(gentle music) - In the early 1600s, China was still the greatest state on earth.

Now ruled by the Ming dynasty, the empire had survived for almost 2000 years and had gone through many periods of breakdown and violence.

But in 1644 China went through another devastating foreign conquest.

And once more the patient and long suffering Chinese people would be left haunted by dreams of lost peace and harrowing visions of war.

(explosions) The invaders were Manchus from the north, people the Chinese saw as barbarians.

The Ming emperor committed suicide and the Manchu armies swept south.

(explosions) When the great city of Yangzhou resisted it was plundered and burned in a 10 day reign of terror.

300,000 people died.

(tense music) Afterwards the writer Zhang Dai visited the West lake in Hanghou, once China's paradise on earth.

As he sailed along the shore he was shocked by the aftermath of the fighting.

"I thought I was in a nightmare," he said.

The loss seemed irretrievable, but China had been through such cataclysms before and would go through them again, and being a great and ancient civilization the people had the inner resources to rebuild.

And that's what happened next.

The Manchus were foreigners, non-Chinese, but it was they who would institute the next rebuilding and becoming Chinese in the process.

And they were the last imperial dynasty of China, the Qing.

(jubilant music) - [Announcer] The Story of China is made possible in part (water rushing) - The Manchu foreigners who founded the Qing dynasty would make China's last and greatest empire.

But it was forged in war.

Their conquest of China took 30 years.

It climaxed in the 1670s in a savage war in the south, when three great provinces rose against the new dynasty and their teenage emperor Kangxi.

The war lasted eight years and by the end the Qing government had half a million troops fighting in these wild mountains of the southwest.

At that moment China could have fallen apart, but it didn't.

The war was the making of Kangxi and when it ended in 1681, he was 27, and he would become the longest ruling and some would say, the greatest of all the Chinese emperors.

(dramatic music) For all its glories, the Ming Dynasty had ended a decadent, divided, and broken empire.

(shouting in foreign language) Now the foreign Manchus set out to make sure that the mistakes made by the last Ming emperors would not be repeated.

That the new rulers of China should be men with a sober sense of public duty, and such a man was Kangxi, whose name means the upright one.

(dramatic music) Kangxi was the first of three great Qing dynasty emperors, father, son and grandson, who incredibly between them ruled for 133 years.

They built China's largest empire and defined the essential shape of China today.

You get an idea of the immense size of the Qing empire when you fly out from Beijing to Xinjiang in the far west.

By air with one brief stop it takes seven hours.

By road it's 2700 miles from the capital to Kashgar.

That's the width of the United States.

Under the Qing dynasty, China entered a new phase of its history.

For they define China not as an exclusively Han Chinese civilization, but as a great multi-ethnic empire.

And so for the first time since the Tang dynasty a thousand years before, China ruled over the central Asian peoples of Xinjiang.

(water rushing) And among them were the Uighurs.

Hello!

- This is my wife and this is my mother-in-law.

- Very nice to meet you, thank you!

- So this is my family.

(chicken clucking) - [Michael] Thank you so much.

Xie xie, that's lovely, thank you.

- Before the Qing dynasty, this area was controlled by the Zhungar Mongols, you know the descendants of Genghis Khan.

The leader of the Zhungar Mongols, he invaded the western territory of the Qing dynasty.

So the emperor of the Qing dynasty Kangxi he lead a big army by himself and he had waged two big wars with the Zhungar Mongols and finally defeated them and kicked them out of this region and took this region.

- [Michael] Under the Qing Kangxi emperor, it almost doubles the size of China, doesn't it?

- Yes, yes, yes.

- [Michael] It was a huge area in this part.

So what happens here in Turfan then?

- The government build new towns just next to the original town so in many cities in Xinjiang, even now we have old town and new town.

The old town was also called Uighur town or Hui town, Hui like Muslim and new town was named Man Town or Han Town, like Hancheng or Mancheng by Chinese name.

- Many different races meet in this point in China don't they?

Many different histories I suppose.

- Yes.

(upbeat music) - [Michael] So, the Silk road became again an axis of world history, linking the great Asian land empires of Iran and Russia, Mogul India, and Qing China.

