- [Michael Voiceover] We've all got an image of China today.

The one-party state.

The biggest nation on Earth.

The huge economic growth of the last 30 years, pushing its power and influence across the world.

(soft music) But there's another China.

(gong rings) A civilization that goes back thousands of years.

It's the oldest continuous state on Earth.

- China's the country that we all want to know about today, but if you want to understand China now, you need to know about its history.

- [Michael Voiceover] And it's a history of amazing drama and creativity, triumphs and tragedies, and deep humanity.

It's an epic tale of continuity which passed down China's oldest beliefs for more than 3,000 years, (singing in foreign language) until the start of the 20th century.

Since then the Chinese people have gone through foreign invasion, civil war, and violent revolution.

Their culture was devastated.

Their ancient traditions, like this temple festival, were lost, it seemed, forever.

But now China is rising again and the Chinese people are rediscovering the meaning of their history.

It's a great time to look afresh at the story of China.

(dynamic music) - [Voiceover] The story of China is made possible (people speaking indistinctly) - [Michael Voiceover] Every year in springtime, 10s of millions of Chinese people set off of the journey home.

They're going back for the Qing Ming Festival, the Festival of Light, to do one of the most important things in Chinese culture, to honor the ancestors.

- I'm heading down to the city of Wuxi for a very special occasion, a family reunion.

(gentle music) - [Michael Voiceover] For the last 30 years, the Chinese people have grown up in a consumer society.

After the break with Chairman Mao's brand of revolutionary communism, China has been on a headlong rush into the future.

But as new freedoms beckon, (dynamic music) and as their world changes before their eyes, the Chinese people are reaching back to the age-old beliefs that have sustained them for so long.

- Sometimes the new proves less enticing than was first thought and the old far more durable than anyone had ever imagined.

- [Michael Voiceover] And for the Chinese people, what matters most is the family.

This is Wuxi.

With eight million people it looks like any modern city, but it's as old as Rome.

And it's the home of the Qin family.

(people speaking indistinctly) (birds chirping) Dawn on the Day of the Ancestors, what the Chinese call Tomb Sweeping Day.

(soft music) And the Qin family gather at the grave of their founding ancestor, Qin Guang, a poet who lived 1,000 years ago.

The presence of the ancestors is still felt by everyone in China.

In the West, most of us can hardly go back beyond the great-grandparents.

The Qins can name more than 30 generations.

They've come from all over China, and further afield, to make their own report to the ancestors, to tell them how the family's doing and how the ancestors and their values still live on in us.

(man speaking foreign language) As the ancients used to say, repaying our roots.

- Amazing scene, isn't it?

Just recalls the whole of Chinese history over the last 100 years.

Wars, revolutions, famines, families broken up, cast to the four winds, and yet they come back with this kind of homing instinct almost to the tomb of the founder, as if everything can be reconstituted.

- [Michael Voiceover] These rituals were banned by Chairman Mao in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

The grave was vandalized and lost.

But when the revolutionary time was over, Frank Ching, a graduate of Fordham and Columbia, came with his sister to search for the tomb.

And what he found was so fascinating that he decided to write the family history.

- Back in 1982, when I found that gravestone, none of these things existed.

You know, when I first started out I was like a blank slate.

I didn't know what existed.

It's really very exciting this is happening.

I certainly never expected anything like this to happen when I started my own journey of discovery.

- [Michael Voiceover] For the head of the family, Qin Baoxin, rediscovering their lost past is part of recovering the identity of the nation.

(Qin speaking foreign language) - [Translator Voiceover] In recent years we've been able to pay more attention to family values and culture.

This was stopped during the Cultural Revolution and slowly we've been restoring these things.

Every family in the country is doing the same thing.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] Like everyone in China, the Qin family have experienced dizzying change since the end of empire.

From colonial subjects to emigres seeking a better life, communist revolutionaries on the Long March with Chairman Mao, and even glamour on the Shanghai stage, their family story mirrors the story of the nation.

And now the meaning of that history is flooding back.

