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00:05China is one of the oldest civilisations surviving today.
00:10For thousands of years, the Chinese people have been building
00:14on the astonishing achievements of their ancestors.
00:17The purple banner behind me reads,
00:20Sir Ji Wonshu.
00:21It's an ancient Chinese saying,
00:23and it means, we benefit from the past's creations.
00:26And the Chinese have certainly made some creations in the past.
00:31They've invented everything from paper and printing to pasta,
00:35from walks and warfare to wheelbarrows.
00:41Go!
00:43Here at my base in Britain,
00:44I'll be testing some of the most exciting Chinese inventions
00:47with the help of master craftsman Marty Jopson.
00:52And I've dispatched roving reporter Jamie Darling to China.
00:58He's going to explore where it all happened thousands of years ago.
01:04Together, we'll be finding out what the Chinese did for us.
01:10MUSIC PLAYS
01:23MUSIC PLAYS
01:42Cut off from the rest of the world for centuries,
01:45the Chinese developed a unique culture
01:47and made many technological, scientific and artistic advances
01:52long before the West.
01:56Now, the creative forces that shaped this huge country
02:00have exploded into the full glare of the 21st century.
02:11You hear that?
02:11That is the heartbeat of the world's fastest growing economy.
02:15A quarter of the world's population live in China,
02:18which means that one in four people are Chinese.
02:2020 million people live here in Shanghai.
02:22It's six times the size of London,
02:24which makes it one of the world's biggest cities.
02:27The skyline behind me is modern, it's vibrant,
02:30and most of it has gone up in the last five to ten years.
02:34But if you scratch the surface here,
02:35you will find one of the oldest and richest cultures
02:38that has ever been on the planet.
02:40They used to consider themselves to be the centre of the universe.
02:43And perhaps they weren't far wrong.
02:56The borders of modern China, the third largest country in the world,
03:00are not the ones that existed in ancient times.
03:03China's first empire was the Qin, which gave us the Great Wall of China.
03:12When the Qin dynasty was formed in the third century BC,
03:16there wasn't much in the way of roads.
03:18But there were two great natural phenomena,
03:20which gave them a head start in travel and communication.
03:24Rivers.
03:26The two defining features of the geography are the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers,
03:31which divide the country up between them.
03:32In ancient times, the Yangtze river, the third longest in the world,
03:37linked most parts of the south,
03:39and the Yellow river, most parts of the north.
03:41But there was no waterway to connect them.
03:44So the engineers of the Qin dynasty invented a solution.
03:48Man-made rivers.
03:49In other words, canals.
03:55This network of canals stretched right from the lower Yangtze basin
03:59up to the more densely populated regions in the north.
04:02And they used it to transport everything,
04:04from soldiers to labourers to foodstuffs,
04:08even, well, ducks, but not big plastic ducks as they do today.
04:13But you can be sure they didn't use pedlows,
04:16because they're far too hard work.
04:24But they did create one problem,
04:26because with all these new waterways,
04:29without a boat,
04:30you needed to find another way to get across.
04:46The Chinese were tremendous builders of bridges.
04:49They found all sorts of interesting ways to cross rivers,
04:52and eventually came up with a brilliant innovation.
04:56But first of all, what's the simplest way to cross a river?
05:00Marty?
05:00A plank.
05:01OK, cross it then.
05:07Now, you see, the problem with the plank is that it's rather flexible.
05:09It bounces up and down in the middle,
05:11and obviously, if there was too much weight, it would simply break.
05:14So the next stage was to put a prop underneath it.
05:17It makes the whole thing much more stable.
05:19Marty, cross again.
05:22So, with the prop or the pillar in the middle,
05:24it's a whole lot firmer.
05:26It doesn't bounce in the middle,
05:27and it's much stronger because it's got that extra support.
05:31But what if the bed of your river is rocky, or sandy, or incredibly deep,
05:35and no good for holding up a pillar?
05:37You'd need a different design.
05:41Over in Europe, some 500 years BC,
05:45the ancient Romans had used the semi-circular arch
05:47and applied it to various kinds of architecture, including bridges.
05:52Their bridges usually had several arches supporting a stone span,
05:56with pillars supporting the arches.
05:58And those pillars could go to great heights.
06:05Marty's built an arched bridge,
06:07and you can imagine that if you used just one arch over a wide river,
06:11your bridge would grow impossibly tall.
06:17You're awful high up there, Marty.
06:19I am indeed.
06:20How high are you?
06:21Well, about five metres square.
06:23Now, that is one of the problems of the semi-circular bridge.
06:27Here I've got a model of one in polystyrene.
06:30And you'll see that this could be built a stone or anything.
06:33The forces are transferred from the top to the next bit to the next bit,
06:36and eventually more or less straight down into the ground.
06:39So this can just sit on the ground or on the top of very high pillars,
06:43and they're very strong.
06:45But you'd never get a cow across that bridge, would you?
06:47And if you're going to build a bridge like that,
06:49you've got to build enormously long ramps,
06:51very, very expensive,
06:52in order to get anything over the top in a practical way.
06:55You can see how Marty was struggling to climb up himself.
06:58So, this was where the Chinese came up with a brilliant innovation
07:03in about the 7th century AD.
07:05Have a look at this.
07:06Here we have a circle.
07:09And the Roman semi-circular bridge was like that.
07:13Here we have a semi-circular arch, half the circle.