(exotic music) And today with the Chinese government's project of a new silk road, central Asia is once more becoming a crossroads of commerce and peoples.

(exotic music) - If you see the different hats you can, by the pattern or color, the flowers on the hat, you can tell where they are from.

Turfan or Hutan or Kashgar or Ili.

So each different places, they have a different pattern for the hat.

- All the silk road places, Hutan, Turfan, have different hats, yeah.

- The Qing initially adopted a light touch towards the ethnic minorities, leaving their local leaders in place.

They also allowed religious autonomy, and Muslim culture soon gained a new vitality in Chinese civilization.

(singing in foreign language) In the oldest Muslim communities of China, founded back in the Tang dynasty, Chinese Muslim scholars now wrote books showing how loyalty to Islam and to the Mandate of Heaven, went hand in hand.

(exotic music) Walking through the mosque you see all these inscriptions not only in Chinese but in Arabic and in Farsi, Persian!

They welcomed outsiders, for their food and their luxuries, their money, their ideas and their expertise.

You may think of China in its history as being an inward looking civilization, but most of the time it wasn't like that at all.

So the Qing dynasty became a rich age for Chinese-Muslim culture, with debates too about the role of women.

One fascinating by-product of the time is women's mosques, with women Imams.

(singing in foreign language) It's an old custom in China, which is now being taken up in wider world, the first one in the USA only in 2015.

(singing in foreign language) Here in the old Song dynasty capital of Kaifeng, there are 16 small women's mosques, part of the changing scene of Chinese Islam from the late 1600s.

I have traveled many places in the world, and filmed with Muslim communities in many different countries, but I have never seen women's mosques like this.

Is this a special, Chinese tradition, or special Kaifeng tradition?

(speaking in foreign language) Special Chinese tradition.

(speaking in foreign language) So here, even today, you can see the results of the religious policies of the Manchus multi ethnic empire.

(speaking in foreign language) (laughing) Thank you so much.

Tibet too, long an independent kingdom, was freed from the rule of the Junghar Mongols.

Kangxi restored the Dalai Lama and brought Tibet into the Qing empire as a Chinese protectorate.

The Qing rulers built a huge replica of the Potala in Lhasa back home.

(exotic music) (cymbals crashing) Fascinated by Tibetan Buddhism, they had private chapels in their own palaces.

(chanting in foreign language) For Tibet, it was a time when Chinese rule promoted Tibetan culture.

(chanting in foreign language) (cymbals crashing) (dramatic music) So China's new, expanded frontiers were secured.

And at home the Manchus were keen to be seen to rule in the Chinese tradition.

- Before they even come in they learn a Chinese way of governing.

Once they come in, they put up a face to represent that they are authentic Chinese rulers.

The Confucius rulers.

The classical Confucian education, civil service examinations, these are all the things they pay a lot of attention to.

- To reinforce their right to rule, the Manchus returned to the roots, giving new life to the old rituals of the Chinese state.

In one ceremony the Manchu emperor joined hands with the poor Chinese peasant.

We're on a platform here and the platform looked out onto a field.

And the field was where the sports ground is there.

Every year on the auspicious day, second month of spring, the emperor plowed eight furrows of this field with a great yellow plow.

The Minister of Finance had the goad, prodding the oxen, and the chief prefect sowed the seed It was to show solidarity with the workers, to show that agriculture was the very basis of the Chinese state, and to revere the very first ancestor who invented agriculture.

To get his message across, Kangxi issued 16 maxims, guidelines for the people, which were posted in every town and village.

(dramatic music) They were read out twice a month, a custom which lasted until the 20th century.

(dramatic music) On great tours of the South, Kangxi talked to the people and listened to their grievances.

He was an autocrat, but stories about his common touch, and that of his grandson, Qianlong, became legend among the Chinese people.

(goats braying) (speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] Now the emperor wanted to understand how the ordinary people of China lived.

He disguised himself and traveled with just two companions, staying in cheap hostels.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] Near Juxian, he met a man who confided that he was in terrible debt and wanted to kill himself.