Some of the older members have founded a clan newspaper to publish news about their family history.

(speaking foreign language) - [Translator Voiceover] In China the family is the foundation of everything.

If the family's at peace, all things go well.

If each family is fine, then the whole country will also be fine.

(people speaking indistinctly) Our family goes back 1,000 years, and in that time there have been huge changes in the country.

But now we can look back again.

And like many people, we are asking, "How did we get here?

"Where are our roots?"

(man speaking foreign language) - I'm going to regret this!

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] So the Chinese people have found again the warmth of home after the vast and terrifying dislocation of the mid-20th century, when for a time China turned its back on its past.

The Qin family, like the nation itself, are seeking a renewed identity, a distinctively Chinese way forward anchored in the Chinese past.

And that history goes back thousands of years, so far back that there are no written texts that tell of its birth.

But there are myths and legends, handed down over thousands of years, and these myths take us to the heart of the Yellow River plain that gave China its name, Zhongguo, the middle land.

And here you can still reach back to those beginnings.

(vibrant drumming) This is a rural fair at a 2,000-year-old temple, which was closed down in the communist era in the 1950s.

- I'm at the Great Farmer's Festival in the plain of the Yellow River, with a million people all around me.

- [Michael Voiceover] And these vast crowds have come to celebrate an ancient myth that tells of the origins of the Chinese people.

As in many ancient cultures, it's the women who've treasured the tales and handed them down.

- How much?

Three?

- [Michael Voiceover] Especially the tale of the mother goddess of the Chinese people, Nuwa.

- Little dog.

It's great, isn't it?

This whole great festival is to two ancient gods in Chinese mythology, Fuxi, the male god, and Nuwa, the female god.

And she's famous because she created humanity out of the yellow mud of the Yellow River, and the mud that was left over, she made dogs and chickens, according to the myth.

- [Michael Voiceover] And the myth contains the seeds of Chinese identity, (soft music) incredibly passed down from the Bronze Age.

(woman speaking foreign language) - [Translator Voiceover] A long time ago, the Earth quaked and the sky fell in.

Only Nuwa and her brother Fuxi survived.

So they bit their fingers and mixed their blood with mud from the Yellow River, and with this mixture they molded the very first humans.

So Nuwa is our ancestral mother.

We're all here because of her.

(woman chuckling) - [Michael Voiceover] These myths have been handed down for over 4,000 years, and they contain a crucial idea, the uniqueness of Chinese ethnic identity.

China is a huge and diverse country, with so many languages and cultures.

But the vast majority of its people call themselves Han Chinese after the great Han Dynasty that ruled China 2,000 years ago.

But the story of China told in the myths and revealed by modern archaeology goes back much further.

And the tale begins on the banks of the Yellow River.

All four of the great civilizations of the ancient world began on the banks of rivers, the Nile, the Euphrates, the Indus, and the Yellow River.

And the rise of all of them depended on control of the water.

- It was the ability to harness the waters of the river for irrigation that enabled ancient people to feed bigger and bigger populations and eventually to create cities and make civilization.

But where the rising of the Nile, for example, was predictable to the day, and seen by the Egyptians as a joyful and benign source of life, the Yellow River here in China has been a destroyer, the killer of millions in its great floods throughout Chinese history, right up to the 20th century.

- [Michael Voiceover] And so at the beginnings of Chinese history, control of the river lay at the heart of political power, and new archaeological discoveries have pinpointed a great flood just before 1900 BCE.

(soft music) And this connects with the most famous myth about the origin of the Chinese state, the tale of the king who first channeled the Yellow River after a great flood is still told by the storytellers.

(man speaking foreign language) - [Translator Voiceover] King Yu had two good helpers, Yellow Dragon and Black Turtle.

Yellow Dragon had a very long tail and Black Turtle was very strong.

To divert the flood, Yellow Dragon dragged its tail and opened a channel for the water.

And when King Yu needed to build a dam, Black turtle pushed huge amounts of mud into position.

King Yu worked so hard trying to control the water that he didn't return home for 13 years.

- Look at this.

