BBC - The Story of China

BBC1

21-jan-2016
SERIES 1 - 1. ANCESTORS

Michael Wood is back with another of his big, rangy history series. Nobody makes a documentary quite like Wood, who has developed a way of twinkling over and through a story without ever saying, “So then this happened, and after that this happened…” You wish he would, occasionally, because a linear history would be easier to digest, but Wood’s approach goes deep and wide and leaves our heads pleasantly spinning.

His way in is via Chinese beliefs and rituals, which makes for a whirl of ceremonies and festivals and walking up temple steps (he does that a lot) and crowds and hurly-burly and – by the end – a real sense we’ve learnt something about how the Chinese see their own story.

It is, of course, a long story: this is the oldest continuous state in the world, Wood tells us, and its beginnings lie 4,000 years ago with the semi-mythical King Yu, said to have tamed the Yellow river and founded the first dynasty.

ABOUT THIS PROGRAMME
1/6. Michael Wood tells the story of the world's newest superpower, exploring the stories, people, culture and landscapes that have helped create its character over 4,000 years. He begins by looking at ancestry, one of the great themes of Chinese history. He joins a 300-strong family as they reunite to carry out rituals for an ancestor who died in 1049, witnesses a million pilgrims at the shrine of the goddess Nu Wa, and hears about China's greatest archaeological discovery, the Oracle Bones, which reveal fascinating clues about the first great dynasty - the Shang.

SERIES 1 - 2. SILK ROADS & CHINA SHIPS

Michael Wood devotes a sizeable chunk of his second episode to a Buddhist scholar who is clearly one of his heroes. In the seventh century, the monk Xuanzang travelled from China to India and brought back scriptures that he spent the rest of his life translating.
In the process he became one of the great figureheads of an era when, Wood tells us, China welcomed foreign influences, and as a result became the great civilisation of its time (he sees a moral there).
Standing by a lock on the Grand Canal, Wood points out that the Tang Dynasty built great canals 1,000 years before the Industrial Revolution. It also absorbed Islam and Christianity – and gave us tea.

ABOUT THIS PROGRAMME

2/6. Michael Wood tells the story of China's first great international age under the Tang Dynasty (618-907). He travels along the Silk Road to the bazaars of Central Asia, and into India on the track of the monk who brought Buddhism back to China. In Xi'an, he talks to Chinese Muslims in the Great Mosque and hears the story of the first reception of Christianity in 635. Moving south, he finds out about the beginnings of China as an economic giant, witnesses a lock on the Grand Canal that was built in 605 but still handles 800 barges a day, and tracks the rise of both silk and tea.