07:17The Chinese realised that they could maintain the inherent strength of the circle,
07:22but not use as much as half of it.
07:23They could use, say, a quarter of it, this much.
07:26Or even less.
07:28Just a short segment of a circle.
07:31So this would be the shape of a segmented arch bridge.
07:35Now, let me show you over here.
07:38Here is my semi-circular bridge.
07:40If I simply take the top section and lift it off,
07:44then I've got a segmented arch.
07:46And that's perfectly strong as long as I hold the ends together.
07:50The trouble is that the forces are now not going straight downwards,
07:54they're going along the line of the segments here.
07:57And so if I let go with my hands, the whole thing will collapse.
08:01So you do have to have abutments or pegs in the ground or something like that
08:04to prevent it from collapsing.
08:06But let's have a look at a real segmented arch bridge.
08:17Hey, you're a whole lot lower there.
08:19Oh, it's much more comfortable.
08:21It's exactly half the height.
08:22It's only one and a half metres up from the ground there.
08:24Much more comfortable.
08:26Bridges like this didn't appear in Western Europe, Venice in particular,
08:29until 600 years later.
08:32Now, there is one very slight problem.
08:34As you come down, you see there's a bit of a kink between the bottom of the bridge and the
08:37ground.
08:38And what the Chinese did was to smooth that out, to make a beautiful shape like a bow.
08:56Just as important as rivers and bridges in linking together this vast country were the roads.
09:02The most famous road in the whole of ancient China was the Silk Road,
09:06the key to early links and trade with the West.
09:14This could have been the Silk Road.
09:15No, it really could have, because it wasn't one road.
09:19It was a network of routes that stretched from 4,000 miles from Xi'an to Rome.
09:24And the Romans didn't refer to China as China.
09:27They referred to it as Serica, the land of silk.
09:32For a couple of thousand years, the Silk Road was the major highway for transporting material goods and knowledge
09:39between China, India, the Near East and Europe.
09:46The merchants who traveled up and down these roads wouldn't take the Silk directly to Rome.
09:51No, no.
09:53It would start with one Chinese trader taking Silk to a trading post
09:57and exchanging it with a local merchant for something he knew he could sell back in the big city, say,
10:02beads.
10:05The guy with the Silk would go to the next post and trade it for, say, gold.
10:12After passing through the hands of many traders, the Silk finally ended up in Rome.
10:20So, everything from Silk to Brassware to Rhubarb to Frankincense to Myrrh to small parrots and elephants.
10:29I mean, everything was traded along here.
10:34The fashion for Silk seems to have caused all sorts of problems back in the West.
10:39Emperor Tiberius forbade men to wear the cloth as it was too translucent and therefore indecent.
10:48But even a Roman Emperor couldn't stop the trade in Silk.
10:57Silk was still the most prized good.
11:00Prized because, up until the Middle Ages, the Chinese were the only people that knew how to make it.
11:05A guarded secret which made the Empire a lot of money.
11:12The Chinese had an abundance of the two natural resources essential to making silk.
11:17The white mulberry bush and a creature that fed on its leaves.
11:21The caterpillar of the silk moth, known as the silkworm.
11:30This is where it all begins.
11:33Silkworms live for three months.
11:35The larvae hatch and then for the next three weeks they do nothing but eat and eat and eat mulberry
11:41leaves.
11:41I know silk is very light, but the larvae will have to eat two full-grown trees to produce just
11:48one pound of silk.
11:50And if you listen very carefully, you can actually hear them munching.
12:04The ancient Chinese believed that the silkworms were affected by strangers.
12:09And so whenever strangers were coming, they had to be warned.
12:12But silkworms are just very sensitive to commotion and smell.
12:16In fact, they're very sensitive to our sweat glands, which you can quite understand.
12:29By the time the silkworm has reached the end of its development stage,
12:33it has ballooned to 30,000 times its original size,
12:37which is the equivalent of a seven-pound baby maturing into an adult blue whale.
12:45Once the larvae have grown to the right size,
12:48they prepare for their transformation into moths by spinning silky cocoons.
13:00When they've completed their work, they sleep for up to 20 days,
13:04after which the moth hatches out of the cocoon and flies away.
13:15The empty cocoons are then placed in boiling water to dissolve the saracen,
13:20or natural glue, which holds the cocoons together.
13:23They're then unwound, and as many as ten cocoons are wound onto one reel.
13:27Because the threads are still coated in saracen,
13:30they stick together to form one large, strong thread,
13:33which makes silk very different to hemp or cotton.
13:46So after three weeks of eating, two weeks of spinning,
13:49the silk is woven into these fantastically coloured materials.
13:54But silk is not just a beautiful fabric.
13:58It has far more important properties.
14:03I'm excited because this is the first time I've seen a silkworm cocoon.
14:07It's surrounded by a single filament of silk,
14:10which is so long that it would stretch all the way from me up to Marty in the castle.
14:16Hi, Marty! Quarter of a mile away.
14:19And back again. Half a mile long.
14:22It's the longest natural fibre in the world.
14:27The material you make from silk is wonderfully light, flexible and springy.
14:33Look at that. Isn't that fantastic?
14:35And magicians know all about it because it'll pack into tiny spaces.
14:39And just look at that little ring.
14:41I can put the end through there and then pull the entire scarf through the ring.
14:47No trouble at all.
14:49In the Second World War, people used to draw maps and escape plans on silk
14:54because then they could hide them inside tiny crevices in their clothing.