- [Michael Voiceover] So could the legend of King Yu have handed down the memory of a catastrophic flood in prehistory, and even the memory of a real ruler?

(thunder roaring) - This is a Ming Dynasty temple.

It was built in the 1520s but on a very, very ancient terrace.

And that's King Yu.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] Up until now historians have thought the tale of King Yu was just a myth, but recently a bronze bowl was found, nearly 3,000 years old, engraved with his story, proving the tale goes back to the Bronze Age and maybe even back to the Great Flood of 1900 BCE.

The legend said that it was King Yu who founded China's first dynasty.

They were called the Xia (singing in foreign language) and they came from the middle plain of the middle land here in the rich wheatfields of Henan, where China's fist large scale societies began.

And at the village of Erlitou, traditions survived until modern times, but this had been the seat of China's first rulers.

(women speaking foreign language) - So the most ancient site in the world?

- [Translator Voiceover] The oldest remains are over there.

- Erlitou!

- No!

Incredible!

Ancient Greece, Ancient Iraq, Ancient Egypt.

Wherever you look, some memory survives onsite.

- [Michael Voiceover] Here towns first emerged out of China's Stone Age villages soon after the Great Flood.

(woman speaking foreign language) - [Translator Voiceover] A long time ago, Emperor Huangdi was buried there.

Thousands and thousands of years ago.

- Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor, the founder of, the original emperor of China.

(woman speaking foreign language) - [Translator Voiceover] North of the river Luo there was an ancient village.

This area was excavated and the things they dug out are over there.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] Under these wheatfields the archaeologists excavated a settlement which had thousands of people and a huge walled enclosure.

(man speaking foreign language) - [Translator Voiceover] You see the white house?

That is where palace number four is.

- [Michael Voiceover] Inside were pillared halls, palaces from different periods between 1900 and 1500 BCE.

They stood on rammed earth platforms, one of them with a triple gate, the pattern of all later Chinese royal cities.

The Xia Dynasty are still a mystery.

Here at Erlitou, archaeologists are still piecing together the clues from the pottery and from the bronze casting.

Most intriguing of all is a bronze scepter inlaid with 2,000 pieces of turquoise in the shape of a dragon, the age old symbol of Chinese royalty, and an echo, perhaps, of the dragon scepter given by the gods to King Yu when he tamed the flood.

So Erlitou looks tantalizingly like the beginnings of the Chinese state.

The finds on the ground seem to be baring up the story of the myths.

(man speaking foreign language) - [Translator Voiceover] Archaeologists think this site is very important.

It seems to be the first city of the mythical Xia, but of course we need writing to be 100% sure.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] If this was the capital of the Xia, China's first dynasty, it's where myth becomes history, the origin place of the Chinese state.

As it is, though, to find China's first historical rulers we now have to leap forward to around 1500 BCE to the Shang Dynasty.

And we know about the Shang because they've left us the first Chinese writing.

The modern discovery of the Shang is one of the most exciting stories in world archaeology, and it began by chance in one of those storehouses of age-old Chinese wisdom, a traditional pharmacy, where beliefs and practices going back into prehistory have come down to us today, and the clues to the mystery of the Shang, unbelievably, were found inside a packet of over-the-counter medicine.

- The story goes like this.

1899, a Chinese scholar called Wang Yirong, who was the Chancellor of the Imperial Academy in Beijing, a great scholar and a collector of ancient bronzes, he was interested in the earliest Chinese writing systems.

He falls ill with malaria and his local pharmacy, just like this one, delivers a series of ingredients, which include dragon bones.

These were animal bones, just like this, they use them today, which you ground up and boiled and drank to alleviate the fever.

When he opened the packet, to his amazement, this is what he saw.

Some of the bones were inscribed with what he could see were primitive forms of the old writing that he knew from the inscriptions on his bronzes.

And eventually these dragon bones were traced back to a little place in the lower valley of the Yellow River, a country town called Anyang.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] And Anyang, according to the ancient Chinese legends, had been the last capital of the Shang Dynasty.

