视频字幕
TheStoryof China（1）Trace The Origin
I. Script
China is oldest nation on the earth. For thousands of years its 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 haven blessed by the ancestors.
But in the late 19th century. The collision with the West shook China to its core19,In midwinter 1899,The emperor came here to Alter of Heaven in Beijing, To ask ancestors for support in Chinas hour of crisis. As the empire crumbled in the face of rebellion and foreign armies, It was the last time the ritual was performed1899.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 5000 years to the Y ellow Emperor .The mythical first founder of China .He made a report to the ancestors about the state of the empire .But that winter of 1899China faced disaster .The following year1900.China was plunged into catastrophe with rebellion ,flood and famine foreign aggression .And the new century saw swiftly fall of the empire.Short-lived republic ,Communist revolution and then the i
nsane madness of the Culture 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 the earth ,China is rising ag ain. It’s great time to be looking at the events which have shaped the history of China. And the ideals which have made it’s culture. So distinctive and so brilliant for so long timeEvery year in the spring ,millions of Chinese people set off on journey home
It’s the time of the Qingming Festival .The festival of light. When,since ancient times,the Chinese have honored the ancestors. I’m heading down to the city of Wuxi for a very special occasions, a families reunion. For the last 30 years, Chinese people have grown up in a consumer society.After the break with a communism, China has been on a headlong rush into the future. But there is 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. its dawn on the day of the ancestors what the Chinese call Tomb-Sweeping day and the Qin family gather at the grave of their founding ancestors .Qin Guan ,a poet who lived 1000 years ago, They have come from all over China .And fur
ther afield to make their
own report to the ancestors. To tell them how family is doing and how 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 years100 Wars ,revolutio ns, famines, families broken up and cast 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 grove was lost after the Cultural Revolution of the 1960sBut when the revolutionary time drew to close. Frank Ching and his sister came searching for the tomb. Back in 1982, when I found that gravestone none of this things exist1982. When I first sought it out I was like a blank slate .I didn’t know what existed. It’s 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 Culture Revolution, so now we need pick it up again.
Like everyone in China the Qin family have experienced dizzying change since the end of empire, From colonia 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 foundation of everything prosperity derives from a harmonious family the whole nation depends on the well been of the family, our family has 1000 years of history1000 in that time huge changes have taken place but now people are beginning ask themselves: what are my roots? What are we roots? 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 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 state on earth .There are no historical texts that describe its birth but later myths and traditions take us to the Y ellow 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 Y ellow River with 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. And in many ancient cultures, it’s the women who have treasured the tales and handed them down.
Especially the tale of the mother goddess of the Chinese people, Nuwa.
Little dog .Its great, isn’t it? This whole great festival is f or 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 Y ellow 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 4000 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 Y ellow River.
China alone has come down until today. It was the ability to harness the water 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 Y ellow River here in China has been a destroyer.
The killer of millions in its great floods throughout Chinese history, right up to the 20th century20 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 Y ellow River and claimed the right to rule the hundreds of tribes along its banks became a myth still told by todays storytellers.
King Yu had two good helpers: Y ellow 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 Kong 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!
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 3000 years old engraved with his story, proves the tale goes back to the Bronze Age.
The legend says that King Yu was the founder of Chinas first dynasty 4000 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?
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 scepter made of 2000 pieces of turquoise in the shape of a dragon. The symbol of royalty all the way through Chinese civilization .Whether the Xia were Chinas 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 question .
Most historians believe the Xia existed. We are 99% sure of that but without writing we cant 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 Chinas 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 if 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 boiled and drank to alleviate the fever. When he opened the packet, to his amazement, this is what he saw. Some of the bones were inscribed with what he could see were primitive forms of the old writing that he knew from the inscriptions on his bronzes. And eventually these dragon bones were traced back t
o a little place in the lower valley of the Y ellow River, a country town called Anyang.At Anyang, Chinese archaeologists made their greatest discovery.