(speaking in foreign language) Straight away, the emperor pawned his own possessions and gave the poor man 100 pieces of silver.

The man used half the money to clear his debts, and with the remainder he set up a tavern and began a new life.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] Emperor Kangxi was a workaholic.

As for the daily business of ruling, he wrote, that takes a lot of energy.

I once handled 500 documents in a single day, sometimes I don't go to bed till after midnight.

Labeled in Chinese and Manchu in the Imperial archive, the dispatch boxes are empty now, but still scented with the camphor that kept insects from the paper.

(sniffing) Isn't that great?

You can still smell it after all these centuries.

The smell of history.

The other great task Kangxi set himself was China's cultural revival.

- Well I think Kangxi as a Manchu emperor, knew very well he couldn't actually cope with the whole of the China that he had conquered and which he was going to rule without the Chinese help.

So he mounted a charm offensive to a lot of the intellectuals who were loyal to the previous dynasty.

He worked hard by getting these people to get involved in the editing of so much of Chinese works, like this one with is the Quan Tangshi, The Complete Tang Poems and my goodness me, you can see, there is quite a lot.

- [Michael] How many poems, do we know?

- [Tao] 48,000 plus.

- [Michael] 48,000, plus yeah.

- And, um, so it's quite a project.

- [Michael] A hundred wood block carvers were employed, under the supervision of a servant.

Cao Yin, who was Han-Chinese, not Manchu, and a boyhood friend of the emperor - Cao Yin was, in theory, a bond servant or a slave, of the Manchus.

His family had been captured by the Manchus, before they actually took over the rule of the whole of the Chinese Empire.

(gentle music) And as a slave person, he remained very close the Emperor, in his household, and, not only that, actually Cao Yin's mother was made one of the nurses for the Kangxi Emperor, and they also say, though it's not proven, that Cao Yin may have been one of the people who was a sort of reader companion to the Emperor when he was a small boy.

(gentle music) This sort of very close bond between them went on, and apart from making him the titular head of this project, because he was Chinese, he also made him a kind of spy, to make private reports to the Imperial Palace alone on what he saw in the course of his duties.

- [Michael] So the bondsman Cao Yin oversaw the huge printing job.

The collating, cutting, the binding and sewing.

He published the complete Tang poems in 1708, and on the frontispiece was a kind gesture by the Emperor, to the boy he'd grown up with, his name on the front page.

Cao Yin wrote back, who am I that I should be on this list of names?

I do not know what happiness can ever compare with this.

(dramatic music) And this great imperial publishing enterprise was done in the very city destroyed by the Manchus in the horrors of 1645.

Now with Manchu patronage, Yangzhou was rising again.

- They I think, have learned the art or the craft of ruling China in the Confucius way very well.

So, what you see in Yangzhou is a bit of a snapshot of some of the prosperity that's coming out of a relatively peaceful and stable period.

(regal music) - [Michael] If Suzhou was the place to be in the Ming, in the Qing, it was Yangzhou.

- So, what you see, is relatively secure property rights on land, in the relatively free market and commerce was I wouldn't say protected but at least in many cases undisturbed.

(singing in foreign language) - Visitors here in the 18th century describe it as a fusion of southern elegance and northern vigor.

In its streets you saw wealth and culture all around you.

Like Georgian London it was a trend-setter, a capital of culture.

And as one of China's four ancient cuisines, its cooking was famous too-- (speaking in foreign language) As it is today.

Even the fast food.

Just the day for this, it's so cold isn't it.

(speaking in foreign language) (exotic music) - Fantastic, wonderful.

(exotic music) (grunting and mumbling) (laughing) Wonderful.

Yangzhou lies on the Grand Canal, at its junction with the Yangtze River and in the 18th century it became a center of commerce where millions were made through the lucrative salt monopoly.

So at the time of the industrial revolution in Europe, China too was developing the first shoots of capitalism, but the Chinese way.

One of the great salt merchants came from a village we've already met in this story, Tangyue, home of the Bao family.

Zhidao became one of the richest men in 18th century China's version of Wall Street.

- [Kam] Because they make business in Yangzhou and they getting richer so they have ability to build this kind of building.