When the archaeologists dug there they found the foundations of palaces of the Shang kings and huge underground tombs.

They found human sacrifice, wives and slaves killed with their masters, their skeletons and severed heads laid out in rows to please the gods.

And they also unearthed heaps of dragon bones, bones of cows and sheep and turtles that the Shang kings and their diviners used to talk to their ancestors and to read the future.

- So basically they choose one piece of bone or shell and then they drill some holes.

And then they heat up these holes with some special plants and then these will create some cracks.

And then they'd look at the patterns of these cracks.

- [Michael Voiceover] It was a strange and archaic form of divination.

With a heated point, they burned little holes in the back of the bone.

That made cracks on the other side, and then the priests looked at the cracks and from them interpreted the will of the ancestral spirits.

And they wrote the questions and the answers on the bones, which were stored in the royal archive.

Will our enemies attack us?

Will the queen's baby boy survive?

Will the rains come?

- So the diviners are asking for the favor of the ancestral spirits?

- Yes, yes.

- [Michael] Wow.

- Yes, so basically it's their special way to communicate with their ancestors.

- [Michael] The ancestors are the key people in their mental universe.

- Yes, yes, yes.

- [Michael] God, fantastic.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] And unlike the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt or the Cuneiform of Babylonia, the archaeologists had no need of a key to decipher them, for they could see at once that the signs on the oracle bones were the direct ancestors of today's Chinese writing.

- That's the character for rain, I mean in modern language, and in oracle bones it's like this, with three drops.

- It's still rain drops.

- So essentially it's the same idea, fundamentally.

This rain character is characterized by these raindrops.

- [Michael] Yeah, yeah.

- [Michael Voiceover] Out of these prehistoric pictographs came today's Chinese script with its 10s of thousands of signs.

But when modern Chinese people read them they see not simple letters representing sounds, but ancient concepts carrying a whole civilization's way of seeing.

So through their script, the Chinese people are uniquely connected with their deep past, more so than any other culture on Earth.

(soft music) So Shang power came from the ancestors.

Now on the oracle bones was one sacred place in particular.

- Hello!

- [Michael Voiceover] A place with the same name as the dynasty, Shang.

- Well this is not like the shopping malls of Shanghai, that's for sure.

- [Michael Voiceover] To find it, the archaeologists now turned to a little town in Henan with a tantalizing name, Shangqiu, the Ruins of Shang.

- Well we're now inside the Ming Dynasty city.

This was built in 1511, the previous one destroyed by floods.

Lots more underneath it, of course.

What's fascinating is it's still called Shangqiu, the Ruins of Shang.

- [Michael Voiceover] So was this the ancestral place of China's first great dynasty?

- Good system!

(Michael chuckling) - [Michael Voiceover] That question has intrigued Chinese archaeologists since their first explorations here in the 1930s.

(horns honking) But the Bronze Age layers here are 30 feet deep in Yellow River silt.

Not long ago, though, a joint Chinese expedition with the University of Boston detected the outline of a much older city underneath the modern town.

And the clues to what it was were in the oracle bones found at Anyang.

- In the 1930s a the Chinese scholar called Dong Zuobin worked on the Bronze Age inscriptions scratched into the oracle bones from the Shang Dynasty.

Thousand upon thousand of them.

And through the 1930s, when China was riven by civil war and Japanese invasion, he worked transcribing these inscriptions in what I suppose you could call self-effacing loyalty to the Chinese past while the catastrophes of the modern world surrounded him.

And you see there his transcription of one of the turtle shells with all the splits and the inscriptions on them and he worked out the order of the Shang kings and their calendar and their rituals and their journeys.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] What he discovered was that the kings came back to do special rituals at the city called Shang.

And that was here.

Its name meant "the place where the ancestors were worshipped."

So state and ancestors were tied together.

And amazingly cults and legends about the Shang still survive here at a mysterious temple at the edge of town.

The mound of Shang.

It's a great artificial hill.

The legends say this mound was built before the Great Flood, that here mankind first got fire stolen from the gods.

