- [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 - [Michael Voiceover] China, a global superpower.

Eyes set on the future, its arrival on the world stage greeted like the appearance of a new planet.

But it's not the first time.

In the 7th century, when Europe was in its Dark Age, Tang Dynasty China become the greatest power on earth and would be for a 1,000 years, til the rise of the West.

What's happening now has happened before.

- I'm in Xi'an, the capital of the Tang, which 1,300 years ago was the greatest and most cosmopolitan city on Earth.

- [Michael Voiceover] And what made it great was not only its economic and cultural power, its sense of its own identity, but its openness to other cultures.

- Standing over the square the statue of one of the heroes of that time, one of the great figures in the history of civilization, the Buddhist monk, Xuanzang, who brought the wisdom of India back here to China.

- [Michael Voiceover] This is a tale of a time which even now the Chinese see as a golden age.

In the story of China we've reached the Tang Dynasty (dynamic music) Almost 1,000 years had passed since the brutal first emperor united China.

But now the Chinese began to find a balance between authoritarian rule and the humanistic ideals of their culture.

- It's often said that in history China has been a closed civilization, introverted, cutting itself off from the world.

And there have been times when it's looked that way, but since prehistory China has never been isolated and has thrived on contact.

And the Tang Dynasty was a great age of international connection.

That time vast numbers of foreign peoples poured into China with exotic goods, foods, and ideas, and even new religions, and the great pathway of exchange was the Silk Road.

- [Michael Voiceover] We call it the Silk Road today but it wasn't really one road but a series of land routes connecting China with the Mediterranean and India.

And the Silk Road turned China for the first time into a global civilization.

Along it, just as today, were many cultures and peoples, different religions, different ways of seeing the world.

- Ah, thank you, thank you so much.

With a magic of the Silk Road, magic of central Asia.

There's Han Chinese, there's Uighurs everywhere.

There's a guy from Kurgystan.

You can tell by his hat.

Just like it would have been in ancient times, you would have seen Arabs and Persians, probably Indians along with the Han Chinese on this very edge of, you know, Tang Dynasty China.

- [Michael Voiceover] So you could say this is the time when East and West first start to get to know each other.

The Romans had sent occasional embassies to China but now Europe and Asia begin to engage and interact, not only with trade, but ideas.

Here along the Silk Road you can see some of the routes of today's international world.

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

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] But in history when two civilizations first come into contact, it's not always peaceful and not always enriching.

To really open up to another culture needs patience and humility, to be willing to shed your own preconceptions.

And in the 7th century the Chinese were confident enough to do that.

And this story of contact between civilizations begins back before the Tang, at the Chinese end of the Silk Road in the delightful old city of Luoyang.

- Luoyang was the ancient capital of the Zhou Dynasty for 500 years and for those centuries its poets and scholars have praised it as a place of great culture.

It was the real heart of China, they said, in the middle of the middle plain of the middle kingdom - [Michael Voiceover] And this is not just a story about empires and economies, but about what it is to be civilized.

- Ni hao, hello.

- [Michael Voiceover] It's about a new spirit in Chinese culture.

- Look at this magic world, Aladdin's cave.

- [Michael Voiceover] A spirit that will give birth to the greatest age of Chinese poetry.

- Ni hao, ni hao.

- [Michael Voiceover] A time when poetry came out of the court into the streets, a witness to the times, expressing the human condition as never before.

(man speaking foreign language) - Ah, so Du Mu, famous poem of the Tang Dynasty.

- [Michael Voiceover] Knowing the insecurity of human life as the Chinese always have.

- This floating life is just like the water under the ice, flowing eastwards day and night and no one notices.

Isn't that great?

So it's a place rich in culture, rich in trade and merchants, and interested in foreigners.

- [Michael Voiceover] And if you want to see just how interested, go a few miles outside of Luoyang, where the most famous Indian of all time is commemorated, the Buddha, the foreigner who most fascinated the Chinese through the whole of their history.

The adoption of this Indian religion would leave its mark on the very DNA of Chinese civilization.