- So this is like grand bankers today in London-- - Yes, exactly.

- Building their mansions with their swimming pools and everything else.

But this is much more ritually centered and historically centered.

- Yes, yes.

- [Michael] Families like the Baos formed corporations rather like the Gettys or the Rockefellers that not only paid for the family houses and temples but pooled the family's money to invest in joint business ventures.

- They donated land, they donated money, they collect money together and they exactly the wording is share, so if we want to see who is the shareholder just open the genealogy and see who is joining the ritual activity, so you know the membership of this corporation.

- So in China, the lineage, the family is the corporation and the shareholders?

- Yes.

- Where at this time in London or in the west, private companies start to be the shareholders.

Back here in his home village, Bao Zhidao is still remembered by his family for his Confucian values.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] Look at the scrolls here, they were left by my ancestor Bao Zhidao, and good advice was written on them, see?

To get rich quickly and fritter the money away, that's against the will of the gods.

(speaking in foreign language) But to earn money and never spend it and take your money to the grave.

That will also offend the gods.

(speaking in foreign language) (gentle music) - So China thrived again under Manchu rule.

In the 18th century, it had the biggest GDP in the world, helped by a government more business friendly than any before the 20th century.

And the Yangzhou merchants made the most of it.

In their gardens they held cultural gatherings.

Their guests were poets, painters and book collectors.

Looking at it with Western eyes, you might say this looks very much like an Enlightenment society.

These guys were the equivalent of billionaires today and they made their wealth on the backs of the poor.

But they were also public-spirited men.

Bao Zhidao had the streets of his part of town repaved, he established an insurance system for the boatmen who ran the salt barges.

He built charitable schools for children at the gates of the city and he plowed money back into his native village.

He may look very different to us in his great silk blue gowns and his long mustaches and pigtails, but he's the very model of what would later be the Victorian philanthropist.

In the 18th century, China was already developing a civil society.

(upbeat music) And in the rich cities of the south, the merchants were also great patrons of opera and drama.

(upbeat music) Well it's very cold and rainy snowy day at the end of the new year's festival.

And we're heading out into the countryside from Yangzhou to see a performance of the traditional Yangzhou drama by the main acting troupe.

Tradition, which has been passed down across all the wars and revolutions of the last couple of hundred years.

(upbeat music) So what show are you doing this afternoon?

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] It's a love story between a woman and her brother-in-law.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Michael] And it's a sad story or a-- (speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] It used to be a tragedy, but the audience didn't like the sad ending.

So we changed it.

Now the play ends happily.

(laughing) (upbeat music) - [Michael] In the Qing travelling companies like this criss-crossed the south, playing in the new market towns which were springing up all over the countryside, providing entertainment to the expanding bourgeoisie, and for ordinary folk too.

(upbeat music) Their shows adapted famous novels but Qing drama also dealt with history, the fall of the Ming, the sack of Yangzhou, contemporary themes with many lessons for Chinese audiences still coming to terms with the Manchu conquest.

(speaking in foreign language) (exotic music) - Today is my Grandma's 90th birthday's celebrations so it is a tradition for us to invite every family member and their friends and neighbors to watch opera.

(exotic music) During ancient time if you were rich you have an opera stage in your home and if you have any kind of a celebration you would invite this kind of opera team to your home to share your happiness with everyone.

(singing in foreign language) (cymbals crashing) - But such a flourishing culture did not mean freedom.

The Qing state was an autocracy, criticism of the system was dangerous.

As in England dramatists were censored.

Books could be banned and burned.

So as so often in Chinese history, writers and artists learned to speak in code.

Always aware of the watchful eye of the state, they developed new modes of expression, challenging the old meanings of history and ethics.

And in Yanghou, a century before the European expressionists one group of painters, the Eight Eccentrics found new ways to represent the inner life, what one Qing writer called the domain of the demonic and mysterious.

And what's so special about the Yangzhou painters?

Does your father think?

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] At the time, society and mainstream artists were very conservative.

But the Eight Eccentrics were rebels.

They had their own idea of art and created their own style.