And tradition also said this had been a kind of observatory, where the Shang kings watched the stars that protected their dynasty.

- Because they believed that the stars were powers in heaven and if we understood them properly then we'd know best how to run our kingdom.

(slow music) - [Michael Voiceover] So the oracle bones and the later myths are clues to early Chinese beliefs about society and the cosmos.

Divination, ritual, and writing were the basis of state power.

For their sacred ceremonies they cast beautiful bronzes to hold food and wine offerings to the ancestral spirits, which were consumed at the royal feasts.

Some of them bear the symbols of the different lineages of the royal and noble families.

Like the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, the Shang practiced human sacrifice.

The oracle bones list the victims.

They were captives from the subject peoples the Shang ruled, killed as offerings to the powers of nature, as the Shang diviners asked the ancestors in heaven for guidance, anxiously watching the stars for omens of auspiciousness and omens of disaster.

- To them time, as revealed in the movements of the stars and planets, was a truly portentous dimension full of danger as well as auspiciousness, and especially for the rulers, for they knew that in time the planets would reveal heaven's judgment on their earthly rule.

- [Michael Voiceover] And eventually heaven did make its judgement.

After five centuries the last Shang king, Di Xin, came to the throne, and he would never be forgotten.

- In the end the last of the Shang kings turned into a monster.

He became a wicked villain, like the characters in a fairy tale.

And anybody who argued with him he had put to death.

And when his most honest councilor tried to make him behave better, the wicked queen ordered the councilor's heart to be cut out.

(woman speaking foreign language) And then, with the people despairing of his cruelty, in the heavens they saw a sign.

Five planets clustered together in a small corner of the sky.

Heaven had spoken.

That five-planet conjunction happens every 516 years.

So we asked the astronomers of Beijing Planetarium to help us find the day when the gods turned against the Shang.

It's usually very hard to find exact dates this far back, but as the ancient Chinese recorded this rare planetary gathering, now we can do it.

- So it's what historians always want to do is to actually go back in time.

Mr. Lu can do it for us.

He can actually take us back to late May 1058 BC on his computer system.

(soft music) So you can follow any single planet?

- Yes.

- It's just wonderful.

- The sun is raised the sky.

- [Michael Voiceover] The sign in the heavens was also seen by the tribes who lived under the Shang tyranny, and they made an alliance under a man known for his virtue, King Wen of the Zhou.

And then came another omen.

A huge red bird landed on the altar of the earth on Mount Jin, and it spoke.

Heaven has commanded that the king of the Shang must be overthrown.

(people yelling indistinctly) Finally, on May the 23rd, 1046 BCE, Di Xin, the last king of the Shang, bowed to the will of the ancestors.

- And in the end all the king's enemies gathered and brought an army against his royal palace.

And then he realized that he'd lost the favor of the gods, or as the Chinese call it, the Mandate of Heaven.

(soft music) (singing in foreign language) And all his allies deserted him, and as his palace in his royal city went up in flames, he puts on his precious jade suit and he walked into the fire.

That was the end of the Shang Dynasty.

- [Michael Voiceover] And so the Mandate of Heaven passed to the king of the Zhou, and he laid down the pattern of rule for future ages.

Rulers must be virtuous and keep harmony between humanity and the cosmos, observing the rituals and the music of the heavens.

(singing in foreign language) And amazingly some of the ritual traditions of the Shang and the Zhou have survived until today.

These are Daoists, followers of China's oldest religion.

Their name means the seekers after the way.

In their ceremonies and music, the Daoists are a living link with these ancient ideas about the relation of the kingdoms of Earth and heaven.

(woman speaking foreign language) - [Translator Voiceover] In Daoism, heaven and Earth are two kingdoms.

Those kingdoms have the same spirit, the same emperor.

Daoism has inherited China's ancient beliefs from the Xia, Shang, and Zhou Dynasties.

But it is not just about belief.

In Chinese culture many ordinary, practical things can be done in the Daoist way.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] And these very ancient customs and beliefs are still held in affection, and practiced, by the ordinary Chinese people today.