- What better symbol is there of the impact of Buddhism on Tang Dynasty China, indeed a symbol of the impact of the exchange of ideas in civilizations, than this great cliff pockmarked with devotion, and in the middle that huge image of the Buddha himself whose message has been carried along what the Chinese called the road carrying the jewel of truth.

- [Michael Voiceover] The Buddha's message on one level was very simple.

He taught four noble truths, that we humans suffer, that suffering is caused by desire, and that there is a cure.

Through enlightenment we can free ourselves.

Now the Chinese had long had their own ethical system of Confucius, they had the old mystical ideas of Daoism, but what Buddhism offered was a spiritual and ritual path based on personal conscience and compassion.

And how China took Buddhism to its own heart is one of the great stories in history, a series of adventures that generations of storytellers have turned into China's favorite cycle of legends and fairy tales.

(soft music) (woman speaking foreign language) - [Translator Voiceover] A long time ago the emperor had a dream in which a strange man appeared to him.

Now this man had skin the color of gold, and he was framed by the sun, the moon, and the stars.

And when the court astrologers and the diviners interpreted the dream, they told the emperor that this man had come from the west and was the Buddha himself.

- The emperor was fascinated and organized an expedition.

18 courtiers and scholars with all their attendants journeyed out to the west to find out more.

They got as far as Afghanistan and there in a Buddhist monastery they met two Indian monks who agreed to come back with them to China.

(birds chirping) They came back here and were established in this monastery, the White Horse Pagoda after the white horses that they rode, and they translated the first Buddhist scriptures ever to be rendered into Chinese.

And they died here and were buried here.

This is the tomb of one of them, Kasyapa MaTanga.

It's not the first exchange between India and China but from that moment onwards the dialogue of civilizations will be continuous.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] Now the story moves on in time to the year 600.

In the wider world the Roman empire has fallen, Byzantium is flowering, and in China the Mandate of Heaven has passed to a new dynasty, the Tang.

In a village outside Luoyang, a boy was born who would become one of the most famous people in Chinese history.

And his name was Xuanzang.

- Xuanzang must have known this place very well from childhood and known all the stories, especially about the two strangers who'd come from India.

"I was inflamed by a passionate curiosity," he says, "about the Buddha and about the origins of the faith, "and I applied for a foreign travel permit several times "to no avail, perhaps because I was a nobody.

"And in the end I took matters into my own hand "and I left in secret for India."

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] He was 26 years old when he set out and his journey would add a new current to the great river of Chinese civilization.

It's a story that's fascinated me over the years, travelling in his footsteps between China and central Asia, across the rugged mountains of Afghanistan into India.

At that time, Xuanzang said, the Tang were new on the throne, and China's frontiers didn't extend far.

There was a ban on foreign travel and at first he had to move at night to dodge the border guards.

So he headed out on the old caravan route to the far west, skirting the Taklamakan desert, whose name means "go in and you'll never come out again."

On the way he stayed in border forts and isolated monasteries where they tried to persuade him not to risk his life by going on.

"But I've been called upon to make the sun of wisdom "shine again," he said.

"I've got to reach the West.

"If I don't, there's no point going back."

And in time Xuanzang's real life adventures gave birth to some of China's best-loved fairy tales, the Tang monk and his crazy companions, especially the faithful monkey.

Travelling shadow puppet players still play it out in the villages, and in the cities the storytellers say that to tell the whole tale in full would take 10 days.

(woman speaking foreign language) - [Translator Voiceover] Xuanzang and his companions were travelling west when they came to a burning hillside.

The master of the mountain, a demon, would not let them pass.

So Monkey stole a magical palm leaf fan from the demon's wife, and with this he put out the fire so Xuanzang and his friends could continue their journey.

- [Michael Voiceover] Today it's still one of the great stories in Chinese culture, a strange and wonderful afterlife for a real Tang Dynasty monk.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] Xuanzang's one of those rare people who turn up in history.

Visionary, great scholar, yet possessed incredible physical toughness and bravery and stamina.

"After three years and nearly 5,000 miles," he says, "we crossed the great snowy mountains "and came down into India."

