"This is one of the greatest masterpieces of Chinese landscape Painting." ""Travelers among Mountains and Streams"- painted by the artist" "Fan Kuan in the 10th century AD." "It was inspired by his wanderings in the unreal landscapes of Mount Hua, one of the five holy mountains of China." "When Westerners first discovered Chinese paintings like this one, they could not see their value." "They wouldn't even acknowledge them as art." "But, as Confucius noted, it is possible to look without seeing." "If you learn to see beyond the surface of these paintings, you will discover their real beauty and find the deepest truths of the Chinese philosophies of life." "Enter the hidden world of Chinese painting." "What makes a Chinese painting so distinctive, so immediately recognizable as Chinese?" "Is it the subject matter that Chinese artists chose to paint?" "Is it the different tools and techniques that they used?" "Or is it how they saw what they were looking at?" "How do we begin to understand this unique painting tradition which has survived virtually unchanged for so many centuries?" "Well, in China they say to understand painting you need to understand calligraphy - the art of writing Chinese characters with a brush." "The two arts are considered inseparable, like twins at birth." "To understand the birth of calligraphy in China we need to go back 3000 years, when Chinese holy men first began to make simple drawings on animal bones." "When the bones were heated in a fire, the voice of heaven was revealed as the priests interpreted the meaning of the cracks that appeared." "From the very beginning, writing in China was not just a way of communication between people, but also a means to connect with the spiritual world." "When farmers in central China first found these ancient artifacts in the 1800's, they called them 'Dragon Bones' and they ground them into medicinal powder." "But in the 1950's, a visiting scholar recognized them for what they were... the earliest examples of Chinese writing." "By studying these bones, scholars began to understand how these pictographs carved into bone evolved over thousands of years into symbols painted with a brush." ""In the beginning, Chinese calligraphy was written in pictograph style."" "If you want to write a goat there was two horns of the goat, and the cow is like this." "So each word, there is a meaning." "This is the sun, this is the moon, and this is, you see, like this, this is a bird, 'niao'." "You can't draw a picture of an abstract concept, like 'good', or 'old'." "And so combinations of characters were created to express an idea associated with the meaning of both characters." "These are called "ideographs", because the character is not a picture of an object in the real world, but a symbol for an idea." "Thus the characters for sun and moon together came to mean"bright."" "As Chinese characters are symbols for ideas, so elements in a Chinese landscape" " rocks, water, trees and mountains became symbols of concepts, such as longevity, and perseverance." "For example, pine trees, as one ancient critic put it, are like 'people of high principles whose manner reveals an inner power.'" "Indeed, one emperor bestowed the title of "Mandarin of the Fifth Degree"" "on a particularly ancient pine tree at the foot of a holy mountain." "Bamboo, which flowers in winter, and grows with measured stalks, is the symbol of strength against adversity, flexibility, and the character of an educated literary gentleman." "So for the Chinese, pictures painted with a brush, whether they be an ideograph, a tree, a rock, or a mountain, are symbols that carry both the surface meaning, and additional hidden meanings that can be uncovered" "by the educated eye." "Chinese paintings are not just pretty pictures - they mean something." "But why was the symbolic nature of calligraphy carried over to the art of painting?" "Because in China, calligraphers and painters were usually the same men - men called Mandarins, who were the ruling scholar-offiicials of China." "To understand traditional Chinese paintings, we need to understand the minds of these Mandarin- artists who created them." "Whereas in medieval Europe nobles often bragged of their inability to read or write, the Mandarins were extremely literate men, living their lives with a writing brush in hand." "Because they were the world's first bureaucrats - administrators of the huge centralized imperial system." "This system was created by the first emperor of china, Qin Shihuang, when he ordered his ministers to create a standard ideographic writing system for all Chinese." "With this common writing system people from different parts of China could communicate in writing even though they spoke different dialects." "In fact, the Chinese term for civilization, 'wen ming', is represented by the characters for literature and bright, and so the term literally means 'enlightenment through literacy'." "Thus writing was doubly important to the Mandarins:" "It was the stuff of both civilization and spirituality." "And this was their shrine to the written word:" "The Forest of Stone Tablets, in the ancient capital of Xian." "For many centuries scholars from all over China, and Asia, would come here - to the world's oldest bookstore to obtain copies of the great texts of the past." "But before the age of printing, it wasn't a simple thing to get something to read." "First rice paper was placed over text carved into a tablet..." "Then the scholars would carefully stamp ink onto the paper..." "After peeling it off, they would have a negative copy of the text which they would roll up and pack away for the long trip home." "A lot of trouble to go through to get your favorite manuscript." "They came for copies of the work of the famous calligraphers... or for this dictionary of how to read old seal script characters - a kind of Chinese Rosetta stone." "But mostly they came to copy the writings of a single humble teacher who lived in the 5th century BC:" "Confucius!" "This sage's ideas about man's role in society - his relation to his family, friends and ruler, became the cornerstone of the imperial system." ""The essence of the philosophy expressed in the writings of Confucius was simply respect for established authority, as a condition of peace and prosperity."" "Mastery of these writings was the only avenue to wealth, position and power in traditional China." "And so the Chinese ruling elite wasn't made up of generals, priests and nobles, but of Mandarins." "To become a Mandarin, you had to pass the rigorous imperial exams." "The sons of upper-class Chinese families had to begin to prepare for these exams as soon as they were old enough to use a pair of chopsticks memorizing and learning to reproduce the Confucian texts automatically, vividly and in detail." "Examinees