(singing in foreign language) In later times the Zhou came to be seen as model rulers, fulfilling Heaven's Mandate.

But China's fate throughout its history has been to fragment in times of crisis.

(people yelling indistinctly) (dynamic music) Eventually Zhou power disintegrated and the heartland of China descended into chaos.

Across the middle land feuding kings and warlords fought for supremacy.

And a recent string of astonishing archaeological finds have shown us what their armies looked like.

- Amazing sight, isn't it?

This is one of more than a dozen chariot burial pits that have been uncovered in the middle of Luoyang in the last few years.

There's 18 chariots and their horses here.

It's the world of Achilles and Hector in more than just the military hardware.

Politically, just like Agamemnon, the kings here in the central plain of China depended on the cooperation of vassal states, smaller kingdoms, sometimes more than 100 of them.

But these were rivals fighting each other.

Political instability, warfare, and violence were endemic.

And for that reason, perhaps, this is the time when a ferment of ideas grows about the nature of kingship, the function of states, duties, obligation, and morality.

Out of this begins the first golden age of Chinese philosophy.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] Right across the old world in the 6th century BC, thinkers and rulers were debating these ideas.

A new age of human thought had dawned, what we call the Axial Age.

Greek philosophers, the Old Testament prophets, the Buddha in India.

All of them were wrestling with ideas about conscience and social justice, and human autonomy.

How can a king be just in violent times?

What is law?

What is virtue?

(man speaking foreign language) In China, it was said 100 schools of thought bloomed, and the most famous thinker came from an obscure state in Eastern China.

He was descended from a family of Shang oracle bone diviners, and his obsession was not the inner life, but how we act in the public world.

- Small town China.

But what a small town!

Because this place, Qufu, has nearly 3,000 years of continuity, life on this spot, and it gave birth to one of the most influential figures in the history of the world.

Confucius.

(soft music) Confucius lived in a time of cultural and political crisis, China divided into many small states that were always fighting each other, and sometimes even divided in themselves.

Like this one, the state of Lu, whose capital was Qufu.

Confucius rose eventually to a quite high ministerial job in which he played a crucial role, brokering a peace deal between three feuding clans and persuading them to demolish their fortifications and acknowledge the duke here as their lord.

And that kind of experience gave him the idea of his mission, which was nothing less than to restore civilization by teaching rulers to be virtuous.

(birds chirping) - Confucius had a very clear vision.

There is definitely this sense of passion in him that he wants to be recognized He wants to contribute to the social order of society and he wants to make sure that ritual practices are followed very closely.

Confucius was very keen on the idea of humaneness or benevolence, and that the ruler set a direct example for the people to follow.

There's a very lively metaphor in the Analects, when the character of the ruler is compared to the wind and the character of the ordinary people is compared to the grass.

So it's said that when the wind blows, the grass naturally bends.

- [Michael Voiceover] Like Socrates or the Buddha, his sayings were turned into a book after his death by his disciples.

- The Analects.

Horrible word, isn't it?

What a mouthful.

It means the sort of quotations from, but really it should be called the conversations of Confucius because that's what it really is.

It's his sayings.

And it's been said that no book in the history of the world, even the Bible, has exerted so much influence for such a long period on so many people.

That's Confucius's little blue book.

18?

18, okay great.

- [Michael Voiceover] The Analects would become China's guide to the principles of good government.

- He says that if you govern people by Zheng,?

it could be translated as law or punishment, then you get people who have no sense of shame.

You get order but people don't really know what they're doing wrong.

But then if you govern by De, a sense of virtue, morality, then people have a sense of shame and with that idea it's implied that they'll have moral progress as well.

- [Michael Voiceover] It's a very old idea in the story of China that the basis of all government is not law, but established morality, and the key end to preserve the state.

So the ideas of Confucius weren't religious.

They were what we would call political, and that's another key to the Story of China.

The core ideals of their civilization were not theological, they were ethical.

Good governance would come if the elite were educated and the king was virtuous.

Without virtue, Confucius thought any ruler was morally bankrupt and should be resisted.