He crossed the river Indus and entered the plains of India, with their teeming kingdoms and cities.

(horns honking) He traveled with Buddhist pilgrims down the Grand Trunk Road to the River Ganges.

And finally he reached Bodh Gaya (chanting in foreign language) and the sacred Bodhi Tree, where 1,000 years before, the Buddha had sat in meditation and gained enlightenment.

"And when I saw it," Xuanzang says, "I just lay on the ground and wept."

Xuangzang spent 16 years in India immersing himself in the authentic Buddhist teachings, visiting all the holy sites and collecting copies of the sacred scriptures.

And then he set off home to take them back to the Chinese people to fire their imaginations as his story has ever since.

(soft music) (boy speaking foreign language) Over the centuries his adventures with his faithful friend, Monkey, were turned into fairy tales which are still loved by every Chinese child.

(Xiao speaking foreign language) - [Translator Voiceover] One day the monkeys went to bathe.

Above the stream was a vast waterfall, like an entire galaxy cascading to Earth.

Straight away Monkey jumped through the waterfall and on the other side he found a paradise, a happy land of mountains, fruit, and flowers.

(soft music) One by one the other monkeys bravely leapt through.

They knelt down and declared Monkey their king.

- [Michael Voiceover] The China Xuanzang came back to in 643 was the largest and strongest country on Earth.

Its capital Chang'an, todays Xi'an, was one of the world's great centers of civilization.

And as for the emperor himself, Taizong, he was at the height of his powers and a stickler for protocol.

But he had a sense of humor.

- The emperor's first words to Xuanzang were, "Welcome back.

"But you never asked permissions to go."

"Well," said Xuanzang, "I applied for a permit "for foreign travel on several occasions "but it never worked, perhaps because I was a nobody."

- [Michael Voiceover] He wasn't a nobody now.

Tales of his 16-year adventure spread like wildfire, and now crowds came just to look at him.

- He's supposedly very good looking, which certainly stood him in good stead.

He was a very good-looking man.

I think it's difficult to underestimate how much Xuanzang really aroused people's interest.

So many people came to welcome him, so many people wanted to have a squint at him.

In fact he had to shut his doors and say, "No more visitors, please," so that he could get on with some work.

- [Michael Voiceover] And work, after all, was what drove him.

"It was my life's task," he said, "to bring the Buddha's teaching to the people of China "for the benefit of generations to come."

The Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi'an was built to house the manuscripts he brought back.

Most were lost long ago in wars and revolutions, but for a few precious fragments.

- [Micahel] So these are in Pali.

- Yeah.

- This is the language of South India and Sri Lanka.

(man speaking foreign language) - [Translator Voiceover] Of the many texts he brought back, all that survives are these palm leaf manuscripts.

They are the crown jewels of Buddhist writings.

- 657 books in 520 packages on 20 pack horses.

- [Translator Voiceover] Xuanzang spent 17 years translating the works.

11 of them were spent here.

- It must make you feel very proud to be monks here.

(man speaking foreign language) - [Michael Voiceover] The emperor now commissions Xuanzang to translate the Buddhist scriptures into Chinese.

In the history of civilization, it's a project comparable to the Arabic translations out of Greek, or the Bible from Greek into Latin.

- With the permission of the emperor, he got quite a team together.

He had 12 people in his team of Buddhists who knew about the literature, and he had eight people also in the team who were phrase collectors, is what they are called.

People who try to put things into Chinese at the time.

- [Michael Voiceover] It was all part of Taizong's insatiable appetite for learning.

He was one of China's great rulers, a model of the Confucian virtuous man.

He was a philosopher, prince, poet, and rationalist.

And he thought that ruling was inseparable from the patronage of culture, and now Taizong wouldn't leave Xuanzang alone.

- Xuanzang was supposed to be doing all this translation work, but he didn't have time.

He had to spend all his time at court trying to fulfill the emperor's need for conversation.

He was a man who was consumed by curiosity.

- The emperor himself said that the scriptures of Buddhism are as unfathomable as the depths of the sea or the height of the sky.