14:57So all spies always had silk handkerchiefs with secret information on.
15:04Silk also has one of the strongest natural fibres in the world.
15:08In fact, they say that weight for weight, silk is stronger than steel.
15:13I'm not sure I believe that and we're going to put it to the test.
15:15Now here we're going to have a tug of war.
15:17We've got a silk rope and a steel rope and they're all in the same line.
15:22So if one of them breaks, we'll know that the other one was stronger.
15:24This silk rope weighs 10 grams for every metre.
15:28And this wire rope weighs 10 grams for every metre.
15:32So it's a fair test.
15:33And in the middle here, I've got a force metre to see how much force we put on.
15:37And to apply the force in the most scientific way we can,
15:40we've got the Chess Valley Rugby Team.
15:43Right, chaps, are you ready?
15:44Yes!
15:45We've also got bits of black string here being held by other people
15:49so that whichever one breaks, this lot of gubbins can't hit anyone in the face, including me.
15:53I'm going to step well back with my force metre here.
15:56And right, chaps, are you ready?
15:59Take the strain.
16:01One, two, three.
16:04Oh!
16:06Come on!
16:08Come on!
16:08Take it!
16:10Take it!
16:14Take it!
16:15Take it!
16:15Come on!
16:16Take it!
16:17Come on!
16:18That's it!
16:19We've got them!
16:20Come on!
16:21Keep going!
16:22Come on!
16:22Dig in!
16:23Hang on!
16:24Hey!
16:27Look, look, it's broken.
16:29And if you look, it's 123 kilograms.
16:32That was what they were pulling.
16:33And look what they've done to the wire.
16:35It's completely broken.
16:37All strands.
16:38So, silk really is stronger than steel.
16:42Fantastic.
16:44Hey!
16:47There's just one more fascinating fact about silk.
16:50In ancient times, it was used to make nets for a game I think you'll recognise.
17:07Yes!
17:08I'm playing football with the Beijing Football School.
17:12And this game originated in 200 BC and was called Zizhou, which means foot ball.
17:21Which, in my book, means that the Chinese invented the beautiful game.
17:27It's described as a game where a ball made of leather had to be propelled with the feet, no hands.
17:34Oh, I can outrun a ten-year-old!
17:36And you won if you kicked the ball through a net made of silk.
17:42People used to play throughout the land.
17:45And the imperial troops apparently used to use it to keep themselves fit.
17:49And the emperor even joined in.
17:51Though I suspect they may have let him win.
17:53But most of the time he was more busy keeping his empire intact.
18:05And sometimes the empire threatened literally to fall apart.
18:11From earthquakes.
18:29China has always been plagued by natural disasters.
18:32Floods, sandstorms, earthquakes.
18:34In fact, in 1556, 800,000 people died in an earthquake.
18:39And in the chaos that followed, there were food riots and even political revolt.
18:43As a preventative measure, the emperor, Emperor He, asked his engineers to come up with a way of letting him
18:49know when an earthquake was happening anywhere in his empire.
18:53So that he could warn and protect his citizens.
18:56And naturally himself.
19:03Earthquakes are caused by the movement of great plates that make up the earth's surface.
19:09Where they meet, immense strain builds up along the fault lines.
19:13When the rock gives way, you get an earthquake.
19:17Obviously, if you're in the centre of an earthquake, you'll know about it.
19:20But how do you know when one is happening hundreds of miles away?
19:24Well, from the shock waves, which are sent out from the epicentre.
19:28And the ancient Chinese, in their own inimitable way, invented a machine that would detect them.
19:34A seismograph.
19:37A bit like this modern one.
19:39Let me show you the principle on which it works.
19:42Basically, a seismograph is just a pendulum.
19:45Here it is, a bit of weight on the end of a string.
19:48Now, when there's an earthquake, the earth moves.
19:51Not up and down, but from side to side.
19:56And when this moves from side to side, what happens is the weight gets left behind.
19:59So the earth moves and the weight is left behind for an instant before it catches up.
20:04Suppose you put a pen on the end of your weight.
20:07And suppose you let that pen rest on a piece of paper.
20:10Then as the whole thing moves from side to side, you get a backwards-forwards line on the paper.
20:15And if you then move the paper slowly, you get a wiggle.
20:18Up and down, up and down, which tells you when the earth has moved.
20:31Now, the ancient Chinese seismograph works on exactly the same principle, but it's very much more elegant.
20:39It's incredibly simple.
20:41What we have here is these little dragon's mouths.
20:43Yeah.
20:44And clasped in each one's jaws is a ball.
20:46Right.
20:47And when there's an earthquake, the ball falls out and tinkles into the little froggy.
20:51Show me. I don't believe it.
20:52This is my earthquake scenario.
20:54OK.
20:55Are you ready?
20:55Yeah.
20:56One, two, three.
20:57Oh, fantastic!
20:58One, two, three.
21:00Now, the seismograph was invented by a chap called Hang Cheng, who was the astronomer royal in the later Han
21:07dynasty, about the 2nd century AD.
21:09And the official historian recorded it in action.
21:12And this is what he said.
21:13On one occasion, one of the dragons let fall a ball from its mouth, though no perceptible shock could be
21:18felt.
21:19But, several days later, a messenger arrived, bringing news of an earthquake in Lung Chi.
21:24That's about 400 miles to the northwest, you understand.
21:27Certainly very sensitive.