He traveled the roads of China like some intellectual troubleshooter, trying to sell China's local rulers his New Deal.

At his tomb I met a group of Confucian teachers from Korea.

These gentlemen are not priests, they're scholars, and what they are doing is not so much religion as ritual.

An act of reverence for the old master and his ideal of universal brotherhood.

(singing in foreign language) Bowing before his tombstone, which was smashed to pieces by the communist Red Guards only 50 years ago, but is now restored.

(man speaking foreign language) - [Translator Voiceover] We are here to honour Confucius.

But why are you here?

(people chuckle) - Ah, very good question!

So we are interested in the history of China and Confucius is so important that that is why we are here.

- [Michael Voiceover] But for them, of course, Confucius is a living teacher in an unbroken tradition of 2,500 years.

(man speaking foreign language) - All over the world, people, they should know about Confucius.

Love should spread all over the world, not just individual.

- Yeah, love, benevolence, courtesy, good manners.

These are the way society works when society works well - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- in Confucius's idea.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] Confucius was condemned during the Communist Revolution as the embodiment of old ideas and old customs, but now once more he's a national treasure, praised by the government for his stress on social values, though not so much, perhaps, for his insistence that it is the intellectual's duty to speak truth to power.

But in both he's a symbol of the Chinese way.

(speaking foreign language) - [Michael] Very good, oh very good!

Xie, Xie!

(soft music) Thank you very much.

Fantastic.

Very, very good.

Confucius was not an innovator, he was the distiller, the crystallizer of an already ancient tradition.

The idea of the virtuous ruler, of filial piety, of ritual and ceremony as the glue that bound society together, and the overruling power of education.

Those are the values that still underlie Chinese values today, and Asian values from Korea and Japan, all the way down to Vietnam.

What a legacy.

But the truth is, in his own lifetime Confucius was a failure.

No ruler bought into his manifesto for change.

After his death in 479 BCE, the warring states fought each other for two more centuries.

And by then no one was listening to arguments about morality, but only the claims of violence and war.

(people yelling indistinctly) And one of those warring states was the Qin.

Through military conquest they swallowed up the Zhou and the other states of the Yellow River plain.

And in 221 BC they proclaimed their leader the first emperor of all China, Qin Shi Huangdi.

- How this vast and diverse area became one state, that's one of the great themes of our story.

As we've already seen, it began a long time before with the Xia and Shang Dynasties.

But without the Qin emperor, whose army is arrayed before us now, it might never have happened.

The ongoing excavation of the first emperor's tomb near Xi'an has given us an unparalleled insight into his empire.

Discipline.

Obedience.

Military might.

- All these terracotta warriors are only a small part of the whole tomb complex.

You know, the whole tomb complex of the first emperor covers about 15, 16 square kilometers.

- [Michael Voiceover] This pit is one of nearly 200 large and small found since the 1970s.

The more the archaeologists look, the more they find.

The restoration job will take several lifetimes.

- I think we are very similar to the doctor.

Only difference is our patient is different.

- [Michael Voiceover] And every one of the thousands of terracotta warriors has an individual treatment plan as they're put back together in the onsite labs.

- Do we know what rank he was in the army?

- [Xia] No, he's a normal soldier.

- You can tell that by the headdress and the armor?

- Headdress.

Depends on his armor, and depends on his troops because general has more detail, more-- - [Michael] Posh clothes, yeah, yeah.

- More, yeah!

More-- - [Michael] A stern, a stern look of command doesn't he?

And this gives us a sense of what the first emperor's army actually was like?

- Yeah, this really a model of the Qin Dynasty army, you know, because these battle formations shows infantry, you know, archers and cavalry, and charioteers, you know.

So that's really battle formation of the Qin Dynasty.

(vibrant music) - [Michael Voiceover] With their mass-produced bronze weapons and mechanical crossbows, the Qin army conquered all their neighbors.

(people cheering) The first emperor imposed his own revolutionary political system on the conquered lands, dispossessing the old aristocracies, creating an enormous captive labor force to build his new state, the Qin.