In comparison, the teachings of Confucius and Lao-tzu and the nine schools are just a single island in a great ocean.

The emperor was so impressed by his bearing and intelligence that he asked him to hang up his Buddhist robe and to become his prime minister.

"Help me run the country."

And Xuanzang refused him.

He said it'd be like taking a boat out of the water.

Not only would it cease to be useful but in time it would rot away.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] Xuanzang died in 664.

His ashes are buried in the little monastery of Xinjiaose near Xi'an, spared in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s at the command of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai himself.

Too precious to the collective memory of the Chinese people.

So an Indian religion became China's greatest cultural borrowing, and with Confucianism and Daoism, Buddhism became the third of China's three great teachings.

- For me it's almost a homage to a fellow traveler.

Traveled most of his route through Xinjiang and northwest frontier of Pakistan and all the way across India to Patna.

And to think he did most of that on foot.

Here's Xuanzang the great traveler.

Can't believe that he had sandals on the Hindu Kush.

Huge framed backpack here made out of bamboo.

Can you see the bamboo strips?

With all the scrolls of the manuscripts stored there.

Of course actually he had all that stuff in cases.

It's a symbolic picture.

And finally the lovely touch here, a lantern to illuminate his journey at night.

After he'd returned to China, Xuanzang kept in touch with his old Indian friends by letter.

And those letters, though unknown in the West, are among the most moving documents in the history of civilization.

In fact, my opinion, they tell you what civilization really is, written by a member of one culture who had lovingly totally immersed himself in another.

He writes the news.

"The great emperor of the Tang," he says, "is joyfully supporting Buddhism "and ruling with justice and mercy "like a compassionate Chakravartin," the old Sanskrit Indian word for a great ruler.

But it's his letter to the abbot of Bodh Gaya which is the most touching, indeed all the more so because they belonged to opposed schools of Buddhism.

(soft music) (man speaking foreign language) - "A great while has elapsed since we were parted," he writes, "which has only increased my admiration for you.

"I'm sending you my very best wishes.

"Of the works that we brought back from India, "I've already translated 30 "and two more with be finished by the end of the year.

"And there's one more thing.

"On my way back from India "I lost a horse-load of manuscripts fording the river Indus.

"I'm sending you a list of the books "in the hope that perhaps you can get them translated "and sent to me.

"This is all for now.

"Best wishes, "The monk Xuanzang."

(singing in foreign language) (upbeat music) - [Michael Voiceover] In the 7th century Xi'an was the greatest city in the world, half a million people, where the biggest European city had only a few thousand.

It was a dynamic place of new styles, new fashions, and new music.

And here foreign influences were eagerly adopted by the new rich.

The city, it was said, was laid out like a vast chessboard.

- Incredible to think, isn't it?

It's about five miles square.

And we're just here at this corner.

- [Michael Voiceover] Tang Xi'an was strictly regulated.

That was the way Chinese cities had always been, vast gated royal enclosures where public access was controlled.

Xi'an had 108 wards, all of them under curfew.

- So this was Anxing ward in Tang Dynasty times in between a palace area and a great government area over there.

So it was quite posh, quite well to do.

There was mansions of court musicians.

A princess lived down the road.

Looks like you can still buy some of their garden ornaments, doesn't it?

- [Michael Voiceover] Like all early Chinese cities, Xi'an was low rise.

Palaces, residential quarters, gardens.

Almost every ward had Buddhist and Daoist temples.

- Ni hau, ni hau.

You see all the things for temples here.

Incense.

That's because right back to the Tang Dynasty there was a huge temple in this area, and it's still a Daoist temple today, the Temple of the Eight Immortals.

There you go.

The Temple of the Eight Immortals.

- [Michael Voiceover] The theater quarter and red-light districts were here, the hostels for candidates for the civil service exams, and all tastes were catered for.

- Fortunetellers, ancient Chinese craft.

Later, later!

- [Michael Voiceover] There were special funeral streets.

One of them features in a famous Tang novel.

- I love all these pilgrimage knickknacks.