Huge tombs of the last Shang kings with mass human sacrifice and crucially, written texts on oracle bones .1928 they finally found the location and they started the excavation. From the excavation they found nearly 30000 oracle bones documenting divination performed on behalf of nine late Shang kings. I love all the portraits of the people. Y es, yes. There is something so optimistic about their faces. They thought that their task is to prove that Chinese history was true. Epoch making, in world archaeology, really .Absolutely, yes .Now we knew that they were historical. Y es. Anyang was the final capital of the Shang Dynasty. They ruled for 500 years, controlling the whole of central China. The first Chinese state. Their authority rested on force but was validated by divination. The Shang kings and their diviners burned cracks in tortoise shells or cow bones to speak to the ancestors. So basically, they choose one piece of bone or shell and then they drilled some holes, and then they heat up these holes with some special plants, and then these will create some cracks, and then they look at the pattern of these cracks. And the cracks come the other side, is that right? Y es. And then they can read these patterns and make their predictions about whether these divinations are auspicious or it is actually against the will of the ancestral spirits, so they should not be carrying out t
he activity they were asking for. So the diviners are asking for the favor of the ancestral spirits. Y es. So basically its their special way to communicate with their ancestors. The ancestors are the key people in their mental universe. Y es. Fantastic .Basically, in every aspect of their society, including, for instance, the harvest .This one is even about praying for rain.
Rain and water would be a big part of their concerns living in the Y ellow River plain, I suppose .Yes, for agricultural society it is absolutely crucial .And unlike the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt or the cuneiform of Babylonia, the archaeologists had no
need of a key to decipher them, for they could see at once that the signs on the oracle bones were the direct ancestors of todays Chinese writing .That’s the character for rain in modern language. And in oracle bones its like this With three drops, so essentially its the same idea, fundamentally This rain character is characterized by these raindrops. Yeah, yeah.Out of these prehistoric pictographs came the modern Chinese script with its tens of thousands of signs. So through their script the Chinese people are uniquely connected to their deep past and its ways of thinking. More so than any other culture on earth .There seem to be Is this fanciful?
There seem to be themes that we trace all the way through Chinese history the reverence for the anc
glamour
estors, the divination, the control of writing and writing as source of power. Is that fair? I agree. I think communication or interaction between the ancestral spirit and the acquisition of social power is indeed a recurrent theme throughout Chinese history.In the oracle bones there is a sacred place. It has the same name as the dynasty, Shang. This is not like the shopping malls of Shanghai, that's for sure. And the archaeologists now turn to a little town in Henan with a tantalizing name. Shangqiu, the mound or ruins of Shang. We are now inside the Ming Dynasty city. This was built in 1511,the previous one destroyed by floods.Lots more underneath it, of course. What's fascinating is it's still called Shangqiu, the ruins of Shang
So was this the ancestral place of China's first great dynasty? That question has intrigued Chinese archaeologists, since their first explorations here in the 1930s.But the Bronze Age layers here are 30 feet deep in Y ellow River silt. Recently, though, geophysical surveys and test cores have detected.
The outline of a much earlier city underneath the town. And the clues to what it was were in the oracle bones found at Anyang. In the 1930s a Chinese scholar called Dong Zuobin worked on the Bronze Age inscriptions scratched into the oracle bones from the Shang Dynasty. Thousand upon thousand of them, and through the 1930s,when China was driven by civil war and Japanese invasion, he worked transcribing these inscriptions in what, I suppose, you could call self-effacing loy
altyTo the Chinese past while the catastrophes of the modern world surrounded him. Y ou see there his transcription of one of the turtle shells with all the splits and the inscriptions on them.
And he worked out the order of the Shang kings and their calendar and their rituals and their journeys. What he discovered was that the kings came back to do special rituals at the city called Shang. That was here. Its name meant "the place where the ancestors were worshiped".
So state and ancestors were tied together. And amazingly, cults and legends about the Shang still survive here at a mysterious temple at the edge of town. The Mound of Shang, it's a great artificial hill. The legends say this mound was built before the Great Flood, that here mankind first got fire, stolen from the gods.
And tradition also said this had been a kind of observatory where the Shang kings watched the stars that protected their dynasty. Because they believed that the stars were powers in heaven and if we understood them properly then we'd know best

版权声明：本站内容均来自互联网，仅供演示用，请勿用于商业和其他非法用途。如果侵犯了您的权益请与我们联系QQ:729038198，我们将在24小时内删除。