- [Michael] So away from the conservative culture of the capital, Chinese artists and thinkers were beginning to explore different pathways to modernity.

But the 18th century also saw a huge explosion of popular culture, especially through the ancient art of storytelling, and in Yangzhou, some of the old storytelling houses are still here.

Hello, Thank you.

This is a tale from the famous novel The Water Margin (speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] This is the story of Wu Song and the tiger.

One day he got drunk, fell asleep and began to snore.

(snoring) Suddenly a strong wind began to blow carrying the smell of fresh blood to Wu Song.

- [Michael] All blood and guts this was the Qing Dynasty Pulp Fiction.

Popular stories are all the rage these days, wrote one jealous scholar.

And among the illiterate it's the only teaching.

Everyone loves it.

(speaking in foreign language) - It's really the Chinese equivalent of Robin Hood, the bunch of good outlaws who live out on Mount Liang, the Chinese equivalent of Sherwood Forest.

There's even a Buddhist monk, a kind of Chinese Friar Tuck.

Drinks just as much but a little more violent.

(screams) - At times under the Qing, though tales like this were banned as subversive.

The people loved the outlaws' exploits so much it was feared they might stir anti-government sympathies.

Chinese governments have always been touchy about how far you can take freedom of speech.

(speaking in foreign language) (applause) (gentle music) By now Emperor Kangxi was getting old.

His boyhood friend, the bond servant, Cao Yin, who printed the great Tang poems was dead now.

The Emperor had cared about him to the very end.

You're not well, Kangxi wrote, take this, it's western medicine but it really works.

But take care of yourself, take care.

(gentle music) Now in his late 60s, the Emperor was conscious of his own mortality too.

When I was young, he wrote, I didn't know what sickness was.

Now I'm getting thinner and weaker.

I have dizzy spells.

Officials can retire but I can't.

I'm old but I can't rest for a minute.

If I die without trouble breaking out for China, I will die happy.

(gentle music) Kangxi died in 1722 after a reign of 61 years, longest in Chinese history.

(gentle music) And he left his sons this advice, "The great rulers of the past," he said, "follow two guiding principles in governing China.

"Number one, have reverence for the laws of heaven "and number two, have reverence for the ancestors.

"Work hard," he said, "take care, "mix strictness with leniency "and expedience with principle.

"And that way you'll find a long term vision "for the nation."

(dramatic music) And Kanxi did have a vision for the nation.

He was an autocrat but a humane man.

The Qing though was still an authoritarian state.

And imperial favor could vanish overnight.

(dramatic music) The new emperor was Kangxi's 43-year-old son Yongzhen.

"Don't think I'm a novice" he said, "I've spent my life in the real world."

(dramatic music) Straightforward but formidable Yongzhen began a war against corruption and incompetence.

(dramatic music) There were purges and show trials and among those caught in the net were the family of the late bondsman, Cao Yin.

Their intimacy with Kangxi now forgotten.

(dramatic music) Just imagine it, the emperor's troops crashing into the house, the servants taken away for questioning, inventory made of your possessions and then the show trial and the inevitable verdict.

And all that was watched, wide-eyed one imagines by Cao Yin's 13-year-old grandson, who at that moment remembered Granddad's favorite old saying, when the tree falls the monkeys will be scattered.

(dramatic music) And it was this tale of a family's ruin that led to writing of China's most famous work of literature.

(dramatic music) The Cao family moved to these alleys in Beijing, and here, Cao Yin's young grandson, Cao Xueqin grew up.

A watchful, clever child, wary of all power having seen the family crushed by the state.

And he grew up in the life of the imagination.

(horns beeping) He wanted to be a writer, but in Emperor Qianlong's day that was fraught with jeopardy.

There were book burnings.

Over 50 writers were executed for criticizing the government So these lanes around the lake were his haunts.

He didn't have a good degree so he never got a good job, he worked for a while in a wine bar, slept in the stable.

Got jobs as a tutor for the children of rich families in the great mansions the other side of the lake.

Final warning, he got sacked for having an affair with the maid.

Never got employed again, ended up down and out in north Beijing.