My family are really fed up with me bringing it back to London.

- [Michael Voiceover] It may seem hard to square all this control with an outward looking age, but the Tang was a centralized state where everyone was registered in the censuses.

Social harmony came from knowing and keeping your place.

(soft music) - Okay, here's the drum tower.

Much later, of course, Ming Dynasty but there was a drum tower in the middle of Tang Dynasty Xi'an, beating the drum for the curfew.

A very strictly regulated city.

You couldn't be found outside your own ward at night, for example, so at the 600 beats of the drum you had to be back home.

(drum beating) - [Michael Voiceover] In the 7th century the west market was the central Asian quarter.

Here were the Silk Road merchants, Uighurs and Persians, and they brought all their exotic foods with them.

- Cherries, barberries, apricots, peaches from Afghanistan.

Xie xie.

Oh my God.

I'm coming back there.

Beautiful.

Xie xie.

- [Michael Voiceover] Fizzing with energy, the capital city matched the ambitions of the emperor Taizong himself.

- I am a great admirer of Li Shimin Taizong.

Like a lot of founding emperors he was very ambitious, very ruthless, excellent administrator, and probably a bit of a control freak.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] And Taizong, above all, was the creator of the Tang golden age.

In this period, China changes from a feudal order to a bureaucratic state.

And the state becomes synonymous with Han Chinese civilization.

It was Taizong who decided that the Silk Road should be brought under the umbrella of Chinese civilization.

Only a few years after Xuanzang made his journey west, Chinese armies marched in his footsteps.

- The Tang emperors sent their armies up the Silk Route here into central Asia and they captured the great city of Gaochang here in 642.

And you could say that the modern idea of a greater China, including all these territories, can be traced back to that time and this place.

(singing in foreign language) - [Michael Voiceover] The goal was to protect China's luxury trade with the West, but it was also political, to make China the great power of Asia.

China was now at its biggest extent before the 18th century.

It had become a continental civilization and will see itself that way from then until now.

Driven by a thriving economy and a rising population, this is the time of the colonization and development of the south as China's center of wealth and trade.

- Big story of the Tang Dynasty between the 600s and the 900s is the shift to the south.

(horn blares) At that time Chinese official writes every stream in the empire was full of ships, thousands, 10s of thousands of great ships moving constantly back and forth, always circulating, and if they stopped for a single moment 10,000 merchants would be bankrupted.

It's the beginning of China as a commercial society, and the beginning of great trading cities.

And none of them was more important that the one that grew up at the junction of the Grand Canal going north south and the Yangtze River going from the west to the east.

The number one city of the Tang Dynasty trade, Yangzhou.

(upbeat music) - [Michael Voiceover] If Xi'an was the center of the imperial administration, Yangzhou was China's commercial heart.

It's the beginning of the industrial south.

You can still get a feel of the town in the core of old Yangzhou, and the key to the success of the city, and to the rise of the south, was one of China's great practical achievements, the Grand Canal.

Built at the start of the 600s, the canal connected the north and the south with the river routes east and west.

And it's still crucial to today's economy.

Originally built 1,500 years ago, Shaobo Lock today handles over 70 million tons a year.

- Amazing scene.

It goes on all through the day does, it?

- Yes, 24 hours a day.

- 24 hours a day?

- Yeah.

- [Michael] Wow!

- [Michael Voiceover] It took five million men to build the first section in 605, eventually running north to a small place called Beijing.

And it was built a thousand years before the Industrial Revolution in Europe.

- [Michael] Mainly carrying heavy material?

- Coal.

- Coal.

And building material.

- [Man In Glasses] Building material.

- China is building everywhere.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] So the Tang Dynasty's creation of the Grand Canal would be one of the biggest factors in the rise of medieval China.

Just as today, such projects were only possible with a command economy.

And with it the Tang transformed China.

In the 7th century the economy boomed.

The canal shipped 165,000 tons of grain each year just to feed the new garrisons in the south.

And standing at the intersection of China's waterways, Yangzhou became a new kind of city.

It's the first sign of the beginning of the modern.

