Ahead of his new six-part series which starts on BBC2 on Thursday, The Story of China, in which he looks at the stories, people and landscapes that have helped create China's distinctive character and genius over four thousand years, historian Michael Wood reveals the fascinating gems he discovered whilst filming it....
How China invented football: Historian Michael Wood reveals the fascinating gems he discovered making a new series on the world's oldest state
New show tells tale of the world's oldest and largest state from Bronze Age to today
Chinese invented 'Kick Ball' 2,000 years ago, dribbling a leather ball
The Story Of China starts on Thursday at 9pm on BBC2
By Michael Wood
15 January 2016
Daily Mail
Last year I stayed in a charming B&B in the old walled town of Huizhou in China. Chatting with my host over freshly brewed coffee, she mentioned her daughter had been on holiday in Europe and had made a pilgrimage to London.
'You see, she adores Shirrock,' she said. For a moment I looked blank but then the penny dropped - Sherlock! It's said 98 million Chinese have watched Benedict Cumberbatch online but maybe that shouldn't be such a surprise: after all the Chinese are the biggest tourists in the world now. And as I learned on University Challenge over Christmas, the most common surname at Eton these days is Li!
Endlessly surprising and always unpredictable, China is a constant source of fascination. So it's a great time to look at what has made its civilisation so distinctive, and so brilliant, for so long. Time, too, to ask whether after 300 years of the ascendancy of the West, China - for long periods of history the greatest civilisation on Earth - is simply returning to its rightful place? Those are the questions we set out to answer in The Story Of China, telling the tale of the world's oldest state from the Bronze Age to today.
Michael Wood with Zhao family members at their fortified village, Fujian province, who keep the traditions of their ancestors alive
A Song Dynasty (960-1279) painting of children playing cuju, an early version of football
In a sense it's a sequel to our Story Of India. I have always tried to make these series entertaining and accessible. Challenging as it's been to make this one, both physically and intellectually, the result I hope has something for everyone.
First of all it's about the Chinese people themselves, the real heroes of the story. They're sometimes seen as difficult to get to know, but when I first travelled around China in the 1980s what most struck me was their friendliness and hospitality; their feeling for 'the warmth of home'. I wanted to give a sense of that in the films.
So we start not with archaeology but a family celebration - the Qingming festival, when Chinese families go home to commemorate their ancestors. Our week in Wuxi with the Ching family, when 300 members gathered to remember their ancestor who died in 1049, was a perfect beginning. The highlight was the spine-tingling dawn ritual of 'Tomb Sweeping Day' when everyone took flowers to the ancestral grave and the oldest family member made a report to the dead.
He told them how the family was doing, and how 'your values still live on in us'. This moving scene was followed by a raucous family banquet with special festival hooch to toast family and friends. It was all such fun, but with a serious point behind it. Namely that in China the family comes first - and behind them is always the presence of the ancestors.
We filmed at a Chinese Premier League match to talk about the Chinese invention of 'Kick Ball': 2,000 years ago the Chinese played games where you dribbled a leather ball into a net, but in the Song Dynasty they had clubs, rules, fans, stars and even music at half-time
In the series you will also see China's beauty: landscapes from the Silk Road deserts to the snow-capped Pamir Mountains; from the plains of the Yellow River to the subtropical southern coasts. We travelled on the Grand Canal, the world's longest artificial waterway, which links Beijing with the Yangtze and the Yellow River.
We even stayed at the last Maoist commune, where they refused to go capitalist in the 80s and still sing The East Is Red every morning!
To British audiences China is much less familiar than India, with which we have so many links. Here there are so many dynasties, strange names and an unfamiliar script, so we found it helped to stick to human stories. Of course we told the tales of some of the great emperors: take the merciless first emperor Qin Shi Huangdi who burned all books but his own and had Confucian scholars buried alive, and the founder of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, a beggar who became one of China's greatest rulers.
But we also met families who have kept their traditions alive, telling us for example how their ancestors made their fortune under the Ming, or how the village was burned down during the Taiping Rebellion, the worst war of the 19th century in which 20 million people died.
The Chinese people were our witnesses, then, and great they were too. There are not many places where you can turn up in a scruffy backstreet and the first people you meet can tell you a tenth-century legend! In one of the most amazing scenes, at a huge temple fair in Henan, a group of women pilgrims told us of the goddess Nu Wa who made the first people out of the yellow mud of the Yellow River - 'and with mud she had left over she made dogs and chickens'.