(exotic music) But that bohemian life in these streets, with its drifting characters, gave the young man his own perspective on the tensions bubbling underneath Chinese society.

The relation between power and freedom.

(dramatic music) In the teaming alleys of the capital, there were a thousand stories.

(dramatic music) For a while he rented a cottage in the hills outside Beijing, at a peppercorn rent, through a family friend.

(dramatic music) And there, an idea began to take shape.

(dramatic music) "The reminders of my poverty were all around me," he said.

"The old stove, the hard bed, the thatched roof, "the latticed window.

"But such things are not necessarily obstacles "to the creative imagination.

"In fact the view from my front door, "the landscape, the trees, and the autumn leaves, "the wind were positive encouragements to write.

"What was to stop me turning the whole thing "into a story?"

(upbeat music) And what a story.

It's nothing less than the great Chinese novel.

What War and Peace is to the Russians, or the Great Gatsby to Americans.

Surreal, poignant, romantic.

We call it the Dream of the Red Chamber.

(exotic music) - This book is written about 250 years ago, right, but as a person from modern times, I still can feel really relate with, because the love and freedom the eternal topic.

(exotic music) I feel like the main character Jia Baoyu, he's a rebel.

- [Michael] He's the hero?

- He is not hero.

- Kind of hero.

(laughs) - Yeah, but he's the rebel, and that's, I think that's more important than being a hero.

- [Michael] The book tells the tale of a family over four generations, until, as grandad Cao Yin had feared, the tree falls and the monkeys are scattered.

- Best part of this novel is actually the humanity caring and universal volume inside of this book.

The people inside of this book, they are not afraid to express themselves, they are brave enough to stand up for love they are having the hope and Cao Xueqin has this hope for women, for the servant, for everyone who has a dream who has the chance to love.

He doesn't discriminate them.

He doesn't like thinking the royalty is better than the servant, he think everybody is the same.

Everybody has the right to love and everybody deserves respect.

(gentle music) - [Michael] Cao Xueqin, the bondsman's grandson died in 1763, his heart broken by the death of his only son.

(gentle music) His novel was finally printed in 1791, censored it was rumored, but brilliantly capturing the glory that was Qing China and the knife edge on which that glory balanced.

(gentle music) When he wrote in the mid-1700s, China was still the greatest civilization in the world.

And in time, no doubt, would have found its own form of modernity.

(gentle music) - Many people think that was the height of the Qing dynasty.

The population is nearly tripled and the territory doubled.

So I guess it was at that time, this is maybe the peace before the storm.

(explosions) (grand music) - [Michael] But now China came into contact with a new rising power.

- [Sailor] It's China, it's China!

- A maritime power, from a small island, 7000 miles away, off the shore of Europe, the British.

And the British would change the course of the story of China.

(drums beating) (engine humming) This is the Pearl River, and this is the great city of Guangzhou what the Europeans call Canton and it was here in the mid 1700s that the destinies of China and the British began to intertwine.

The British were becoming the great power in India and opening up a global trading network for the first time in history and they wanted to get in on the Chinese market, they wanted luxuries and silk and textiles but above all they wanted tea.

(crowd chattering) They'd started to drink tea back in the 17th century, paying for it with hard currency, silver.

But that soon became a problem for their balance of payments.

During the course of the 18th century, tea became a British obsession, the national drink.

And by then they were importing millions of pounds weight of tea every year, it was 10% of the national revenue.

No wonder then that people said, "If the China tea trade was endangered, the British nation was in trouble."

But the problem was that China was self-sufficient, it didn't need the outside world.

- Europeans and British in particular were buying a lot from China and China wasn't buying a lot from Britain and Europe.

There was nothing really that they, they needed.

- [Michael] So the British set out to create the demand.

- And the British and other traders, the Portuguese, the Dutch, were all thinking what is it that the Chinese would buy so that we can get that silver out and then we can buy more tea?

By the 1790s I think, they figured it out.

That the Chinese were buying a little bit of opium every time and that number was increasing.

(exotic music) - The key to the opium trade was British control of India, where the opium was grown.

The East India Company bought raw cotton from India and then sold it back to them as finished textiles.

