TheStoryof China（1） Look For Ancestors
I. Script
China is the oldest nation on earth .For thousands of years it‘s rulers believed their task was to keep human society in balance with the eternal order of the universe .The emperor who achieved that harmony would receive the mandate of heaven ,blessed by the ancestors .But in the late 19th century ,the collision with the West shook China to its core .In midwinter 1899,the emperor came here to the Altar of Heaven in Beijing to ask the ancestors for support .In China‘s hour of crisis ,as the empire crumbled in the face of rebellion and foreign armies .It was the last time the ritual was performed .Here ,just before dawn on the winter solstice ,the emperor prostrated himself before the powers of the universe .He performed rituals that they believed went back 5,000 years to the Yellow Emperor ,the mythical first founder of China .He made a report to the ancestors about the state of the empire .But that winter of 1899,China faced disaster .The following year 1900,China was plunged into catastrophe with rebellion ,flood and famine ,foreign aggression, and the new century saw swiftly the fall of the Empire ,short-lived republic ,Communist revolution and then the insane madness of the Cultural Revolution .But despite the tragedies of the 20th century ,the Chinese people have come through .Today China is writing its own story once more under a new mandate .So long the greatest civilization on earth ,China is rising again .It‘s a great time to be looking at the events which have shaped the history of China and the ideals which have made its culture so distinctive and so brilliant for so long.
THE STORY OF CHINA ANCESTORS
Every year in spring millions of Chinese people set off on the journey home .It‘s the time of the Qingming Festival ,the festival of light ,when ,since ancient times ,the Chinese have honoured the ancestors .I‘m heading down to the city of Wuxi for a very special occasion a family reunion .For the last 30 years ,Chinese people have grown up in a consumer society .After the break with Communism ,China has been on a headlong rush into the future .But there‘s a deeper China ,for as new freedoms
beckon ,the people themselves are reaching back to the things that have mattered most to them in their history .And for the Chinese people ,identity begins with the family .Sometimes the new proves less enticing than was first thought and the old far more durable than anyone had ever imagined.
This is the Qin family of Wuxi. WUXI JIANGSU
It‘s dawn on the day of ancestors ,what the Chinese call Tomb-Sweeping Day .And the Qin family gather at the grave of their founding ancestor ,Qin Guan ,a poet who lived 1,000 years ago .They have come from all over China and further afield to make their own report to the ancestors .To tell them how the family is doing and how the ancestors and their values still live on in us .As the ancients used to say ,repaying our roots .Amazing scene ,isn‘t it ?It recalls the whole of Chinese history over the last 100 years ,wars ,revolutions ,families broken up and 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 again .These rituals were banned in the Communist era and the grave was lost after the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.But when the revolutionary time drew to a close .Frank Ching and his sister came searching for the tomb .Back in 1982,when I found that gravestone none of these things existed .When I first sought it out I was like a blank slate .I didn‘t know what existed .It‘s really very exciting that this is happening .I certainly never expected anything like this to happen when I started my own journey of discovery.
More attention is now paid to family values and culture this was interrupted by the cultural revolution .So now we need to pick it up again .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 .Family lays the foundation of everything .Prosperity derives from a harmonious family .The whole nation depends on the well being of the family .Our family has 1000 years of history .In that time
huge changes have taken place .But now people are beginning to ask themselves what are my roots?
I‘m going to regret this .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 past goes back thousands of years .China is the oldest continuous stage on earth .There are no historical texts that describe its birth but later muths and traditions take us to the Yellow River plain that gave China its name ,Zhonggou ,the middle land .And here you can still reach back to those beginnings .This is a rural fair at an ancient temple ,closed down in the Communist era .I‘m at a great farmers festival in the plain of the Yellow River with a million people all around me.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 have treasured the tales and handed them down .How much ?Three ?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 for 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 .A long time ago the sky fell and the earth quaked ,only Nuwa and her brother Fuxi survived .They bit their fingers and mixed their blood with mud and made primitive humans out of it .Thanks to Fuxi and Nuwa everybody shares the same ancestors .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 see themselves as Han Chinese ,part of the biggest tribe in the world .The myths also tell us about the origins of the Chinese state by the banks of the Yellow River .All four of the great old world civilizations began on rivers ,the Nile ,the Euphrates ,the Indus and the Yellow River .China alone has come down until today .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 .And so the beginnings of Chinese history ,the control of the river and its environment lay at the very heart of political power .And the tale of the king who tamed the mighty Yellow River and claimed the right to rule the hundreds of tribes along its banks became a myth still told by today‘s storytellers .King Yu had two good helpers :Yellow Dragon and Black Turtle .The dragon had a very long tail and the turtle was very strong .To divert the flood the dragon dragged his tail and opened a channel for the water .When King Yu needed to build a dam ,the turtle pushed huge amounts of mud into position .King Yu worked so hard to control the river that he didn‘t return home for 13 years !Look at this .This is a Ming Dynasty temple that was built in the 1520s,but on a very ,very ancient terrace .And that is King Yu .Historians have always thought the tale of King Yu was just a myth ,but the recent find of a bronze bowl nearly 3,000 years old engraved with his story proves the tale goes back to the Bonze Age .The legend says that King Yu was the founder of China‘s first dynasty 4,000 years ago .They were called the Xia and they came from the middle plain of the middle land ,here in Henan .And at the village of Erlitou ,traditions survived until modern times that this had been the seat of China‘s first rulers .The most ancient site in the world ?Erlitou ,yes Erlitou .Incredible !Ancient Greece ,ancient Iraq ,ancient Egypt .Wherever you look ,some memory survives on site .Here ,towns first emerged out of China‘s myriad Stone Age villages .This is the bunal site of Huangdi .It‘s thousands of years old .Huangdi ,the Yellow Emperor ,the original Emperor of China .North of the River Luo there was an ancient village .This area was excavated ,the things they dug out are over there .Under these wheat fields the archaeologists excavated a settlement which had thousands of people and a huge walled enclosure .The white house ,the taller one is Palace No.4.Inside it were pillared halls ,palaces from different periods between 2000 and 1500 BC .They stood on
rammed earth platforms ,one of them with a triple gate ,the pattern of all later Chinese royal cities .The Xia are still a mystery .But here at Erlitou ,archaeologists have found tantalizing clues ,pottery ,bronze casting ,and most intriguing of all ,a burial with a sceptre made of 2,000 pieces of turquoise in the shape of a dragon ,the symbol of royalty all the way through Chinese civilization .Whether the Xia were China‘s first dynasty and whether this was their capital is still not known and that‘s because we lack the key evidence ,writing .Do you think that this was the capital of the Xia or what do you think ?Difficult questions .Most historians believe the Xia existed .We are 99% sure of that ,but without writing we can‘t prove it .If it this was the capital of the Xia ,for the Chinese ,myth would become history for they would have found the root of the Chinese state .As it is ,though ,we now have to leap forward to around 1200 BC to find China‘s first historical rulers ,the Shang Dynasty .And we know about the Shang because they have 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,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 bolied 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 .At Anyang ,Chinese archaeologists made their greatest discovery .Huge tombs of the last Shang kings with