21:28It was indeed.
21:28If it picked up an earthquake 400 miles away.
21:30But it's not mysterious, really.
21:31No?
21:31No.
21:32Well, I can show you.
21:33OK, go on.
21:33Nothing to do with dragons.
21:34Nothing to do with dragons.
21:35From the archaeology and the documentary evidence, we know these things existed.
21:38We know the outside shapes.
21:40But what we don't know is what went on inside.
21:42So, this is all inferred from what we know on the outside.
21:46Well, yes.
21:47And what it consists of, this large lump here, is a big pendulum.
21:51It's just a great big chunk of steel.
21:53OK.
21:53In there.
21:54And what happens is when there's an earthquake, the pendulum moves.
21:58Yeah.
21:59Or rather, the earth moves and the pendulum stays still.
22:02Right.
22:02If that makes sense.
22:03Yeah.
22:03And it pushes on one of these little rods here and...
22:06Right.
22:06Oh.
22:07Pushes a ball out.
22:09Pushes a ball out.
22:10Can I have another go?
22:11I'll have a go.
22:11Can you try over there somewhere?
22:13Over there.
22:14Right.
22:14I'll go around there.
22:15Try that one.
22:16Ah!
22:17Fantastic.
22:18Yes.
22:18Well, they certainly jump out.
22:20But now, hang on a sec.
22:20You've got eight dragons.
22:22Why do you need eight dragons?
22:24Right.
22:25Well, the thing is, you get extra information from this because you get directional information.
22:30OK?
22:31When it's set perfectly, well, the first time I set it, when I banged it here, the dragons
22:34on this side lost their bones.
22:36Both those two, I think, yes.
22:37Both those two fell out and that one fell out as well.
22:38And that gives you some information about the direction.
22:40You mean the earthquake was coming from over there?
22:41It was coming from over there.
22:42Wow!
22:42So, maybe that one at Hang Shik, or wherever it was, was coming from Lung Shik.
22:46Exactly.
22:46Was coming from the right direction.
22:47Exactly.
22:48That is extraordinary, isn't it?
22:49Now, these things, originally, weren't just little tabletop models.
22:53Right.
22:53They would have been huge.
22:54They were eight feet tall.
22:56Wow!
22:56Sort of up there.
22:57Bronze things, exactly.
22:58So, you can imagine, I mean, this thing's sort of a one-off and resetting it would have
23:02been a complete...
23:02A nightmare.
23:03Yeah.
23:03And, presumably, when the ball fell, you would really know about it.
23:06You would, indeed.
23:13Dinner time!
23:14Now, where would the ancient Chinese have had their dinner?
23:17Well, the answer is, right here, on the street.
23:20Because the Chinese invented fast food a thousand years before anybody else.
23:24And their food is perfect for it.
23:29Sort of perfect for it.
23:43Ox lungs, seahorses, octopuses ears, get them while they're hot.
23:49They're lovely.
24:05The ancient Chinese also invented these.
24:08But how do you make them?
24:10I haven't seen a pasta machine anywhere.
24:13It's reckoned that noodles originated from China as early as 5000 BC.
24:17Today, the most common are wheat flour noodles.
24:20Which can be made with or without eggs.
24:23Just mixed with water and salt.
24:32Again, I'm finding another job that I can't do.
24:37This middle bit is looking like noodles.
24:41I think he said, this man is a genius.
24:45He didn't say that at all.
24:47In China, making hand-pulled noodles is an art.
24:51Involving holding the stretched-out pasta in both hands
24:54and whirling it around several times.
24:56An art that's way beyond me.
25:01It's thought that noodles made it to Europe in the late 13th century
25:05after Marco Polo travelled to China and brought the recipe back to Italy.
25:09There they were called pasta and became the country's national dish.
25:18The Chinese didn't just invent fast food, but restaurants as well.
25:22Many medieval Song dynasty restaurants became so good
25:26that the inner palace of the emperor itself ordered takeaways from them.
25:34I made those.
25:38This looks like my usual TV dinner, except it's not in a plastic container
25:42because the Chinese didn't have plastic containers back then.
25:46Actually, they had something better.
25:49Tough, natural and homegrown.
25:51Lacquer.
25:52And you could call it the world's first plastic.
25:56Like rubber, lacquer comes from a tree.
25:59The vernickefleur, or lacquer tree.
26:03It's indigenous to China.
26:05It grows at high altitude and it's tapped in the summer
26:08and then left to recover for a minimum of five years.
26:12The tree's bark is cut into with a sharp knife
26:14and the sap slowly oozes out.
26:17It would take ten trees to fill a pot like this.
26:29The basis to most lacquerware is wood.
26:33You take a carved wooden bowl and you begin layering it in lacquer.
26:39It's mixed with pigments to get different colours
26:42and has to be kept at the right consistency.
26:45Exposed to air, it forms a hard coat,
26:47resistant to water and acid or alkaline corrosion.
26:53After three or four coats, you've got your lacquerware.
26:59It's good?
27:01Yeah.
27:04At this factory, they still carry on the specialised craft of lacquer inlay.
27:19As early as 2,000 years ago, objects coated with black and red lacquers appeared in China.
27:26And since then, it's been used for everything from furniture to artworks.
27:34And some of the most beautiful, exquisite and expensive antiques are lacquerware.
27:38But though these things are beautiful, they're hardly practical.
27:45And yet, Chinese lacquer is so tough, it makes remarkably resilient kitchenware as well.