Michael pictured with dancing ladies by the city wall in Kaifeng
The historian with Korean scholars at the Confucian cemetery in Qufu
And as we travelled we saw that so many continuities in Chinese culture have not been broken, despite the ravages of the 20th century. People pulled out treasured documents, paintings or inscriptions saved from Mao's Red Guards or from even earlier upheavals.
They have never lost their social rituals either, such as the love of eating together (not for nothing is A Bite Of China one of the country's biggest TV hits, just like The Great British Bake Off here). China produced the world's first great cuisine and had the first restaurant culture during the Song Dynasty (960-1279) in Kaifeng. There we took an 11th-century cookbook to a chef who did me a vegetarian version of a recipe lovingly recorded by an ancient Chinese Jamie Oliver.
The Song Dynasty was also the age of Chinese inventions. I had a go in the wheelhouse of a 45ft-high working replica of an 11th-century astronomical clock made by the Song Dynasty's Leonardo da Vinci - Su Song. Steel, gunpowder, the magnetic compass - the list of Chinese inventions is as long as your arm; but some are less well known.
In the series you will also see China's beauty, pictured here tea pickers surrounded by greenery
For example we filmed at a Chinese Premier League match to talk about the Chinese invention of 'Kick Ball': 2,000 years ago the Chinese played games where you dribbled a leather ball into a net, but in the Song Dynasty they had clubs, rules, fans, stars and even music at half-time. In a Confucian society, though, there was no abusing the referee!
But this is also a tale in which the British play a special part. Our first embassy to China went to Beijing in 1793 but the key moment came in 1842 when the Chinese were defeated by the British in the First Opium War.
This resulted in the establishment of Hong Kong as a British territory and Shanghai as a treaty port for foreign trade, and bitter as this was to the Chinese it changed history. Some historians now see the British as a catalyst for modern China, so it was deeply symbolic when President Xi rode with the Queen in a carriage down the Mall last autumn; our destinies intertwined in a way that could never have been foretold two centuries ago. But then history, as the Chinese say, is always a mirror.
The Story Of China starts on Thursday at 9pm on BBC2.
Read more: How China invented football: Historian Michael Wood reveals the fascinating gems he discovered making a new series on the world's oldest state* | Daily Mail Online
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
How China invented football: Historian Michael Wood reveals the fascinating gems he discovered making a new series on the world's oldest state
New show tells tale of the world's oldest and largest state from Bronze Age to today
Chinese invented 'Kick Ball' 2,000 years ago, dribbling a leather ball
The Story Of China starts on Thursday at 9pm on BBC2
By Michael Wood
15 January 2016
Daily Mail
Last year I stayed in a charming B&B in the old walled town of Huizhou in China. Chatting with my host over freshly brewed coffee, she mentioned her daughter had been on holiday in Europe and had made a pilgrimage to London.
'You see, she adores Shirrock,' she said. For a moment I looked blank but then the penny dropped - Sherlock! It's said 98 million Chinese have watched Benedict Cumberbatch online but maybe that shouldn't be such a surprise: after all the Chinese are the biggest tourists in the world now. And as I learned on University Challenge over Christmas, the most common surname at Eton these days is Li!
Endlessly surprising and always unpredictable, China is a constant source of fascination. So it's a great time to look at what has made its civilisation so distinctive, and so brilliant, for so long. Time, too, to ask whether after 300 years of the ascendancy of the West, China - for long periods of history the greatest civilisation on Earth - is simply returning to its rightful place? Those are the questions we set out to answer in The Story Of China, telling the tale of the world's oldest state from the Bronze Age to today.
Michael Wood with Zhao family members at their fortified village, Fujian province, who keep the traditions of their ancestors alive
A Song Dynasty (960-1279) painting of children playing cuju, an early version of football
In a sense it's a sequel to our Story Of India. I have always tried to make these series entertaining and accessible. Challenging as it's been to make this one, both physically and intellectually, the result I hope has something for everyone.
First of all it's about the Chinese people themselves, the real heroes of the story. They're sometimes seen as difficult to get to know, but when I first travelled around China in the 1980s what most struck me was their friendliness and hospitality; their feeling for 'the warmth of home'. I wanted to give a sense of that in the films.
