Overview of Chinese Civilization and Its Evolution

China was the last of the great civilizations to develop independently in the old world, over a thousand years after the first in Iraq. And theirs was a vision of life unique to itself. The End The Chinese conception of civilization differed completely from that of the West. For them, its goal was a moral order on Earth, sustained by virtue, ritual and reverence for ancestors. These ancient ideas permeated all aspects of Chinese life. Even the cataclysms of our own time, from the Communist Revolution down to the crushing of the democracy movement here in Tiananmen Square in 1989, have been played out against these deeper forces which have shaped China for thousands of years. This is a search for the roots of Chinese history. And our search begins in the old lanes here near the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. Tucked away in the alleys here is the oldest pharmacy in Beijing, founded in 1663. It's simply Beijing Zhongling Tang Pharmacy. It's so famous. Yeah, and now it's Beijing, China. In Chinese medicine, as in all traditional Chinese culture, the basic idea is the search for harmony on earth. Ultimately, this was the goal of civilization itself. And to reach it, inner and outer lives must be incongruous. Yin and yang, as they say. Female and male. Dark and light. This elemental balance underlies all Chinese thought, whether in science or philosophy, in food, or as here, in medicine. The discovery of the origins of Chinese history happened by a strange chance. In 1899, a Chinese scholar who was quite well known here in Peking, Wang Yizhong, was suffering from malaria. He had prescriptions for it made up in his local pharmacy. It could even have been this one. At the time, a friend of his was staying with him as a house guest, and he saw the prescriptions being made up. One of the ingredients was a recipe which had been used by Chinese doctors for hundreds of years, ground up old bones. known as dragon bones. But to their astonishment, when the two men looked at the bones, they saw that on them was a strange, archaic form of writing, some of whose characters were the same as those used in modern Chinese writing. And though this recipe had been used for hundreds of years, this was the first time it had come to the attention of scholars. The two men determined to find out where the bones had come from. They combed the apothecary's shops in this part of Peking, Eventually they came up with their answer. The bones had been dug up near a dusty little town in central China, in the plain of the Yellow River, a town called Anyang. Quang Ho, the Yellow River Coming down from Mongolia, bearing its rich yellow silt to the Yellow Sea. Destroyer of cities, killer of millions, even in our own century. Chinese civilization first arose on its banks, but unlike the civilizations of the West, the source of political power did not lie in control of nature, but in control of the past. There's nothing to see at Anyang today. The site of the palaces and tombs where the dragon bones were found has been plowed over. But here were the ruins of Yin, the last city of the ill-fated Shang dynasty, burned down in 1100 BC. And here was the answer to the riddle of the dragon bones. The chemists in Beijing had been grinding up the ritual archive of the Shang kings. These were oracle bones used by royal diviners to communicate with the ancestral spirits. In these strange marks lay the beginnings of the I Ching, the great Chinese book of wisdom. It was through the magic power of writing that the ancestral spirits could be raised. And the ancient Chinese word for these symbols, Wen, writing, would become the word for civilization itself. In the beginning was not the city, but the word. The second key find at Anyang was the bronzes. They were used for sacrifices and ritual meals. Their inscriptions tell of the worship of ancestors and lineage, basic preoccupations of the Chinese till today. It was the possession of these things, the performance of the correct rituals, the monopoly of bronze and writing, which gave the rulers access to the wisdom of the ancestors. This was the basis of political power. And only with this could the ruler possess the greatest of all gifts. A gift to be kept only so long as he was just and cared for the people. The Mandate of Heaven. A fresh grave in the cemetery of the Kung family in Chufu. A monument to the most influential figure in Chinese history, Kung Fuza, Confucius. It was Confucius who transformed the magic of the Bronze Age into the conception of the state as a moral order sustained by virtue and ritual. Confucius lived in that astonishing Axis age when the Buddha was alive, and Pythagoras and the Greek philosophers, the Jewish prophets. Not a religious leader, but the codifier of China's traditions in history, poetry and ritual. His teachings were the ideal of Chinese government for 2,000 years. At the centre of Confucius'message was a very simple and original idea. He wasn't concerned with God or the afterlife or heaven. I don't know anything about... about those things, he said. His concern was that of every government today on earth. How do you build a just and stable society here? And his answer was this. Goodness was the essential quality needed to keep society together. People are not born good. They need to be taught goodness. Rulers and rule. But it was essential that the rulers were taught goodness, spiritual and intellectual, because if rulers rule with unjust harshness and severity, meeting out punishments would be a good thing. regimentation, then people lose their faith in the law, they lose their respect for themselves, they have no sense of shame. But if people are taught goodness, then they have all those qualities and they regulate themselves. Confucius'vision then was of a moral society bound together by mutual respect and trust. And though he was an aristocrat, it was an anti-authoritarian idea because the ideology would rest with the scholars, not with the emperors, who themselves had to obey that. that golden mean, otherwise they risked forfeiting the mandate of heaven, as even today's rulers of China have found out. The In the last few years, the rulers of China have revived some of the old Confucian traditions, at least in their outward form. Performance of these rituals ceased after the Communist Revolution. These are actors, and this ceremony in Confucius'hometown is for tourists. They're largely foreign Chinese tourists from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, rediscovering routes severed, temporally, it would now seem, in 1949. It's a vision of a splendid past which the rulers of China in our time attempted to do away with in the belief that new traditions could replace them. But just when we think we've shaken it off, the past has an uncanny habit of coming back to restate its old claims on our loyalties. The ancient Chinese believed that earth, nature and the cosmos were part of a harmonious natural order. The Tao or path. The search for the right path, Taoism, is the second great stream of Chinese thought, a natural mysticism to set beside the practical common sense of Confucius. Not an alternative, but the other half of a necessary balance in life. The pilgrim path up the sacred mountain, Taishan, is a symbol for that search for the Dao. It's been walked for thousands of years by Chinese people, rich and poor, from the first