- The city never slept.

It's probably the first large city in history to employ artificial lighting on a grand scale.

Even the barge traffic on the Grand Canal is able to keep moving through the city til well after midnight.

- [Michael Voiceover] So Tang Dynasty Yangzhou was always open for business.

- And so too, of course, was the entertainment industry, the taverns and music bars and the brothels, described with delicate euphemisms in Tang Dynasty poetry as Yangzhou's 10 miles of summer breeze.

In the 830s it was all immortalized by the poet Du Mu in a tag which has hung around the city for all its ups and downs from that day to this.

The Yangzhou dream.

(horn honking) - [Michael Voiceover] And as the south grew rich, they looked for new outlets for international trade, not only by land but by sea, all the way to the Persian Gulf.

- So here in the south in the Tang Dynasty we've got the beginnings of what I suppose we could call the Maritime Silk Road.

Long distance international trade organized by merchants here in cities like Quanzhou, and they're selling very top end stuff, silks and fine cloths and exotic tableware.

They're selling mass-produced ceramics designed with the Western consumer in mind, and they're also selling what will become the most popular drink in the world, tea.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] Tea had begun in the south on the subtropical hillsides of Hunan.

Originally drunk for health, by the Tang its use had spread everywhere and the first books had been published on its beneficial effects.

It's never looked back.

They exported silk, too.

Coveted since roman times by westerners who were prepared to pay jaw-dropping prices for garments fit for an emperor.

So you might think China's role today as a global mass-producer is a new phenomenon in world history, but it's not.

It's been estimated that Tang China had 55% of the worlds GDP with its vast internal market, from local village craftsmen and women, to the imperial factories, and from everyday ceramics to gorgeous works of art.

Tang China was a giant engine of growth.

So let's view the early medieval world in a different way.

Tang China was the superpower.

They exported Confucian ideas, Buddhist religion, their written script, and their language adopted across east Asia and Japan.

The Japanese even imitated Tang Xi'an in the architecture of their capital, Nara.

China's influence on the east was as profound as Rome in the Latin west.

In the east in the 7th century all roads lead to Xi'an.

And if you want a symbol of the age, just outside Xi'an stand the statues of 108 ambassadors from central Asia to Japan, and Vietnam to Persia.

The diplomatic pecking order of the Tang Foreign Office.

- This was the time when China went out to the world and the world came here to China.

(singing in foreign language) - [Michael Voiceover] And Islam, too, came to China in the Tang, peacefully, which was not always the case in history.

The first Muslims settled in China within living memory of the prophet Mohammed, and they're still here with their own distinctively Chinese traditions.

- We believe during the prophet Mohammed's time, peace be upon him, encourage our ancestors to learn science and technology that developed in China.

- Seek knowledge as far as China.

- [Michael Voiceover] It had been the year Xuanzang arrived in India that the prophet had died in Arabia, telling his followers to seek knowledge as far as China.

(singing in foreign language) - Today we speak Chinese Mandarin, and a local dialect, but in history we used to speak Chinese, Arabia, Farsia, Mongolian.

Four language, sometime.

- And this time Tang Dynasty China was the center of the world, Xi'an was the center of the world, I suppose, yeah.

- Superpower.

- [Michael] The superpower.

- [Michael Voiceover] To welcome an alien religion would hardly have been possible in the West or the Islamic world before modern times.

It shows that while the Chinese believed in the superiority of their civilization, they also knew there were many paths to enlightenment, that all knowledge was useful in understanding the cosmos and the position of humanity in it.

And that idea is expressed in one of the most astonishing monuments in the whole of Chinese history.

It's a stone inscription recording the coming of Christianity to China as far back as the 630s.

- It was one of China's great national treasures, one of the select list of the A-list monuments that can never leave the county.

And as an account of the interaction of civilizations, it's really hard to beat.

Let's start at the top.

Those nine characters say, "A monument to commemorating "the propagation of the luminous religion of the West," that is, Christianity.

(soft music) In 635, it says, a wise man from the West, perhaps from Persia, called Raban Abraham, decided to bring the Christian scriptures to China.