So we start not with archaeology but a family celebration - the Qingming festival, when Chinese families go home to commemorate their ancestors. Our week in Wuxi with the Ching family, when 300 members gathered to remember their ancestor who died in 1049, was a perfect beginning. The highlight was the spine-tingling dawn ritual of 'Tomb Sweeping Day' when everyone took flowers to the ancestral grave and the oldest family member made a report to the dead.
He told them how the family was doing, and how 'your values still live on in us'. This moving scene was followed by a raucous family banquet with special festival hooch to toast family and friends. It was all such fun, but with a serious point behind it. Namely that in China the family comes first - and behind them is always the presence of the ancestors.
We filmed at a Chinese Premier League match to talk about the Chinese invention of 'Kick Ball': 2,000 years ago the Chinese played games where you dribbled a leather ball into a net, but in the Song Dynasty they had clubs, rules, fans, stars and even music at half-time
In the series you will also see China's beauty: landscapes from the Silk Road deserts to the snow-capped Pamir Mountains; from the plains of the Yellow River to the subtropical southern coasts. We travelled on the Grand Canal, the world's longest artificial waterway, which links Beijing with the Yangtze and the Yellow River.
We even stayed at the last Maoist commune, where they refused to go capitalist in the 80s and still sing The East Is Red every morning!
To British audiences China is much less familiar than India, with which we have so many links. Here there are so many dynasties, strange names and an unfamiliar script, so we found it helped to stick to human stories. Of course we told the tales of some of the great emperors: take the merciless first emperor Qin Shi Huangdi who burned all books but his own and had Confucian scholars buried alive, and the founder of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, a beggar who became one of China's greatest rulers.
But we also met families who have kept their traditions alive, telling us for example how their ancestors made their fortune under the Ming, or how the village was burned down during the Taiping Rebellion, the worst war of the 19th century in which 20 million people died.
The Chinese people were our witnesses, then, and great they were too. There are not many places where you can turn up in a scruffy backstreet and the first people you meet can tell you a tenth-century legend! In one of the most amazing scenes, at a huge temple fair in Henan, a group of women pilgrims told us of the goddess Nu Wa who made the first people out of the yellow mud of the Yellow River - 'and with mud she had left over she made dogs and chickens'.
Michael pictured with dancing ladies by the city wall in Kaifeng
The historian with Korean scholars at the Confucian cemetery in Qufu
And as we travelled we saw that so many continuities in Chinese culture have not been broken, despite the ravages of the 20th century. People pulled out treasured documents, paintings or inscriptions saved from Mao's Red Guards or from even earlier upheavals.
They have never lost their social rituals either, such as the love of eating together (not for nothing is A Bite Of China one of the country's biggest TV hits, just like The Great British Bake Off here). China produced the world's first great cuisine and had the first restaurant culture during the Song Dynasty (960-1279) in Kaifeng. There we took an 11th-century cookbook to a chef who did me a vegetarian version of a recipe lovingly recorded by an ancient Chinese Jamie Oliver.
The Song Dynasty was also the age of Chinese inventions. I had a go in the wheelhouse of a 45ft-high working replica of an 11th-century astronomical clock made by the Song Dynasty's Leonardo da Vinci - Su Song. Steel, gunpowder, the magnetic compass - the list of Chinese inventions is as long as your arm; but some are less well known.
In the series you will also see China's beauty, pictured here tea pickers surrounded by greenery
For example we filmed at a Chinese Premier League match to talk about the Chinese invention of 'Kick Ball': 2,000 years ago the Chinese played games where you dribbled a leather ball into a net, but in the Song Dynasty they had clubs, rules, fans, stars and even music at half-time. In a Confucian society, though, there was no abusing the referee!
But this is also a tale in which the British play a special part. Our first embassy to China went to Beijing in 1793 but the key moment came in 1842 when the Chinese were defeated by the British in the First Opium War.
This resulted in the establishment of Hong Kong as a British territory and Shanghai as a treaty port for foreign trade, and bitter as this was to the Chinese it changed history. Some historians now see the British as a catalyst for modern China, so it was deeply symbolic when President Xi rode with the Queen in a carriage down the Mall last autumn; our destinies intertwined in a way that could never have been foretold two centuries ago. But then history, as the Chinese say, is always a mirror.
The Story Of China starts on Thursday at 9pm on BBC2.
Read more: How China invented football: Historian Michael Wood reveals the fascinating gems he discovered making a new series on the world's oldest state* | Daily Mail Online
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
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