27:52Take a heatproof lunchbox.
27:56Right, let's see what this stuff can handle.
27:59First, boiling water.
28:06Let's see what...
28:07Any damage?
28:10No damage.
28:11Didn't touch it.
28:12Try something a bit more violent.
28:15This flame is at least 1,000 degrees.
28:18Here we go.
28:191,000 degrees.
28:21What can it do?
28:25Well, it's not doing anything.
28:27Not marking it at all.
28:31You can melt aluminium cans with these things.
28:34So, this lacquer's pretty good.
28:38Acid.
28:38We're going to pour this stuff on it.
28:40This is concentrated sulphuric acid.
28:42Nasty stuff.
28:44And just to demonstrate that it's not just water,
28:46I've got some sugar cubes.
28:48And when I pour the sulphuric acid onto the sugar cubes,
28:50it'll drag the hydrogens and the oxygens out of the sugar,
28:54and all you'll be left with is blackened carbon and an icky, gooey mess.
28:59And hopefully, the lacquer won't take any damage.
29:03Instant caramelisation.
29:06There, let's have a look.
29:07Completely mangled them.
29:09Look at that.
29:10It's really going now.
29:12But it's not touching the lacquer.
29:20There.
29:20There.
29:20Look at that.
29:21Hasn't touched it.
29:22There's a bit of carbon left behind.
29:24Bit of gunge.
29:27Basically, totally unharmed by concentrated sulphuric acid.
29:32So, amazingly robust and decorative,
29:36lacquer is a wonderful natural material,
29:38and in the ancient world, unique to China.
29:48Chinese music is as old and as distinctive as the rest of Chinese culture.
29:53Two and a half thousand years ago,
29:55the philosopher Confucius described music as being
29:58of the highest sense, not an amusement, but a means of calming the passions,
30:04purifying thought and dispelling unrest and lust.
30:15And then there was the science of music, especially tuning.
30:31This is the Zhonghua Shirti Zhong, Zhong meaning bell, in Beijing.
30:36Now, it's a little known fact that the Chinese came up with the first tuned bells
30:39long before anyone else.
30:42They are first mentioned around 600 A.D.
30:46But they didn't only use tuned bells for making music.
30:50The Chinese based their whole system of measurement,
30:53that's length, width, weight and volume,
30:56on the musical pitches of tuned bells.
31:07You can see why standardized measurements would be needed
31:11in a country where trading was so important.
31:15Say you're in a market and you want to buy some chilis.
31:18Could I have some chilis, please?
31:20What they would do is they will fill their cup full of chilis as a measure.
31:25But if you go somewhere else and ask for some chilis,
31:27could I have some chilis?
31:32They will fill their cup with chilis.
31:34And obviously they're different, it's not a standard measure,
31:37and this could cause arguments.
31:39BUZZER
31:39BUZZER
31:41But if the cup was the same size as a standard bell...
31:45BUZZER
31:46..you get a universal measure,
31:48because all the bells across China that sound the same note
31:51are all the same size.
31:58BUZZER
31:59Strange as it may seem, the idea of bells as a measure of volume
32:03is actually recorded in ancient texts.
32:07BUZZER
32:07The writings of the Guo Yue, dating from the 3rd century AD,
32:12describe the ancient kings making this decree.
32:15BUZZER
32:16The chung vessel, or bell, is to be standard,
32:18and the magnitude of the pitch should not exceed that produced also
32:22by the string of the chun,
32:23and its weight should not exceed 120 caties.
32:27The measure of pitch, length, capacity and weight
32:30originates in this standard vessel.
32:32So there you have it, in a nutshell.
32:35Unfortunately we're a bit short of caties and we don't have a chun,
32:38but we can sort of guess what they're talking about.
32:40It's to do with standard lengths and bells.
32:43Now, bells ring particular notes,
32:49and they were obviously tuning them with reference to a stringed instrument,
32:53the chun. Even though we don't have a chun, we have a guitar,
32:56and if I just use the top string,
32:57obviously I can get different notes according to the length of the string.
33:03BUZZER
33:04And I reckon that bell, the big one here,
33:09BUZZER
33:09is vibrating at about this frequency.
33:15BUZZER
33:15BUZZER
33:16So, it seems as though they standardised their bells against strings.
33:22And according to the experts, they picked a standard weight of string,
33:26and a standard length, and a standard tension,
33:28and they sent people all around the country with these strings,
33:31and they made the bells to match the strings.
33:34Now, to me that seems inherently unlikely, because you couldn't always get a standard string.
33:39They'd vary in weights, they'd get damp, and so on.
33:42What seems to me more likely, that's without any evidence at all,
33:45is that they would cast, say, a million of these bells, send them all over the country,
33:49and they're all identical, and then match the strings to the bells.
33:52But, whatever actually happened, the fact is that they got a standard set of measures all over the country.
33:59And it may be that the measures of volume were simply these bells themselves.
34:03Take a bell, turn it upside down, fill it with rice, shake it till it's just level,
34:08and that would be your standard measure of volume, a standard amount of rice.
34:12And take the string that rings exactly the same note as the bell,
34:17and then, this is your standard unit of length.
34:21This is the unit with which you'd measure your silk, or whatever it was, your standard length.
34:27Anyway, whichever way round it was, there is now a standard set of units right across the country,
34:33and what's more, the bells right across China, from Shanghai to Beijing, ring exactly in tune.