They then bought up Indian opium and sold it to China, buying tea in return.

And so they created a trading triangle.

The profits were high, but so was the risk So in 1793 the British sent an embassy to China, to try to get favored trading nation status.

Its leader was Sir George McCartney.

Born in County Antrim, McCartney had served in the Caribbean and India.

He coined the phrase, the empire on which the sun never sets.

(dramatic music) China is picturesque beyond comparison, he wrote, the rice paddies, the fields of sugar cane, the tea plantations.

"The common people of China," he said "are patient and industrious, cheerful "under the severest labor.

"Hardy and loquacious, they are by no means the sedate, "tranquil people they've been represented.

(dramatic music) "But the poorest" he added, "detest the Mandarins whose arbitrary powers they fear, "whose injustice they feel, whose rapacity they must feed."

(dramatic music) The emperor wouldn't meet them in Beijing because the British refused to prostrate themselves, or kowtow.

So they set up their gifts from Birmingham and Manchester manufacturers outside the capital at the summer palace.

By now the British were frazzled.

Nine months sea journey, the weeks over land to Peking and the emperor took them by surprised he came unannounced.

(gentle music) The British were very impressed by him as a man, 83 years old but didn't look a day over 60, his manner dignified and affable.

He asked if anybody in the embassy spoke Chinese and a 12-year-old pageboy called Staunton had learned a bit of Chinese on the journey and the emperor was so delighted that he gave little Staunton his fine yellow silk purse that hung by his belt containing his favorite areca nuts.

Well that was quite optimistic for the British but what followed wasn't.

(dramatic music) The emperor went round looking at the presents the orreries, and the celestial globes, the planetarium the telescopes without a flicker on his countenance and he picked up the air pump and then said, "These things are not good enough to amuse a child."

(dramatic music) Deflated by his failure, McCartney returned to Macau, dismissing the Qing state as a crazy old man of war, no longer seaworthy.

As he saw it the Qing government was holding the Chinese people back from the benefits of modern civilization "And a nation that does not advance", he said, "must retrograde and finally fall back "into barbarism and misery."

(dramatic music) But the British simply couldn't take no for an answer.

Oh thank you!

If any link in their global trading network was broken, their economy could face disaster.

"Our aim", said McCartney, "should be to mold "the China trade to the shape that best suits us".

Any stopping of that trade would have a severe affect on our position in India to which it is already immeasurably valuable.

It would have an immediate and heavy blow on our own woolen industries and manufacturers back home, the ancient staple of England, and all our other growing imports and manufactures would be instantly convulsed.

(dramatic music) So the honorable East India Company continued to smuggle opium, despite public outrage back in Britain.

And soon the ravages of the drug became apparent in the streets of China, with millions of addicts.

(dramatic music) - By the 1820s opium addiction became visible socially which means opium dens on the street, people dying off, dozing off on the street.

It's becoming a social problem.

(dramatic music) Suddenly there's a huge increase of court documents relating to this, if you search 1790s there's none, then if you go to 1810 maybe a few, 1820s there's a lot, go to 1830s it's a huge amount.

(dramatic music) So I think by mid 1830s, 1835, 36, I think it's obvious they have to do something about this.

(ominois music) - [Michael] Shocked by the social effects of the opium trade, and by its drain on their silver supply, the emperor and his advisors debated what to do.

(ominois music) - The emperor spent time looking for an upright official because opium is something you could sell make a lot of money so you need someone who is upright, very Confucian, very moral.

- [Michael] Such a man was the incorruptible Commissioner Lin.

Of his appointment, an old friend wrote, our great land needs thunder and lightning to revive it now.

(dramatic music) Lin gave the orders to destroy all the opium held in British warehouses.

(dramatic music) Commissioner Lin began the destruction of the British opium in early June 1839.

(dramatic music) There were 1200 tons of it, it took 500 workers more than three weeks to get rid of it all.

Burning it, mixing it with lime and dumping it in these ponds.

(dramatic music) And at the same time the commissioner wrote a letter to Queen Victoria.

A letter that's touching in its almost naive believe in Confucian morality.