That's the source of the name for China used today by the outside world, which first came to know China at this time.

Qin Si Huangdi built the first Great Wall.

He made a new road system linking the 36 military provinces.

For tax and commerce, the weights and measures were regulated, and there was to be a uniform coinage.

And the Chinese script, too, was standardized, so the emperor's will could be conveyed right down to local magistrates, who administered a population of more than 30 million people.

- The beginnings of China as a unitary state, as the world's first bureaucratic, centralized empire, begin with Qin Shi Huangdi.

- [Michael Voiceover] But this first united China was held together by fear and force.

(people yelling indistinctly) The Qin emperor killed 400 Confucian scholars and ordered all history books to be burnt.

In the Qin year 0, history was to be erased.

(man yelling in foreign language) But the emperor's cruelty was the downfall of his dynasty.

Only three years after his death the people rose in revolt.

The great rebellion was led by a peasant, Liu Bang, (man yelling in foreign language) and Liu Bang founded the new dynasty after which the Chinese still name themselves today, the Han.

(man speaking foreign language) - [Translator Voiceover] Liu Bang, the leader of the rebels, had a very magical birth.

His mother dreamed she mated with a dragon and the dragon landed on her and she became pregnant, and soon she gave birth to Liu Bang.

(soft music) When the Qin Empire fell there was civil war.

After four years Liu Bang triumphed, unified China, and became the first emperor of the Han Dynasty.

- [Michael Voiceover] The Han Dynasty would last for 400 years, and they laid the pattern for future Chinese government, balancing the harshness of the first emperor with the humane Confucian tradition.

It was under the Han that China first went out to the West, making contacts with the Greeks and Romans out on the Silk Road.

- In earlier times, wrote the great historian Polybius, the history of the world was a series of unrelated episodes.

But from now on history becomes an organic hole.

The affairs of Europe and Africa connect with those of Asia.

Events have a relationship and everything contributes towards a single development.

- [Michael Voiceover] It's a key moment in world history and it's recorded by China's greatest historian, the Han Dynasty's Sima Qian.

- His father had been astrologer and archivist of the court, what we would say, I suppose, is the official historian, and had hoped to write a history of China, but had not done so.

And now, here in Luoyang, he's dying.

And at this point he extracts from his son a solemn promise.

"In the past age," he said, "the writing of history has been abandoned.

"But now the Han Dynasty has arisen "and all within the four oceans is united.

"But I fear that the history of the world, "i.e.

the history of China, will not be written.

"You must do it."

And as Sima Qian tells the story, he replied, "It is the greatest crime "to ignore what the ancestors have requested.

"I dare not fail."

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] And Sima Qian didn't fail, even when condemned to be castrated for sympathizing with a critic of the emperor.

Rather than committing suicide as a gentleman should, he accepted the public humiliation and fulfilled his vow to his father to tell the story and to hand it down to us.

So under the Han continuity was restored.

Still today the Chinese people call themselves Han, with Han speech and Han culture, and acknowledgement that for all China's ethnic and linguistic diversity, they belong to one great civilization with one overarching narrative, the story of China itself.

Back at the temple of Nuwa, the mother goddess of the Chinese people, the pilgrims are gathering again to give thanks to the ancestors.

This ancient ceremony ceased at the end of the empire, and the temple was closed down in the 1950s, but now the rituals have been brought back to life with words from sacred books over 2,000 years old.

After the ravages of the 20th century the Chinese people have recovered their belief in their history as a source of strength, not weakness, And the ideas that have nourished their identity for so long are being handed down now into an ever more confident and expansive Chinese future with a new text, may our country's great traditions be passed down once more from generation to generation.

(soft music) Coming next in The Story of China, Tales from the Silk Road, as Tang Dynasty China goes global.

- You could say it's the beginning of universal history and it's happening in the Tang Dynasty.

- [Michael Voiceover] While Europe was in the Dark Ages, China's brilliant age of art and literature was born, a time when Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam all came to China and changed their civilization forever.