emperor to Chairman Mao. And today, tourists and pilgrims are coming again. Hello, how are you? I'm fine. For so long, Western culture has seen nature in terms of control and exploitation. But for the Chinese, it is the source of all harmony and balance. They thought it was our duty as human beings, through art, religion or science, to understand the harmony, not to abuse it or needlessly to change it, but to go with the force of nature, the yin and yang, as they would say. The little Taoist temple on the top of Taishan, dedicated to the goddess of the mountain, was wrecked in the Cultural Revolution. It's now lived in again, not by actors, but by real Taoist monks and nuns who came back in 1985, committing themselves to the old way. In the end, said the Taoist sage Lao Tzu, all creatures return to their distinctive roots. That is called returning to one's destiny. These people are tourists from Taiwan. Their leader is a spirit medium well known on TV in Taipei. It's the kind of ceremony you can see in backstreet ancestor temples in the urban jungles of Singapore and Hong Kong. Now they're returning to commune again with the older ancestors. On the summit of Taishan, the pilgrims wait for the first glimpse of the dawn. It was up here that Chairman Mao proclaimed the East is red. But that was before his great leap forward turned the dawn yellow with pollution. The first emperor surveyed his kingdom from here as the sun rose and announced, now I've united the whole world. Confucius said simply, now I realize how small the world is. The Silk Route in the Gobi Desert in the far west of China, the most inhospitable landscape in the world. Across this desert from the 2nd century AD came the ideas, goods and people which ushered in China's first international age. Till this time, Chinese civilization had developed in isolation, uniquely itself, neither wanting nor needing anything from the outside world. But now contacts opened up with Central Asia, Persia, even Rome, but especially with India. For what the Chinese wanted was not material riches, but spiritual enlightenment. The wisdom of the Buddha. The Chinese never developed, perhaps never needed, an elaborate theology of their own. Indeed, the Western idea of a personal god is utterly foreign to them. But Buddhism, with its atheistic and democratic message, its deep care for ritual, was to have the greatest appeal of all the foreign religions which took root here. Buddhism was the third great stream making up the current of Chinese civilization, along with Confucian wisdom and Taoist mysticism. And the later Chinese came to believe that these three philosophies contained the essential ideas of civilization, and without any one of them, life would be unbalanced. That however sophisticated and technologically advanced a society might become, its people could only be fulfilled through inner enlightenment and the contemplation of eternity. In the Tang Dynasty, Chinese scholars went on great missionary journeys to India to bring back authentic texts and relics of the Buddha. And in this little temple, in a secluded valley outside Xi'an, are kept the ashes of the most famous of those missionaries, Suanzang. Some of the texts he brought back from India in the 7th century are still here. Ah, goodness. What is it made out of? It's made of palm trees in India. Palm leaf. It's palm leaf. Yes. And the script, the script is not... Sanskrit is it what is the language He said what is this This is an ancient Indian script The Asian Pali This is Asian Pali Does he know how many books Sun Tsung actually brought back to China from India He said do you know how many books the Xuanzang masters brought back from India Xuan Tsang brought 650 books back to Xi'an for translation. Rucksack on his back, a lamp to light his way. It's rare in history that we can pinpoint the very moment when one great civilization goes out to learn from another. In the 8th century AD, all roads in Asia led to Xi'an, or Shainan as it was then known. It was the greatest city in the world, rivaled only by Baghdad and Constantinople. Its vast square laid out like a chessboard. A huge ritual enclosure, Shang'an's central boulevard was four miles long and twice as wide as today's avenue, which leads to the city's bell tower. This was the first time that foreigners had entered China in any numbers, and as often in later days, they were confined to their own area at night, well away from the centre of power. Over in the western quarter of the city, though, in the foreigners'enclave... you could find an anarchic vitality and a sophistication and a cultural mix that impressed all visitors to Chang'an. Here there were Muslims, Christians and Jews from Syria and Iraq, Zoroastrians and Manichaeans from Iran and Syria. in Central Asia. There were Persian conjurers, Turkish moneylenders, and Hindu fakirs. In the cafes, there was Central Asian music, Asian food, as there still is today, and also entertainment from singing and dancing girls from Persia, and even further afield. Some of them, it was said, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Small wonder, then, that as the writer of the time said, you could misspend your youth in cities like this and end up with nothing. but the reputation of a wanderer in the blue houses. In Chinese eyes, the Tang dynasty was above all the most golden of the many golden ages of their poetry. An art whose roots go back to the shamanistic magic of the Bronze Age. For the Chinese, indeed, composing poetry is one of the essential ingredients of civilization. But if we could choose a single career to symbolise this first international era of Chinese culture, then it would be perhaps the great poet Li Bai, or Li Po, as we know him in the West. Li Po was the product of the Silk Road. He was born not in China, but out in Central Asia, and spoke one of the Turkish languages. He spent his early years as a wandering soldier of fortune before he found his opportunities here in the greatest city on Earth. He was a magnetic personality, irascible. self-taught, flashing eyes, a fearsome voice and a heaven-sent talent. He was a prodigious drinker too. The story goes that he died falling drunk into a river trying to catch at the reflection of the moon. But Li Po wandered through the music halls and the cabarets and restaurants of Shang'an and the other cities of China, his ear tuned not only to classical poetry but to folk songs and ballads and the latest pop music coming hot out of Central Asia. on the caravan trails. He was always an outsider. He refused pointedly to sit the Confucian examinations, preferring to do it, as he would have put it, his way. Always an outsider, but still today among the Chinese people, along with his friend Du Fu, their best-loved and their best-known poet. Beyond the vermilion gates and the smell of wine and flesh, wrote Du Fu, people are freezing and starving to death. In thousands of villages, they harvest only weeds while the women do the ploughing. The people of China can face any test if only their leaders treat them humanely. The Tang Dynasty ended in social upheaval and revolution, like many in Chinese history. But it was followed by one even greater. 