34:44Chinese bells are made from bronze,
34:46and are just one example of the extraordinary metalworking skills that the ancient Chinese developed.
34:58They were one of the earliest people to make cast iron, certainly long before the West.
35:03They even had a nationalised cast iron industry 2,000 years ago.
35:08They used it for almost everything, suspension bridges, monuments, even 13-storey pagodas.
35:15The ancient Chinese must have been excellent metallurgists,
35:19because it's extremely difficult to keep a metal at a constant high temperature,
35:24and that is crucial for its smelting.
35:27So, how did the ancient Chinese do it?
35:30They must have had a secret weapon.
35:35It all comes down to how you pump air into the furnace to achieve and maintain that constant high temperature.
35:41And to do this, the Chinese invented a simple and ingenious device of enormous importance,
35:47the double-acting piston bellows.
35:49Marty's had a go at a working model.
35:52And, Marty, if you would pump very slowly for me.
35:55Here's the piston.
35:56As it goes up, it's pulling air in from the bottom and pushing it up here and out through holes
36:02in the top.
36:03And now go down again.
36:04As it goes down, it's pulling air in through the top and out through holes in the bottom.
36:08And either way, it goes up into this chamber and out through the pipe.
36:13OK, Marty, give it a bit of welly.
36:14I'll put the pipe in this thing of water.
36:16Let's see if it'll...
36:16Ah, look at that!
36:17And the point is, it'll blow air on both strokes.
36:21Both the upstroke and the downstroke.
36:23So it's much more efficient than single-acting bellows.
36:26OK, OK, Marty, it looks quite hard work.
36:28Although it was key to the success of the ancient Chinese iron industry,
36:32the double-acting piston bellows could also be put to a completely different use,
36:37because what works with air also works with liquid.
36:41So have a look at this thing.
36:43Marty, pull.
36:45And then push.
36:48Oh, it looks very hard work, this one.
36:50Right, so you can see that on the push stroke it's pushing liquid out there,
36:54and it's pulling it up on this side.
36:56And on the pull stroke it's pushing liquid out there and pulling it up on this side.
37:00And push again.
37:01So it pushes liquid out on both strokes.
37:04And they could put all sorts of liquid through there, not just water, but fuel.
37:09And so they made a flamethrower.
37:17We think it was fuelled with something like petrol.
37:26That's quite impressive, Marty.
37:28Yeah, flaming marvellous.
37:30Well, there's your target.
37:32On the count of three, will you give it some real welly?
37:34OK.
37:35One, two, three, go!
37:38Go!
37:53The first people to be attacked by one of those flamethrowers must have thought they were facing a fire-breathing
37:59monster.
38:00The Chinese do have all sorts of mythical monsters, including, of course, the dragon, which is everywhere in China.
38:09To the Chinese, though, they aren't monsters.
38:12They're benign creatures that embody wisdom, strength and goodness.
38:16Chinese dragons are different to Western dragons in many ways.
38:21For a start, they don't actually breathe fire.
38:23They can fly without wings, have shape-shifting abilities, and are made up of nine different animals,
38:30including the head of a camel, the eyes of a demon, the horns of a stag, the neck of a
38:37snake.
38:37Even the 117 scales that cover its body are borrowed from a carp.
38:43Dragon dancing has a long history, and so does dragon flying.
38:47Not with wings, but at the end of a string.
38:56The Chinese history of kite-making goes back over a thousand years.
39:00But not just simple flag kites.
39:03Look at this stunning array, from owls to turtles.
39:06I just have to get one.
39:09There you go.
39:10One.
39:13But you can't guess what I'm going to do.
39:15Yes, I'm going to take my dragonfly for a flight.
39:18I haven't flown a kite since I was about 12 years old.
39:22I wasn't very good then, and I suspect I'm going to be worse now.
39:26There doesn't seem to be much wind.
39:31In China, kite-flying is a national pastime.
39:34And originally, kites were used to ward off evil spirits.
39:39And also, the higher your kite flies, the luckier you are.
39:43So, let's see how lucky I'm going to be today.
39:47OK, go!
39:48Let's go!
39:49OK, come on.
39:53Ah!
40:06Kites shaped like birds are particularly popular in China, and their use is recorded as early as the 4th century
40:13BC.
40:14They didn't reach Europe until nearly 2,000 years later.
40:24Kites had their military uses as well.
40:28In 200 BC, a general used a kite to measure the height of the walls of a fortress he was
40:35going to storm.
40:36You could also attach propaganda material to your kite, and at the right moment, cut the strings.
40:42The messages would drop wherever you wanted.
40:52Another general tied bamboo poles to the kite, so it made howling noises in the night over an enemy camp.
40:58And then he sent in his own spies to tell the soldiers that it was the voices of their ancestors
41:04warning of an impending defeat.
41:08But they went one better.
41:18The Chinese used their kites for all sorts of things.
41:21Not just frightening the enemy, but actually spying on them.
41:24Because they found that they could sling a basket under one or even several kites,
41:27and send a person up to look down behind the enemy lines and report their positions.
41:35It's clear from the design of their ancient kites, and the way they used them,
41:39that the early Chinese had understood the principles of aerodynamics.
41:43In other words, they knew that an angled surface, pulled or moving through a stream of air,
41:49will generate lift and flying.
41:56And there's even evidence in some early writings that a Chinaman was the first person to fly with wings.