Observing the path of the winds through great perils he made his was all the way to China, presumably on the Silk Route, and arrived here in Chang'an.

The emperor, it says, received him in here in Chang'an and the Christian scriptures were translated in the imperial library and then the emperor considered them in his private apartments and was deeply convinced by their truthfulness and issued this proclamation in 638.

The way for humanity at different times and different places did not have the same name.

And the great sage at different times and different places was not in the same human body.

Over history heaven ordained that true religion would be established in different countries and different climates, so that all of humanity could be saved.

And we've considered the Christian scriptures and have decided that in all their essentials they are about the core values of humanity, and we have decreed that they be propagated throughout the empire.

- [Michael Voiceover] But the story of China is one of cycles of creation and destruction.

(bird chirping) And in the next century the empire faced a perfect storm of crises.

It began out in the west.

Battles against the expanding Muslim caliphate, savage internal rebellions, reported by one of the great Tang poets, Li Bai.

- "Last year," says Li Bai, "we were fighting out to the north beyond the Great Wall "and this year we're fighting far out in the west "on the Kashgar river.

"We've washed our blades in the streams of Parthia "and grazed our horses amid the snows of Tian Shan."

There it is.

There's Tian Shan.

What a place to imagine it, here in Jiaohe.

Tang Dynasty garrison town with its watchtower and its beacon platform.

"But," says Li Bai, "the beacon fires are always burning.

"The marching and the fighting never stops "and nor does the dying.

"You should know that the sword is a cursed thing "that the wise man uses only if he must."

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] Out in these vast expanses the Tang empire was overstretched.

(people yelling indistinctly) And in the end they abandoned the west.

China would only regain it in the 18th century.

The crisis came under the emperor Xuanzong, the apocalyptic eight-year rebellion of General An Lushan, which saw the end of the Tang dream of a greater China.

(birds chirping) The oasis of Turfan was one of the Tang garrison towns out in the western deserts.

- So when Li Bai writes his poem about fighting in the west, this area he's talking about?

- Yes, I think so, yes.

In about 755, because of the rebellion of An Lushan and Shi Siming, the central government became much weaker so the stationed troops were returning to inland China to fight against the army of An Lushan and Shi Siming.

- An Lushan.

Yeah, so this was a very big shock to them.

- Yeah, big warlord.

- [Michael Voiceover] An Lushan, a bogeyman who chilled hearts back in Xi'an.

(soft music) Far to the northeast he gathered armies to take revenge after the emperor had killed his son.

At home the dynasty had lost touch with the people.

The tombs of the 8th century royals near Xi'an showed their pastimes and pleasures, polo and hunting and courtly parties, oblivious to the gathering storm.

- These are wonderful images outside the tomb chamber.

They're courtly ladies, just attendants.

In their stylish fashions they could be found in central Paris (mumbles) Central Asian fashions.

These are the vogue in the early 700s.

The faces are so animated, aren't they?

You can almost imagine their conversations, the gossip, the rumors.

Courts that were seething with anxiety.

- I'm afraid we Chinese never manage to live more than 50 years without some terrible cataclysmic event.

- [Michael] The cycles of Chinese history.

- That's right.

And it had been a particularly good period up until the brilliant emperor began, allegedly, to love his concubine, Yang Guifei, the precious concubine, too much.

(soft music) - The story goes that the emperor sent his men over the land to find the most beautiful woman in China.

They failed, of course, but then when he was bathing here in the hot springs he saw the 18-year-old daughter of a high official.

It was love at first sight.

She turned out to be the concubine already of one of his sons, but he took her all the same, became besotted with her, neglected the duties of government to be in her company.

- He left quite a lot of the work of governing the country to various people, especially to this concubine's family and so on, which was absolutely disastrous.

- [Michael Voiceover] And such seething discontent paved the way for An Lushan's rebellion.

One of the greatest human-made disasters in Chinese history.

- An Lushan came in with his Tibetans, went straight to Chang'an.