400 miles from Xi'an, eastwards down the Yellow River, lies Kaifeng. In the 11th century AD, Kaifeng was the capital of what is regarded as the peak of Chinese civilization, the Song Dynasty, a golden age unsurpassed in world history. The Sung achievement was right across the board from industry and technology to art, literature, poetry, history, and it makes it one of the great cultural epochs of the world. And with the existence of the Sung, it was a great opportunity to be able to do something that was so important to the world. of printing they could disseminate their ideals right across eastern Asia. There was another characteristic to that time and that was of an intense inward cultivation, of inward development. shaped the old ideals of Confucian philosophy of self-development and secular piety, harnessed them to an examination system which ensured that only the best could aspire to positions of power, and they made that the root of their state culture. Indeed, that philosophy would dominate Eastern Asia for the next millennium and is the cultural basis of the phenomenal success of countries like Japan and Korea in modern times, for they are still essentially Confucian. Here in Kaifeng, as everywhere in today's China, 40 years of communist rule have not severed these deeper beliefs. Reverence for ancestors, filial piety, Confucian virtues are all coming back into the open now that freedom of worship is once more guaranteed. It's the autumn festival tonight in Kaifeng, and on the streets the old market and restaurant culture of the city is resurgent. Here in Kaifeng in the 11th century are the origins of another of China's great gifts to humanity. It's cooking. The Chinese was the world's first great cuisine, long before the French. In Sung times, vast restaurants here, like the Humane Harmony Diner, it was said turned night into day. day like its medicine Chinese cooking is based on ancient theories of harmony and balance on the five elements the five tastes yin and yang the old themes of Chinese culture And here today in Kaifeng, you can still find the oldest restaurant in the world. Ma Yuching's Bucket Chicken House, founded in 1153. Tell that to Maxims of Paris. A cuisine is a whole way of seeing the world. It's one of the simplest and most direct ways in which people can enjoy life, a mark of civilization, and the Chinese excelled in it, as they still do. In the 13th century, when European visitors came in numbers to China for the first time, they were still open-mouthed. with what they saw. Sailing up the Grand Canal here in Suzhou, the Venetian Marco Polo had no doubt that this was the greatest civilization in the world. I tell you, he said, in all truth, the riches and resources, it's all on such a stupendous scale, you wouldn't believe it unless you saw it. If the Chinese were warlike, they could conquer the rest of the world. Thank goodness, they're not. At this time, agricultural and commercial revolutions led to a population boom, which saw China become the most populous country on earth, as it still is today. But the country was self-sufficient and could feed all its people. As the Arab traveller Ibn Battuta said, theirs was incomparably the highest standard of living in the world. There comes a point in the life of any civilization when the basic necessities of life for the people have been satisfied. Food, shelter, freedom from violence. Then it can aspire to extend its higher ideals to more and more of its people. The key conception of Chinese civilization had always been the search for harmony. And all its manifestations were part of that search. Patterns of the bronze caster and the painter, the porcelain maker, to the designs of the silk weaver. By cultivating such arts, the noble person could realize the universal harmony which Confucian wisdom sought. For the Chinese, this was the supreme mission of civilization. From its beginnings as a tool of divination, writing remained the means of access to the wisdom of the ancestors. The symbol for writing, the sign called Wen, had begun by signifying the characters on the oracle bones. Through time its meanings deepened and widened to embrace writing, culture, refinement, elegance, till writing came to mean civilization itself. It was nothing less than an expression of the way the Chinese saw the world. But now the way China saw the world began to change. From this vast bay at Quanzhou in South China, now silted up but then the busiest port in the world, Admiral Zheng He embarked on great voyages of exploration in the 15th century, which could have changed the course of history. Zheng He sailed his fleets to the great South Indian harbour of Cochin, the meeting place of East and West. Here he would have seen the Chinese fishing nets imported in Mongol times, for Indian merchants had long traded with China from here, exchanging pepper and spices for porcelain and silk. From Cochin, Zheng He explored East Africa and visited the Persian Gulf and Mecca itself. He could have discovered the West had he had the inclination. It would be nearly a century before Vasco da Gama sailed into this same harbour, not as a bearer of peace, but a harbinger of war and conquest. Then, suddenly, the imperial bureaucrats banned any further voyages, despite their rich commercial potential. The ships were broken up, their logbooks destroyed, and now only a few stone inscriptions on a windswept hillside. remained to speak of one of the great mysteries of history. Western thinkers have always taken a brutally simple line on the stopping of Cheng He's explorations. For them, it would be like calling a halt to manned space exploration on the eve of... of the first moon landing. It's proof that the Chinese are backward-looking and ignorant, had no desire for new knowledge, and were run by a load of hidebound bureaucrats. Proof, too, that the West was the fount of science and technology and progress and had a monopoly on the spirit of enterprise. But as always in history, there are many ways of looking at the same question. After all, it was the Chinese who were the great technological innovators. So perhaps it's really a question of how... different civilizations think you should use technology. And perhaps then the Chinese saw, quite sensibly on the face of it, that their true interests lay here, inside their own borders, cultivating their soil, cultivating the inner life, searching for the harmony that had always been the goal of their civilization. And that it was the West, on the other hand, that had a compulsive desire to change, a compulsive need to invade other people's space, both moral and physical. and a refusal to accept limits on its own. Since the 18th century, it's been customary to talk about the East needing to catch up with the West. These days, that's obviously happening all around us materially, if it's not happened already. But it takes two to make a dialogue. And perhaps the West still has some catching up to do. Perhaps the West still has to learn from the East a way of cultivating its... inner space of accepting limits on desires and space in an increasingly finite world. At the beginning of this modern dialogue between the East and the West, the French philosopher Pascal said that the trouble with Western man was this. He did not know how to be content in an empty room. Banning of the Ming voyages was part of a deeper introspection in Chinese culture. Now behind a new great wall to keep out the barbarians, the Chinese built a new capital far to the north, Beijing, the North City. Here at the Altar of Heaven, the Emperor continued to perform the rituals of the Bronze Age, in the belief that the world would never change. The