42:04In about the middle of the 5th century AD, the first emperor of Northern Chi was a rather unpleasant man
42:12called Gao Yong.
42:15He converted to Buddhism, and as part of his conversion, he had to set free all living things.
42:21He set birds free from their cages.
42:25And as he saw them fly, he had a really evil thought.
42:30He could set his prisoners free and make them fly like birds.
42:37He summoned the prisoners to him, gave each one a set of rather crude bamboo wings,
42:44told him to climb to a high tower and jump off.
42:49That's a great deal.
42:53That's enough.
42:57That's enough.
43:02That's enough.
43:05That's enough.
43:07That's enough.
43:16Go back to their house.
43:19I have to go back to myально-口 problem.
43:19That was enough.
43:32In two years, 200 prisoners died, which he thought was most amusing.
43:39But the legend suggests the Chinese began to learn something about aeronautics
43:44and eventually one man, Prince Yuan Huang Tou, managed actually to fly.
43:50Well, his wings must have been a lot better than Marty's
43:53and I really would not recommend trying this at home.
43:56But perhaps he was lucky.
43:57He probably had up currents as well, good healthy drafts of air going upwards.
44:02But he apparently glided for two miles and survived.
44:08And so it came to be that in the middle of the 5th century AD,
44:12Prince Yuan Huang Tou invented the hang glider.
44:24It's no coincidence that they used bamboo for wings.
44:28A fifth of the world's supply grows in China
44:30and it has always played a huge part in everyday life.
44:34Most things have been made with bamboo.
44:37Buildings, fences, musical instruments, furniture, even paper.
44:43In the very first Chinese books, characters were written on slices of bamboo.
44:49But later, bamboo fibre became one of the ingredients of fine quality paper.
44:54Paper was one of the most important inventions ever to have come out of China.
45:02The first paper seems to have been made about 100 AD,
45:07when they left bamboo and other vegetable pulp,
45:10cabbage, that sort of thing, lying out in the sun.
45:18The word paper comes from the word papyrus.
45:21But the Chinese paper was nothing like the Egyptian stuff,
45:24the stuff they made from reeds and painted pictures on.
45:27The Chinese made their paper from a whole variety of different pulps,
45:31from bamboo, from hemp and, of course, from rice.
45:39They even invented lavatory paper.
45:42And it was massive. It was this size.
45:45In 1393, for the imperial court for one year,
45:49they made 720,000 sheets this size.
45:53In modern terms, that's more than 3,000 rolls.
46:01Mind you, this is about the right size for a newspaper.
46:09If you look at any modern Chinese newspaper,
46:12you start to realise how different our languages are.
46:14Each character refers to a sign as opposed to a sound,
46:17and there are over 40,000 of them,
46:19which is extremely difficult to learn off by heart,
46:22which is why Tzu Zichung, a man I'm about to meet,
46:25is so respected.
46:32The Chinese are renowned for their calligraphy,
46:35and Tzu Zichung is a master.
46:38His work sells for more than 600 pounds per square metre.
46:55Somehow, I don't think my attempts are going to attract those kinds of prices.
47:15In China, they've been writing things down for around 6,000 years,
47:19but not in the way we know it.
47:21They've never had an alphabet like ours, but have always written in pictograms,
47:26using pictorial symbols rather than letters.
47:29In China, calligraphy is seen as one of the three most important art forms,
47:34along with poetry and painting.
47:47All three art forms were usually combined,
47:50as in these typical Chinese wall hangings,
47:53where painted images are decorated with calligraphy poems running down one side.
47:58The strokes that make up each character have to be written in the correct sequence.
48:03With more than 40,000 symbols in the language,
48:06it's no wonder it takes years of practice to become this good.
48:13Beautiful as these are,
48:15they're hardly practical if you're trying to deliver a message or a story to the masses.
48:20I mean, imagine how long it would take him to write one of Confucius' sayings.
48:28But the Chinese came up with a novel idea for mass-producing print.
48:32By simply taking blocks of wood and carving their characters into them,
48:36they invented block printing.
48:41Buddhist monks were the first to use the block print to spread their sutras,
48:45their religious texts, among the believers.
48:48The oldest dated block printed book is the Buddhist Diamond Sutra from the year 868.
48:54And in the next century, they block printed the Confucian classics,
48:58carving entire pages of script onto each block.
49:09And not just script, but pictures as well, which led to...
49:15Paper money.
49:17This, to us, rather obvious use for paper was invented by private businessmen who were having trouble with robbers along
49:24their trade routes.
49:27The idea was to give the merchants a piece of paper with a number printed on it, a value.
49:32They could then take this as a bond from the capital out into the provinces and exchange it for goods
49:39or for gold, whatever they needed.
49:41But if they got robbed along the way, all the highwaymen got was a piece of paper.
49:49This kind of bank draft system held for a couple of hundred years, but then, in the 11th century,
49:55the imperial workshops started printing actual bank notes in various denominations.
50:02It's quite extraordinary how long it took for many Chinese inventions to come to us.
50:07In Western Europe, we didn't begin printing paper money until the 17th century.
50:14There's one Chinese use of paper, though, that we never adopted.
50:22The Chinese made fantastically tough paper armour, using a sort of pulp of hemp fibres on a silk backing.
50:29And they equipped all the troops with it.
50:31And they claim, they claim that this was arrow-proof.
50:33I really don't like where this is going, Adam.
