

the grapes were already here.

Brought, perhaps, by the short-lived empire of Alexander the Great.

When he finally returned to his emperor in China's ancient capital,

Zhang Qian took some of those grapevines with him.

It's a tradition that China has only recently learned to treasure.

The Loulan Company in Turpan is a little more than 20 years old,

but it draws on a much deeper history.

It is named after a lost kingdom, once centred on Turpan.

I am meeting the managing director, Mr Wang,

in a boardroom lavishly decorated with reproductions

of that kingdom's ancient glories -

good wine, nice chairs,

odd conversation.

So what have we got here?

That's absolutely delicious.

It's nice to think of some silk road traders having a rest

and sipping some wine in Turpan all of those years ago.

With every answer, Mr Wang adds another thousand years

to the history of winemaking in Turpan.

It reminds me of the silk mother.

China's history is so long...

that all its tales grow in the telling.

LAUGHTER

THEY TOAST

But some of Turpan's ghosts have much more substance.

The Astana Cemetery lies 25 miles from Turpan itself.

Its tombs contained bodies over 1,000 years old,

mummified by the desert climate -

and buried with many of them were contracts, records of deals done.

One of the archaeologists who dug here was Aurel Stein,

so we already know the fate of many of these fascinating documents.

They are in Britain.

These bodies are a husband and wife of the seventh century.

I feel...a little uncomfortable.

After all, they hardly invited me in.

In another tomb, the body of a moneylender,

called Zuo Chongxi, was discovered.

The contracts found with him

were particularly revealing about business on the silk road.

We learn that he took payment in silver coins and bolts of silk

and that, when he died, he was ensnaring a local farmer

in a stifling debt.

He was grasping, he was flinty.

Think Ebenezer Scrooge.

He was 57 when he died in the year 673,

and the contracts reveal a small number of loans,

which were outstanding at the time of his death.

The implication being that he was expecting

to collect on those loans in the afterlife.

Zuo's standard rate of interest

was a bloodsucking 10 to 15% a month.

It reminds us that along the Silk Road,

business was done scruple free...

..and that payday loans are nothing new.

If wine was indeed already being made here in Zuo's lifetime,

it's easy to imagine his customers and clients making good use of it.

People drank it to forget their debts.

Zuo's ghost is one I'm happy to leave behind.

It's time to leave Turpan and drive for a couple of hours to the West,

towards the Tian Shan mountains.

We are at least 100-miles north-west of Turpan.

We've come out here to the mountains.

It's staggeringly, breathtakingly cold,

but we've come here because we've had a tip-off

that there's a nomad out here with about 100 horses.

So, I've come out to see if any of them

are those wonderful heavenly horses.

But I'm not sure what I'm going to find.

Before we start filming, I glimpse a couple of large horses.

But they disappear.

The ones left behind look like something

from the Shetland end of the scale.

Even smaller than the Terracotta Army horses.

There's certainly loads of them.

I wonder why.

So, I ask why.

Stupid of me, really.

Mr Ye, why do you have so many horses?

QUESTION IS TRANSLATED

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

We raise these horses in winter.

We will sell the horse meat.

The smoked horse meat.

So, in the past 30 years, I have got more than 100 horses.

'Ah, despite appearances, I'm in an abattoir.

After a moment's respectful silence, I ask about the larger horses,

and Mr Ye assures me that they are indeed heavenly.

Somewhere in this fairytale forest is a heavenly horse,

and Mr Ye has sent his lads off to try and heard it up.

So, I'm expecting it to magically appear.

It wouldn't surprise me if Little Red Riding Hood came along, as well.

There he is.

Not very big.

Perhaps the heavenly horse was only something Zhang Qian

had never seen before.

A horse of normal size.

Even so.

You can only wonder what he thought when he first saw

a horse of that size when he was used to such small ponies.

He would have known that it was going to change his world.

But when you look closely you can see that this horse

is not in the best of condition.

I wish I had met a heavenly horse that was prouder, freer, healthier

and not for dinner.

Zhang Qian wouldn't meet his heavenly horses

until he was well beyond China's western border.

So, westward I go.

Another 300 miles to the city of Khotan.

Close to the border, no more than 100 miles

from Pakistan to the south-west, the Himalayas and India due South.

Here, the population is about 90% Uyghur

and their historical connections with the Silk Road are strong.

Khotan was one of the first places outside of central China

that began to cultivate silk.

And legend has it that it came not as an official export,

but by an act of subterfuge.

In 1900, our old friend from Dunhuang, Aurel Stein,

found some evidence to support that legend

in some desert ruins 80 miles from here,

and he did what he always did -

he removed it, labelled it and took it to the British Museum.

I've brought along a sketch.

So the story goes,

a Chinese princess was offered in marriage to the king of Khotan.

But being unhappy about being reduced

to a term in a diplomatic deal

and fearing a life without any sort of luxury here

in this distant province,

she decided to take matters into her own hands.

Before she left on her journey,

she hid silk worms and mulberry seeds in her head dress.

Thus, the secret of silk cultivation made its escape

from the Chinese heartland and it's been here ever since.

Khotan's markets and bazaars are full of silk fabrics

to this very day.

And for at least 1,000 years,

they've been making it in this style.

Known as Atlas silk.

I've been waiting 2,000 miles to see this.

The silks embrace colour with a wild abandon.

Nothing is supposed to blend tastefully,

it's all designed for maximum impact.

It's so bright that if you look at it

and then look away you get flashing after-images.

In fact, it's quite difficult to explain just how much

this Atlas silk pokes you in the pupils.

It's as if the colour decisions are all made

on the basis of which is most likely to cause retinal detachment.

I love it.

The results insist very loudly indeed

that although the Uyghur territories have been part of China's dominions

for over 200 years, the makers of this fabric are not Chinese at all.

Many Uyghur don't even speak Chinese.

Khotan very clearly identifies itself as a Silk Road city.

Everywhere I've been in China there have been new tourist opportunities

and statues commemorating figures from the rich bed of history.

China wants to remind itself and us that in the days of the Silk Road

it was a place of commerce and creativity.

That however it spent the 20th-century,

it wants to do business now.

And doesn't want anything else to matter.

Beyond Khotan, the desert reasserts itself.

But today, the Chinese government refuses to listen

to what the sand has to say.

They're editing the desert.

Flattening dunes, planting hardy grasses.

Pushing it all back -

or trying to.

More than 2,000 years later,

and they're still not letting this godforsaken place get in their way.

There's more than a little of the spirit of Zhang Qian in all of this.

I can still feel his yearning presence

faithfully doing his emperor's bidding.

Constantly pushing westward, making contacts.

Each contact maturing into a deal done

and each deal carrying with it an extra little burden

of cultural change and contact.

Once he got through this desert he'd come to a mountain pass.

And once through that mountain pass

he would come to the kingdom of the Sogdians.

An entire world waiting for what China had to offer.

For what China had to sell.

I'm following him West.

In the next episode, hidden valleys.

The art of the Sogdians.

The ancestor of the lute.

A ceramic paradise, built by captive artisans

for one of the most ruthless conquerors

the world has ever seen...

..and the Central-Asian cities

where modern mathematics and astronomy were born.