longest and richest intellectual tradition in the world, now increasingly turned in on itself. And here in the National Library in Beijing is the most staggering proof both of that greatness and of its progressive desiccation. This is the greatest literary enterprise of all time, an encyclopedia running to 79,000 handwritten volumes, still in its original shelves and boxes, labelled in green, red, blue and grey according to the imperial cataclysm. of spring, summer, autumn and winter for classics, history, philosophy and literature. A testimony to the idea that all knowledge, past, present and future, could be contained in a single room. But all this time, far away in barbarian Europe, Bacon, Newton, Descartes had been concerning themselves not with how to perfect the past, but how to control the future. And now some Chinese intellectuals began to plead for a more open approach to knowledge. Among them, an obscure young historian called Chang Suecheng. It was Chang Suecheng, on the very eve... of the most momentous upheaval in Chinese history since the time of the Qin emperor. In other words, the clash with the West and all that that would engender. It was he who attempted to reappraise the way that the Chinese had seen history since the very beginnings of the Confucian tradition. For him, history was an all-embracing concept which would include all of this, the entire canon of Chinese literature. The Confucian texts, he said, were all history. Confucius may be a true guide to life, but he is also simply a historical text, and the time is past when history should be merely minute textual analysis and compilation by squads of scholars burrowing away. on a rigid and old-fashioned curriculum. History should be dynamic and meaningful. Some have seen him as a precursor of the revolution, a prophet of democracy, an enemy of feudalism. That's no doubt exaggerated. But in 1799, two years before his death, he wrote a prophetic letter about what he saw as the inevitable decline of the Qing dynasty and the worrying prospects ahead. This was a time, he said, when history should no longer... concern itself merely with the past, but should use the past to reform the present, and indeed to look into the future. And the historian's greatest gifts, he said, were not just knowledge, but inspiration and insight. And a historian's inspiration, he thought, was just like the I Ching, the book of changes, in that it enabled him to look into the future. At the moment of his death, China was about to come face to face with another culture. whose view of history was diametrically opposed to that of the Chinese tradition. The Europeans, with their Judeo-Christian heritage, believed that history was purposive, that it was leading towards an appointed end, and that they would be the winners. The first Chinese descriptions of we Westerners are not flattering. These barbarians have a grim look, untidy hair, an unpleasant smell. They have no rituals worthy of the name. They're liars and are rather arrogant. They conquer countries by fraud and force, ingratiating themselves in a friendly way before they oppress the natives. At the heart of their conduct is violence. By the 18th century, the coasts of the South China Sea were frequented by the Spanish, the Dutch, Portuguese, English, and later Americans. All bearing Chinese inventions, gunpowder, the stern rudder, the magnetic compass, paper maps. Coming not just to sell, but to impose their goods, their ideas, their religion, their will. They soon set up trading colonies, lording it from grand mansions paid for by the illicit trade in goods like opium. In the tale of colonial infamy, this is one of the least known episodes in the West. But it culminated in the central event of 19th century Chinese history, the Opium War. The point of the opium trade simply was to sell opium to China. But in practice that meant getting as many Chinese people addicted to the drug as possible. But opium was prohibited in China and had an almost negligible local consumption. So it had to be sold illicitly in bulk from the one permitted trading post on the mainland, Canton, and from offshore bases like this one. The indispensable link in this setup was India. There the British imperial possessions had grown in the last decades of the 18th century. And as the British themselves produced nothing which the Chinese wished to buy, it was in India that the opium, and to a lesser extent the cotton, could be grown that could be traded for the luxuries that the British desired, and especially tea, which by then had become a national obsession. And so an infernal triangle was set up between Britain, China and India. Which parallels the tragic triangle of the previous century between Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, the slave trade. And this was no small business. Incredible as it may sound, in the early 19th century, opium was the biggest single trade anywhere. It is as if today the Colombian drug barons possessed such a powerful fleet that they were able to sail into San Francisco Bay. And compel a large portion of the population of the United States to become addicted to heroin and cocaine and to wipe out the US fleet if it intervened. In what Gladstone called the most disreputable war ever fought by the British, the Chinese fleets, hopelessly outgunned and outdated, were smashed to pieces, defeated by the very technology which they had invented. But let's stand still. For the Chinese defeat was a shattering revelation. Forced now to watch impotent as the Western barbarians, their cultural inferiors, now began to carve up the Middle Kingdom into colonies with the same greedy relish that they had scrambled for Africa and dismembered India. Unable to cope with the pressure of the outside world, the Chinese government now collapsed. Chinese people were treated like animals in their own land by the Western imperialists, harnessed to polo traps for sport, banned along with dogs in their own public parks. The great time of revolution had arrived, as the I Ching, the Book of Changes, states, and the great man was at hand in whom all belief would reside. In 1949 Mao and the communists took power on a tide of emotion and optimism after years of civil war, famine and foreign rule. But in their haste to erase the past, they killed millions by ill-judged reforms and tyrannical violence. And this in the name of a Western ideology and a Western conception of history. Today, the Chinese people are living through a time of great opportunity. Still without political power, they're poised nonetheless to become an economic giant. They could regain their place as the greatest of all civilizations. But when their rulers crushed the democracy movement, here in Tiananmen Square in 1989, they showed the old fear of authoritarians throughout history, the fear of the past to discredit the present. On the streets at night, the Chinese people can listen once more to the old music banned under Mao's dictatorship. In the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of divination, there is a hexagram entitled Revolution. In a revolution, it says, two mistakes must be avoided. You must not move with excessive haste, nor use excessive ruthlessness against the people. What is done must correspond to a higher truth. A revolution not founded on inner truth will come to grief, for in the end the people will support only what they feel in their hearts to be just.