"We learn that your country is 60 or 70 thousand Li "away from China," he said "and yet foreign vessels "come here to make great profit out of the wealth "of our county.

"But by what right in return do they sell us "this poisonous drug which does so much harm "to the Chinese people?

"They may not necessarily intend to hurt us, "but by putting profit above all things "they are disregarding the harm they do to others.

"So we ask you, where is your conscience?"

(dramatic music) But the British were in no mood to discuss Confucian ethics.

The fact that China had 50 times their population and lay the other side of the world was of no matter.

They were a maritime nation, the Chinese were not.

In fact the Chinese didn't really have a navy at all.

Did they understand that the balance of power in the world was changing because of maritime power?

- Yeah, I think for us historians we're always asked that.

Don't they realize that they were no match?

Don't they know what's going on in the world?

I think the answer, I can be quite definite in that, is no, they still think we are the middle kingdom and all under heaven.

Respects China, admires Chinese civilization.

- Bringing ships and men from India, the British gathered a task force and sailed to China.

In New Year 1841 they entered the Pearl River.

(dramatic music) And there, the Chinese found themselves hopelessly outgunned.

(dramatic music) The Chinese had defended the estuary in depth, they had outer fortifications towards the sea.

And then at the narrows, these big fortresses with heavy guns.

(dramatic music) To the soldiers who were waiting here so anxiously it must have seemed that they had a chance of defeating the British.

(dramatic music) In fact the Chinese guns were useless with their fixed positions and fixed range against a mobile enemy.

The British fleet had three 74-gun warships out in the estuary, a flotilla of smaller vessels, they had 15 troop ships carrying native Indian regiments who were going to fight alongside the British when they stormed these fortresses, and their secret weapon was a nearly 200-foot-long boat made entirely of iron, and on it swivel and pivot mounted heavy weaponry and a rocket launcher that could send incendiary projectiles and the name of the boat was the nemesis, Retribution.

(explosions) At the climax of the battle a British rocket hit the powder store of the flagship Chinese junk, which blew up in a tremendous explosion.

(explosions) The British then rampaged up the coast, and stormed the port city of Ningbo.

(explosions) It was shock and awe, 19th century style.

(dramatic music) Rocked by their defeat, the Qing government sued for peace in the very place where 400 years before Admiral Zheng, had given thanks after his great voyages.

(forlorn music) Here in this room in Nanjing, they negotiated the first of what the Chinese call the unequal treaties.

(forlorn music) (speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] Under this treaty, China was forged to seed territory, open up ports and pay war damages in silver.

(forlorn music) - [Michael] So power had come from the barrel of a gun.

The British had got what they wanted, trading rights, silver and a foothold in China.

Five treaty ports on the Chinese coast.

(forlorn music) The treaty was signed out on the Yangtze River in the Admiral's cabin of HMS Cornwalliis.

And so began what has come to be seen in China as their century of humiliation.

(forlorn music) That event, the First Opium War has left its mark on China's view of its history until today.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] Confucius said to possess feelings of shame is akin to courage.

A nation with the feeling of shame is like a crouching lion ready to leap forward.

(speaking in foreign language) Humiliation can bring an inner momentum.

(speaking in foreign language) (dramatic music) - History, the Chinese say, is a mirror.

In Chinese history every dynasty has reached a peak and then declined, and needed outside influence to bring change.

(dramatic music) This time the catalyst was the British.

(dramatic music) Among the treaty ports was a small town that would become the greatest city on earth, Shanghai.

And an uninhabited island, Hong Kong.

(dramatic music) And all this was the unintended consequence of the first opium war.

All there was here was a few wooded islands kind of native fishing villages, and a wonderful anchorage, which is why the British wanted it.

And it would become one of the greatest trading cities in the world.

(dramatic music) So out of these traumatic events, would come new forces that would transform China in the modern age, in ways that no one, back in 1841 could ever have forseen.

(dramatic music) Coming next in The Story of China, the age of revolution, the end of empire, foreign invasion, civil war, and Chairman Mao.

Then the birth of a new China, when the communists came to Texas in search of the American dream, and the Chinese people rediscovered the warmth of home.

(fireworks exploding)