Soldiers carried the emperor and his favorites out of the capital overnight, it was so desperate an emergency.

But when they got into the hills, because he was making for Sichuan, which was hilly and where he thought he would be safe, his bodyguards, a small group of people, rebelled and said they were not going any further as long as the emperor had this favorite, and favorites, with him and the favorites had to be slaughtered.

(ominous music) - [Michael Voiceover] Among them was the Lady Yang, strung up on a tree on a silk cord.

- The great rebellion of the An Lushan period was extremely hard on China.

An enormous number of people were killed or displaced.

And we know that the census that were taken before that happened and afterward, 35 million people were missing.

- [Michael Voiceover] As government broke down, eight years of horror unfolded.

It was a national catastrophe described by China's greatest poet, Du Fu, in lines remembered ever since by these Chinese people in times of trouble.

(Dr. Tao speaking foreign language) - Just two words.

It means the state has been demolished and it doesn't exist anymore.

There's no state left.

But shan hi zai, the mountains and the rivers, still remain.

- [Michael Voiceover] In all the 3,000 years of Chinese poetry, the world's oldest living poetic tradition, it's Du Fu, the poet of this terrible time, who is their most loved because he spoke in the people's voice.

(upbeat music) He's still part of the school syllabus today, so every Chinese child knows how the Tang fell.

- Hi, hello.

- [Michael Voiceover] Not from their history class, but from poetry.

- Oh, very good!

You speak English.

Wonderful, wonderful.

- [Michael Voiceover] And here at the secondary school in Yanshi outside Luoyang, they've an extra reason to know all about it.

- [Michael] This is the tomb here, is it?

- [Student] Yes.

- Ah.

- [Michael Voiceover] Because Du Fu's grave is in the school grounds.

He wasn't famous when he died, the inscription says.

(student speaking foreign language) - [Michael Voiceover] The tomb of Mr. Du, government deputy irrigation inspector.

- Terrific, xie xie.

Wonderful, wonderful.

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] As the Tang world collapsed, one last brief poem by Du Fu tells how fleeing south of the river he met again a famous musician once high in the emperor's favor.

It was the time of falling flowers, the poet said.

A poetic way of describing a disaster that was never to be forgotten.

- The falling flowers in Chinese poetry.

Can you explain to me what this means?

Anybody?

- I think it means, you know, the flowers are falling down and the period of the season is gone.

And also it means that Tang Dynasty is gone.

- Yeah.

- And he feels very sad.

- So falling flowers is not just blossom falling, it's a feeling of melancholy in the heart.

And the Tang Dynasty's falling.

There is a mood of autumn and sadness.

And he meets the man who was once this great figure.

Such a simple poem, isn't it?

Just four lines, and yet it's full of fantastic ideas.

Thank you for being patient.

Xie xie.

(students chuckle) To you!

(soft music) - [Michael Voiceover] So the state was broken but the land survived, and so did the people.

The 9th century was a time of famines and more rebellions.

In the end the Tang lose their nerve and start to look inwards.

In the 840s they even launch a persecution of Buddhism, now a symbol of un-Chinese ideas.

And so the Mandate of Heaven was lost, but as the Buddha has said, and the Chinese have always known too well, all things must pass.

- On the first of June 907, the last Tang emperor abdicated, bringing to an end an age of amazing creativity, an age by which the Chinese still define themselves today.

Time in which Xi'an here rivaled and then surpassed Baghdad and Constantinople as the city of the world.

(soft music) For a time China will plunge into anarchy, but a new age of greatness will soon arise, as in China it always has.

- [Michael Voiceover] And though the Tang Dynasty ended over 1,000 years ago, the Chinese people still look back on that time as the foundation of China as an international civilization, a brilliant epoch when Chinese values shaped the whole of the eastern world, as they still do today.

(soft music) Next time in The Story of China, the brilliance of the Song Dynsty, an incredible age of invention to match the European Renaissance, an age of scientific discovery, the world's first cuisine.

- Plum blossom noodle cake soup.

- [Michael Voiceover] The beginning of printing, and two of the most momentous wars in Chinese history.