Even the cataclysms of our own time, from the Communist Revolution down to the crushing of the democracy movement here in Tiananmen Square in 1989, have been played out against these deeper forces which have shaped China for thousands of years. This is a search for the roots of Chinese history. And our search begins in the old lanes here near the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. Tucked away in the alleys here is the oldest pharmacy in Beijing, founded in 1663. It's simply Beijing Zhongling Tang Pharmacy. It's so famous.

Yeah, and now it's Beijing, China. In Chinese medicine, as in all traditional Chinese culture, the basic idea is the search for harmony on earth. Ultimately, this was the goal of civilization itself.

And to reach it, inner and outer lives must be incongruous. Yin and yang, as they say. Female and male. Dark and light.

This elemental balance underlies all Chinese thought, whether in science or philosophy, in food, or as here, in medicine. The discovery of the origins of Chinese history happened by a strange chance. In 1899, a Chinese scholar who was quite well known here in Peking, Wang Yizhong, was suffering from malaria.

He had prescriptions for it made up in his local pharmacy. It could even have been this one. At the time, a friend of his was staying with him as a house guest, and he saw the prescriptions being made up. One of the ingredients was a recipe which had been used by Chinese doctors for hundreds of years, ground up old bones.

known as dragon bones. But to their astonishment, when the two men looked at the bones, they saw that on them was a strange, archaic form of writing, some of whose characters were the same as those used in modern Chinese writing. And though this recipe had been used for hundreds of years, this was the first time it had come to the attention of scholars.

The two men determined to find out where the bones had come from. They combed the apothecary's shops in this part of Peking, Eventually they came up with their answer. The bones had been dug up near a dusty little town in central China, in the plain of the Yellow River, a town called Anyang. Quang Ho, the Yellow River Coming down from Mongolia, bearing its rich yellow silt to the Yellow Sea. Destroyer of cities, killer of millions, even in our own century.

Chinese civilization first arose on its banks, but unlike the civilizations of the West, the source of political power did not lie in control of nature, but in control of the past. There's nothing to see at Anyang today. The site of the palaces and tombs where the dragon bones were found has been plowed over.

But here were the ruins of Yin, the last city of the ill-fated Shang dynasty, burned down in 1100 BC. And here was the answer to the riddle of the dragon bones. The chemists in Beijing had been grinding up the ritual archive of the Shang kings.

These were oracle bones used by royal diviners to communicate with the ancestral spirits. In these strange marks lay the beginnings of the I Ching, the great Chinese book of wisdom. It was through the magic power of writing that the ancestral spirits could be raised.

And the ancient Chinese word for these symbols, Wen, writing, would become the word for civilization itself. In the beginning was not the city, but the word. The second key find at Anyang was the bronzes.

They were used for sacrifices and ritual meals. Their inscriptions tell of the worship of ancestors and lineage, basic preoccupations of the Chinese till today. It was the possession of these things, the performance of the correct rituals, the monopoly of bronze and writing, which gave the rulers access to the wisdom of the ancestors.

This was the basis of political power. And only with this could the ruler possess the greatest of all gifts. A gift to be kept only so long as he was just and cared for the people.

The Mandate of Heaven. A fresh grave in the cemetery of the Kung family in Chufu. A monument to the most influential figure in Chinese history, Kung Fuza, Confucius.

It was Confucius who transformed the magic of the Bronze Age into the conception of the state as a moral order sustained by virtue and ritual. Confucius lived in that astonishing Axis age when the Buddha was alive, and Pythagoras and the Greek philosophers, the Jewish prophets. Not a religious leader, but the codifier of China's traditions in history, poetry and ritual. His teachings were the ideal of Chinese government for 2,000 years.

At the centre of Confucius'message was a very simple and original idea. He wasn't concerned with God or the afterlife or heaven. I don't know anything about... about those things, he said.

His concern was that of every government today on earth. How do you build a just and stable society here? And his answer was this.

Goodness was the essential quality needed to keep society together. People are not born good. They need to be taught goodness. Rulers and rule.

But it was essential that the rulers were taught goodness, spiritual and intellectual, because if rulers rule with unjust harshness and severity, meeting out punishments would be a good thing. regimentation, then people lose their faith in the law, they lose their respect for themselves, they have no sense of shame. But if people are taught goodness, then they have all those qualities and they regulate themselves. Confucius'vision then was of a moral society bound together by mutual respect and trust. And though he was an aristocrat, it was an anti-authoritarian idea because the ideology would rest with the scholars, not with the emperors, who themselves had to obey that.

that golden mean, otherwise they risked forfeiting the mandate of heaven, as even today's rulers of China have found out. The In the last few years, the rulers of China have revived some of the old Confucian traditions, at least in their outward form. Performance of these rituals ceased after the Communist Revolution.

These are actors, and this ceremony in Confucius'hometown is for tourists. They're largely foreign Chinese tourists from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, rediscovering routes severed, temporally, it would now seem, in 1949. It's a vision of a splendid past which the rulers of China in our time attempted to do away with in the belief that new traditions could replace them. But just when we think we've shaken it off, the past has an uncanny habit of coming back to restate its old claims on our loyalties.

The ancient Chinese believed that earth, nature and the cosmos were part of a harmonious natural order. The Tao or path. The search for the right path, Taoism, is the second great stream of Chinese thought, a natural mysticism to set beside the practical common sense of Confucius. Not an alternative, but the other half of a necessary balance in life.

The pilgrim path up the sacred mountain, Taishan, is a symbol for that search for the Dao. It's been walked for thousands of years by Chinese people, rich and poor, from the first emperor to Chairman Mao. And today, tourists and pilgrims are coming again. Hello, how are you?

I'm fine. For so long, Western culture has seen nature in terms of control and exploitation. But for the Chinese, it is the source of all harmony and balance.