50:36Well, you've got the armour, I've got the arrow, and I think we ought to test it out, don't you?
50:40Back to back.
50:40What do you want?
50:41Back to back.
50:42Eight paces, if you would, starting now.
50:44One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
50:51Turn!
50:55Are you ready?
50:58Take this.
50:59Oh, what happened to that one?
51:01Well, of course, in the interest of safety, we spared, Marty.
51:05Hmm.
51:07And another.
51:19Well, although I found it hard to believe, when I finally hit the target,
51:24I proved that paper armour, made in the ancient Chinese way, is indeed really strong.
51:30It will stop an arrow.
51:34Don't think papier-mâché will do it, though.
51:36You could get badly hurt.
51:40But there are some Chinese weapons that paper armour wouldn't stand a chance against.
51:53This is the world-famous Beijing fireworks factory, which produces one of China's most celebrated exports.
52:02The Chinese have been making fireworks for over a thousand years, and they're still exploiting a special formula that was
52:09discovered by accident.
52:11In the ninth century, the emperor's alchemists mixed saltpeter, sulfur, and carbon, in an effort to find the elixir of
52:20eternal life.
52:21They heated it, and they blew up their faces, their hands, and they burnt down their house.
52:26They discovered gunpowder.
52:31Hence, these ladies are working with only four kilos of gunpowder in very non-flammable rooms.
52:38Those alchemists soon realised that they got onto something exciting, if dangerous, and carried on experimenting.
52:45They put gunpowder into bamboo sticks and threw them into a fire, and invented the first firecracker.
52:54They may not have bestowed eternal life, but ever since, Chinese firecrackers have been used in ceremonies to ward off
53:01evil spirits.
53:04Over the next couple of hundred years, the Chinese developed a whole array of fireworks.
53:09Rockets, catherine wheels, you name it, they had it.
53:12And the techniques haven't changed much since.
53:15And this rather wonderful, old-fashioned bomb look-alike is a modern-day firework.
53:21It's ironic when you think that a black powder discovered in the search for the secret of eternal life has
53:28killed untold millions.
53:35This is gunpowder.
53:37It's a mixture of charcoal, sulphur, and potassium nitrate, which is also called saltpeta or nitre.
53:44And, in fact, most of this mixture is potassium nitrate.
53:48That's what supplies the oxygen and makes it burn fast.
53:51Now, Marty's going to light it at this end, and it'll go along the trail and set fire to this
53:55little mountain of black powder there.
53:58It's not contained, so this will just burn very quickly.
54:01OK, Marty, got your fuse lit?
54:03I'm stepping back.
54:05You light the trail.
54:09Wow!
54:14You see, it burns very fast, but there's no explosion, no bang.
54:19But if you contain that gunpowder within some container, then when it generates all that hot gas, it'll force its
54:25way out, and that's when you get an explosion.
54:27Now, in this little package, we've got about half as much black powder as there was in that heap, but
54:32it's contained, only by tape, but it's held in.
54:35Let's see what happens when we like this.
54:36In you come, Marty.
54:38I'm going well back.
54:47Wow!
54:49So, you see, just by containing that gunpowder, you build up tremendous pressure and, therefore, an explosion.
54:57And once the Chinese had learnt that trick, they started using their gunpowder in warfare.
55:06Gunpowder made its military debut just over 1,000 years ago, when the Song Dynasty overthrew the Southern Tang Dynasty
55:13in 975 AD.
55:15The various bombs that the Chinese created were mainly hurled by a great big launching engine.
55:26Fire!
55:27And here we have our own version and a cardboard village to act as target.
55:34Now, then, we've got three different sorts of bombs to rain on this village.
55:39First, we've just got exploding bombs.
55:41Second, we've got poison gas bombs.
55:43And thirdly, we've got incendiaries.
55:46And I think, probably, I think we should start with an exploding bomb.
55:50Marty, can you fire over an exploding bomb?
56:11The Chinese army may have been the first to use chemical weapons.
56:17Right, are you ready for poison gas, Marty?
56:20We're getting there, yeah?
56:22Fire!
56:24Wow, look at that.
56:26There it goes.
56:26There it goes.
56:29Oh!
56:32Oh!
56:33Oh!
56:34Key deadly ingredients would have included monkshood, wolfsbane, root of Chinese spurge, a pretty but very poisonous flower, and arsenic.
56:45OK, OK, now, an incendiary, if you would.
56:50This bomb is equipped with caltrops, hooks, which would ensure that the bomb attached itself to its target and made
56:56for maximum damage.
56:58It would also send out iron splinters in all directions, another fiendish invention from the Chinese military engineers.
57:18That's really quite fierce.
57:21Well, those bombs did a nasty lot of damage.
57:25And actually, I'm not too keen on warfare.
57:27I'd much rather concentrate on more entertaining uses of gunpowder.
57:31So, bring on the darkness of the night.
57:42Let's finish with the invention which, perhaps more than any other, symbolises the energy and variety of this remarkable civilisation.
57:51For me, fireworks represent the explosive creativity that characterised the people of ancient China.
58:03To receive a free Open University leaflet, which accompanies this series, and details of Open University programmes, telephone 0870 900
58:120352, or go to bbc.co.uk slash history.
58:22Next time, we meet the Aztec, the Maya and the Inca, the people of the New World lived in a
58:28land of riches.
58:29From rubber to gold, medicines to food, jungle warfare to suspension bridges, the meeting of two worlds changed both forever.