They thought it was our duty as human beings, through art, religion or science, to understand the harmony, not to abuse it or needlessly to change it, but to go with the force of nature, the yin and yang, as they would say. The little Taoist temple on the top of Taishan, dedicated to the goddess of the mountain, was wrecked in the Cultural Revolution. It's now lived in again, not by actors, but by real Taoist monks and nuns who came back in 1985, committing themselves to the old way.

In the end, said the Taoist sage Lao Tzu, all creatures return to their distinctive roots. That is called returning to one's destiny. These people are tourists from Taiwan. Their leader is a spirit medium well known on TV in Taipei.

It's the kind of ceremony you can see in backstreet ancestor temples in the urban jungles of Singapore and Hong Kong. Now they're returning to commune again with the older ancestors. On the summit of Taishan, the pilgrims wait for the first glimpse of the dawn.

It was up here that Chairman Mao proclaimed the East is red. But that was before his great leap forward turned the dawn yellow with pollution. The first emperor surveyed his kingdom from here as the sun rose and announced, now I've united the whole world. Confucius said simply, now I realize how small the world is. The Silk Route in the Gobi Desert in the far west of China, the most inhospitable landscape in the world.

Across this desert from the 2nd century AD came the ideas, goods and people which ushered in China's first international age. Till this time, Chinese civilization had developed in isolation, uniquely itself, neither wanting nor needing anything from the outside world. But now contacts opened up with Central Asia, Persia, even Rome, but especially with India.

For what the Chinese wanted was not material riches, but spiritual enlightenment. The wisdom of the Buddha. The Chinese never developed, perhaps never needed, an elaborate theology of their own.

Indeed, the Western idea of a personal god is utterly foreign to them. But Buddhism, with its atheistic and democratic message, its deep care for ritual, was to have the greatest appeal of all the foreign religions which took root here. Buddhism was the third great stream making up the current of Chinese civilization, along with Confucian wisdom and Taoist mysticism. And the later Chinese came to believe that these three philosophies contained the essential ideas of civilization, and without any one of them, life would be unbalanced.

That however sophisticated and technologically advanced a society might become, its people could only be fulfilled through inner enlightenment and the contemplation of eternity. In the Tang Dynasty, Chinese scholars went on great missionary journeys to India to bring back authentic texts and relics of the Buddha. And in this little temple, in a secluded valley outside Xi'an, are kept the ashes of the most famous of those missionaries, Suanzang. Some of the texts he brought back from India in the 7th century are still here.

Ah, goodness. What is it made out of? It's made of palm trees in India.

Palm leaf. It's palm leaf. Yes.

And the script, the script is not... Sanskrit is it what is the language He said what is this This is an ancient Indian script The Asian Pali This is Asian Pali Does he know how many books Sun Tsung actually brought back to China from India He said do you know how many books the Xuanzang masters brought back from India Xuan Tsang brought 650 books back to Xi'an for translation. Rucksack on his back, a lamp to light his way. It's rare in history that we can pinpoint the very moment when one great civilization goes out to learn from another.

In the 8th century AD, all roads in Asia led to Xi'an, or Shainan as it was then known. It was the greatest city in the world, rivaled only by Baghdad and Constantinople. Its vast square laid out like a chessboard.

A huge ritual enclosure, Shang'an's central boulevard was four miles long and twice as wide as today's avenue, which leads to the city's bell tower. This was the first time that foreigners had entered China in any numbers, and as often in later days, they were confined to their own area at night, well away from the centre of power. Over in the western quarter of the city, though, in the foreigners'enclave...

you could find an anarchic vitality and a sophistication and a cultural mix that impressed all visitors to Chang'an. Here there were Muslims, Christians and Jews from Syria and Iraq, Zoroastrians and Manichaeans from Iran and Syria. in Central Asia.

There were Persian conjurers, Turkish moneylenders, and Hindu fakirs. In the cafes, there was Central Asian music, Asian food, as there still is today, and also entertainment from singing and dancing girls from Persia, and even further afield. Some of them, it was said, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Small wonder, then, that as the writer of the time said, you could misspend your youth in cities like this and end up with nothing. but the reputation of a wanderer in the blue houses.

In Chinese eyes, the Tang dynasty was above all the most golden of the many golden ages of their poetry. An art whose roots go back to the shamanistic magic of the Bronze Age. For the Chinese, indeed, composing poetry is one of the essential ingredients of civilization.

But if we could choose a single career to symbolise this first international era of Chinese culture, then it would be perhaps the great poet Li Bai, or Li Po, as we know him in the West. Li Po was the product of the Silk Road. He was born not in China, but out in Central Asia, and spoke one of the Turkish languages. He spent his early years as a wandering soldier of fortune before he found his opportunities here in the greatest city on Earth.

He was a magnetic personality, irascible. self-taught, flashing eyes, a fearsome voice and a heaven-sent talent. He was a prodigious drinker too.

The story goes that he died falling drunk into a river trying to catch at the reflection of the moon. But Li Po wandered through the music halls and the cabarets and restaurants of Shang'an and the other cities of China, his ear tuned not only to classical poetry but to folk songs and ballads and the latest pop music coming hot out of Central Asia. on the caravan trails. He was always an outsider.

He refused pointedly to sit the Confucian examinations, preferring to do it, as he would have put it, his way. Always an outsider, but still today among the Chinese people, along with his friend Du Fu, their best-loved and their best-known poet. Beyond the vermilion gates and the smell of wine and flesh, wrote Du Fu, people are freezing and starving to death. In thousands of villages, they harvest only weeds while the women do the ploughing. The people of China can face any test if only their leaders treat them humanely.

The Tang Dynasty ended in social upheaval and revolution, like many in Chinese history. But it was followed by one even greater. 400 miles from Xi'an, eastwards down the Yellow River, lies Kaifeng.

In the 11th century AD, Kaifeng was the capital of what is regarded as the peak of Chinese civilization, the Song Dynasty, a golden age unsurpassed in world history. The Sung achievement was right across the board from industry and technology to art, literature, poetry, history, and it makes it one of the great cultural epochs of the world. And with the existence of the Sung, it was a great opportunity to be able to do something that was so important to the world.

of printing they could disseminate their ideals right across eastern Asia. There was another characteristic to that time and that was of an intense inward cultivation, of inward development. shaped the old ideals of Confucian philosophy of self-development and secular piety, harnessed them to an examination system which ensured that only the best could aspire to positions of power, and they made that the root of their state culture.

Indeed, that philosophy would dominate Eastern Asia for the next millennium and is the cultural basis of the phenomenal success of countries like Japan and Korea in modern times, for they are still essentially Confucian. Here in Kaifeng, as everywhere in today's China, 40 years of communist rule have not severed these deeper beliefs. Reverence for ancestors, filial piety, Confucian virtues are all coming back into the open now that freedom of worship is once more guaranteed.

It's the autumn festival tonight in Kaifeng, and on the streets the old market and restaurant culture of the city is resurgent. Here in Kaifeng in the 11th century are the origins of another of China's great gifts to humanity. It's cooking.

The Chinese was the world's first great cuisine, long before the French. In Sung times, vast restaurants here, like the Humane Harmony Diner, it was said turned night into day. day like its medicine Chinese cooking is based on ancient theories of harmony and balance on the five elements the five tastes yin and yang the old themes of Chinese culture And here today in Kaifeng, you can still find the oldest restaurant in the world.

Ma Yuching's Bucket Chicken House, founded in 1153. Tell that to Maxims of Paris. A cuisine is a whole way of seeing the world. It's one of the simplest and most direct ways in which people can enjoy life, a mark of civilization, and the Chinese excelled in it, as they still do. In the 13th century, when European visitors came in numbers to China for the first time, they were still open-mouthed. with what they saw.

Sailing up the Grand Canal here in Suzhou, the Venetian Marco Polo had no doubt that this was the greatest civilization in the world. I tell you, he said, in all truth, the riches and resources, it's all on such a stupendous scale, you wouldn't believe it unless you saw it. If the Chinese were warlike, they could conquer the rest of the world. Thank goodness, they're not.

At this time, agricultural and commercial revolutions led to a population boom, which saw China become the most populous country on earth, as it still is today. But the country was self-sufficient and could feed all its people. As the Arab traveller Ibn Battuta said, theirs was incomparably the highest standard of living in the world.

There comes a point in the life of any civilization when the basic necessities of life for the people have been satisfied. Food, shelter, freedom from violence. Then it can aspire to extend its higher ideals to more and more of its people.

The key conception of Chinese civilization had always been the search for harmony. And all its manifestations were part of that search. Patterns of the bronze caster and the painter, the porcelain maker, to the designs of the silk weaver. By cultivating such arts, the noble person could realize the universal harmony which Confucian wisdom sought. For the Chinese, this was the supreme mission of civilization.

From its beginnings as a tool of divination, writing remained the means of access to the wisdom of the ancestors. The symbol for writing, the sign called Wen, had begun by signifying the characters on the oracle bones. Through time its meanings deepened and widened to embrace writing, culture, refinement, elegance, till writing came to mean civilization itself.

It was nothing less than an expression of the way the Chinese saw the world. But now the way China saw the world began to change. From this vast bay at Quanzhou in South China, now silted up but then the busiest port in the world, Admiral Zheng He embarked on great voyages of exploration in the 15th century, which could have changed the course of history.

Zheng He sailed his fleets to the great South Indian harbour of Cochin, the meeting place of East and West. Here he would have seen the Chinese fishing nets imported in Mongol times, for Indian merchants had long traded with China from here, exchanging pepper and spices for porcelain and silk. From Cochin, Zheng He explored East Africa and visited the Persian Gulf and Mecca itself. He could have discovered the West had he had the inclination. It would be nearly a century before Vasco da Gama sailed into this same harbour, not as a bearer of peace, but a harbinger of war and conquest.

Then, suddenly, the imperial bureaucrats banned any further voyages, despite their rich commercial potential. The ships were broken up, their logbooks destroyed, and now only a few stone inscriptions on a windswept hillside. remained to speak of one of the great mysteries of history.

Western thinkers have always taken a brutally simple line on the stopping of Cheng He's explorations. For them, it would be like calling a halt to manned space exploration on the eve of... of the first moon landing.

It's proof that the Chinese are backward-looking and ignorant, had no desire for new knowledge, and were run by a load of hidebound bureaucrats. Proof, too, that the West was the fount of science and technology and progress and had a monopoly on the spirit of enterprise. But as always in history, there are many ways of looking at the same question. After all, it was the Chinese who were the great technological innovators. So perhaps it's really a question of how...

different civilizations think you should use technology. And perhaps then the Chinese saw, quite sensibly on the face of it, that their true interests lay here, inside their own borders, cultivating their soil, cultivating the inner life, searching for the harmony that had always been the goal of their civilization. And that it was the West, on the other hand, that had a compulsive desire to change, a compulsive need to invade other people's space, both moral and physical.

and a refusal to accept limits on its own. Since the 18th century, it's been customary to talk about the East needing to catch up with the West. These days, that's obviously happening all around us materially, if it's not happened already. But it takes two to make a dialogue.

And perhaps the West still has some catching up to do. Perhaps the West still has to learn from the East a way of cultivating its... inner space of accepting limits on desires and space in an increasingly finite world. At the beginning of this modern dialogue between the East and the West, the French philosopher Pascal said that the trouble with Western man was this.

He did not know how to be content in an empty room. Banning of the Ming voyages was part of a deeper introspection in Chinese culture. Now behind a new great wall to keep out the barbarians, the Chinese built a new capital far to the north, Beijing, the North City.

Here at the Altar of Heaven, the Emperor continued to perform the rituals of the Bronze Age, in the belief that the world would never change. The longest and richest intellectual tradition in the world, now increasingly turned in on itself. And here in the National Library in Beijing is the most staggering proof both of that greatness and of its progressive desiccation. This is the greatest literary enterprise of all time, an encyclopedia running to 79,000 handwritten volumes, still in its original shelves and boxes, labelled in green, red, blue and grey according to the imperial cataclysm. of spring, summer, autumn and winter for classics, history, philosophy and literature.

A testimony to the idea that all knowledge, past, present and future, could be contained in a single room. But all this time, far away in barbarian Europe, Bacon, Newton, Descartes had been concerning themselves not with how to perfect the past, but how to control the future. And now some Chinese intellectuals began to plead for a more open approach to knowledge. Among them, an obscure young historian called Chang Suecheng.

It was Chang Suecheng, on the very eve... of the most momentous upheaval in Chinese history since the time of the Qin emperor. In other words, the clash with the West and all that that would engender.

It was he who attempted to reappraise the way that the Chinese had seen history since the very beginnings of the Confucian tradition. For him, history was an all-embracing concept which would include all of this, the entire canon of Chinese literature. The Confucian texts, he said, were all history.

Confucius may be a true guide to life, but he is also simply a historical text, and the time is past when history should be merely minute textual analysis and compilation by squads of scholars burrowing away. on a rigid and old-fashioned curriculum. History should be dynamic and meaningful. Some have seen him as a precursor of the revolution, a prophet of democracy, an enemy of feudalism. That's no doubt exaggerated.

But in 1799, two years before his death, he wrote a prophetic letter about what he saw as the inevitable decline of the Qing dynasty and the worrying prospects ahead. This was a time, he said, when history should no longer... concern itself merely with the past, but should use the past to reform the present, and indeed to look into the future. And the historian's greatest gifts, he said, were not just knowledge, but inspiration and insight. And a historian's inspiration, he thought, was just like the I Ching, the book of changes, in that it enabled him to look into the future.

At the moment of his death, China was about to come face to face with another culture. whose view of history was diametrically opposed to that of the Chinese tradition. The Europeans, with their Judeo-Christian heritage, believed that history was purposive, that it was leading towards an appointed end, and that they would be the winners. The first Chinese descriptions of we Westerners are not flattering.

These barbarians have a grim look, untidy hair, an unpleasant smell. They have no rituals worthy of the name. They're liars and are rather arrogant. They conquer countries by fraud and force, ingratiating themselves in a friendly way before they oppress the natives. At the heart of their conduct is violence.

By the 18th century, the coasts of the South China Sea were frequented by the Spanish, the Dutch, Portuguese, English, and later Americans. All bearing Chinese inventions, gunpowder, the stern rudder, the magnetic compass, paper maps. Coming not just to sell, but to impose their goods, their ideas, their religion, their will.

They soon set up trading colonies, lording it from grand mansions paid for by the illicit trade in goods like opium. In the tale of colonial infamy, this is one of the least known episodes in the West. But it culminated in the central event of 19th century Chinese history, the Opium War.

The point of the opium trade simply was to sell opium to China. But in practice that meant getting as many Chinese people addicted to the drug as possible. But opium was prohibited in China and had an almost negligible local consumption. So it had to be sold illicitly in bulk from the one permitted trading post on the mainland, Canton, and from offshore bases like this one.

The indispensable link in this setup was India. There the British imperial possessions had grown in the last decades of the 18th century. And as the British themselves produced nothing which the Chinese wished to buy, it was in India that the opium, and to a lesser extent the cotton, could be grown that could be traded for the luxuries that the British desired, and especially tea, which by then had become a national obsession.

And so an infernal triangle was set up between Britain, China and India. Which parallels the tragic triangle of the previous century between Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, the slave trade. And this was no small business. Incredible as it may sound, in the early 19th century, opium was the biggest single trade anywhere.

It is as if today the Colombian drug barons possessed such a powerful fleet that they were able to sail into San Francisco Bay. And compel a large portion of the population of the United States to become addicted to heroin and cocaine and to wipe out the US fleet if it intervened. In what Gladstone called the most disreputable war ever fought by the British, the Chinese fleets, hopelessly outgunned and outdated, were smashed to pieces, defeated by the very technology which they had invented. But let's stand still. For the Chinese defeat was a shattering revelation.

Forced now to watch impotent as the Western barbarians, their cultural inferiors, now began to carve up the Middle Kingdom into colonies with the same greedy relish that they had scrambled for Africa and dismembered India. Unable to cope with the pressure of the outside world, the Chinese government now collapsed. Chinese people were treated like animals in their own land by the Western imperialists, harnessed to polo traps for sport, banned along with dogs in their own public parks. The great time of revolution had arrived, as the I Ching, the Book of Changes, states, and the great man was at hand in whom all belief would reside.

In 1949 Mao and the communists took power on a tide of emotion and optimism after years of civil war, famine and foreign rule. But in their haste to erase the past, they killed millions by ill-judged reforms and tyrannical violence. And this in the name of a Western ideology and a Western conception of history. Today, the Chinese people are living through a time of great opportunity. Still without political power, they're poised nonetheless to become an economic giant.

They could regain their place as the greatest of all civilizations. But when their rulers crushed the democracy movement, here in Tiananmen Square in 1989, they showed the old fear of authoritarians throughout history, the fear of the past to discredit the present. On the streets at night, the Chinese people can listen once more to the old music banned under Mao's dictatorship. In the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of divination, there is a hexagram entitled Revolution.

In a revolution, it says, two mistakes must be avoided. You must not move with excessive haste, nor use excessive ruthlessness against the people. What is done must correspond to a higher truth. A revolution not founded on inner truth will come to grief, for in the end the people will support only what they feel in their hearts to be just.

Transcript for:Overview of Chinese Civilization and Its Evolution

Transcript for:
Overview of Chinese Civilization and Its Evolution