would descend by the thousands to the imperial examination halls here in Nanjing... where just a few exam cells remain." "Up until the last century there were thousands upon thousands of exam cells here, covering a huge area." "And here the examinees were tested on one subject only." "The Chinese imperial examination system tested knowledge of these Confucian texts, and success or failure in that oldest of all civil service exams, determined one's career in the Chinese imperial bureaucracy." "Examinees would spend days writing down the classics from memory, eating and sleeping in their cells." "Of course, sometimes their memories failed them, and the cheat sheet was born." "Those who passed became Mandarins." "With this high offiice came power, wealth, and lots of paperwork!" "Mandarins spent most of their lives writing documents, often in multiple copies, in the square, offiicial regular script." "So how was the art of calligraphy born out of this stiff offiicial writing?" "Well, these scholars, being human, had to occasionally escape the Confucian rigidity of their structured, offiicial lives." "So they were attracted to another philosophy that was the opposite yet the compliment of Confucianism..." "Taoism." "A philosophy that was to profoundly influence of the art of the Mandarins." "The Chinese philosophy of Taoism stresses man's relationship to nature, appealing to the artistic side of humankind." "The Tao, or 'The Way', is the unseen reality behind appearances;" "the balanced cosmic flow of all things." "The first aim of the Chinese artist was to express the perfect harmony of this unseen reality." "In their heads Confucian, but in their hearts Taoist," "Mandarins would escape to relax and write poetry in nature, or if that wasn't possible, in a garden." "And, in the year 323 AD, that's just what seven of these scholar-offiicials did, gathering here on the side of a small stream at the Orchid Pavilion, the sacred shrine of Chinese calligraphy." "These scholars were escaping from their highly structured offiicial lives- relaxing, waxing lyrical, enjoying a cup of wine to loosen their inhibitions, and having philosophical discussions on the banks of this tiny stream." "They were among the first of a long and honored tradition of drunken poets." "One scholar was always accompanied by a servant carrying a bottle of wine and a spade with which to dig the scholar's grave." "He declared: "To a drunken man the affairs of this world appear as so much duckweed in the river."" "After which he floated a cup of wine down the stream to his friend" "Wang Xishi, a man who had no idea he would revered for all time by the Chinese as the father of calligraphy." "In line with Taoist philosophy, the Mandarins looked to nature for inspiration." "So while Wang Xishi, a writer of the formal offiicial script, sat meditating... his inspiration arrived with a honk." "He was distracted by the natural, flowing movements of geese in the pond." "Movements which he copied with his brush." "And so the beautiful flowing grass script was born, raising calligraphy to an abstract art form." "His characters, 'light as a floating cloud, vigorous as a startled dragon', were very different from those of the square, clearly defined offiicial script." "Wang Xishi's work is treasured not so much because of what was written, but in how the characters were written." "His style embodies the Taoist concept of yin and yang, of everything containing in itself its opposite." "Each word you write with this brush..." "there must be yin yang." "This is Taoist... yin and yang." "Horizontal stroke must be thin yin, yin." "This is yin." "The yang is always thick, the yin is always thin." "Yang, yin, yang yin." "Likewise in Chinese painting, the concept of yin-yang can be found hidden in the composition." "Neighboring trees have a guest-host relationship, the host large and protective, the guest smaller and more modest in bearing." "This host-guest principle can be applied to the relation of rock to rock, mountain to mountain, or man to man." "So great calligraphy or painting must have this sense of balance - of yin and yang - which the mandarins so treasured." "This is a good piece of calligraphy." "Some moist, some dry, some thin, some thick, some big, some small, some big, and some fast, some slow." "In both their lives, and their art, they strove to attain a harmonious balanced relationship between their roles as stern administrators, and their more sensitive, artistic Taoist spirit." "No artist was better at doing this, at expressing his personality in his work, than a certain eccentric monk who lived during the ninth century." "Zhang X u." "Legend has it he would walk around drunk and sobbing... until he sat down to perform some calligraphic magic." "He allowed his brush to gallop across the paper, curling, twisting in one unbroken stroke." "The novelty and quality and originality of his work, had nobles lining up to buy a sample, and emperors down the centuries scrambling to own some small piece of his genius." "This is his work called 'Cure for Stomach-ache'." "It is highly polished by the rubbing countless scholars who have copied it over the centuries." "They copied it not because they suffered from stomach ache, but because they could see the indomitable spirit of the man reflected in the way he wrote his characters- making the crazy, wild, yet highly skilled calligraphy a treasured work of art." "With Zhang X u, calligraphy became a visible expression of personality." "The Mandarins inherited this concept of expressing feelings through artistic creation and adopted it for their own painting - most famously during the 14th century Yuan dynasty, when the native Chinese were conquered and ruled by the Mongols." "During this time the Mandarins who normally would have served at court found themselves at a loss a what to do, since the Mongols chose not to employ most of them to administer their newly conquered empire." "Those scholar-offiicials who were invited to serve faced a terrible dilemma:" "If they joined the new Mongol administration, they could be branded traitors." "If they withdrew out of loyalty to the vanquished Chinese emperor and finished their lives in seclusion, they would be forced to support themselves and their families as best they could with their talents." "Most chose the latter path." "The best of them, however did not." "Chao Mengfu became a high-ranking offiicial in the Mongol court and he was despised for it." "Nevertheless he became one of China's most famous artists." "His emphasis on the blending of calligraphy, literature and painting became the ideal for Mandarins in later centuries." "In this work he made use of sparse and abbreviated brush strokes to express his loneliness and inner longing for the open countryside with its mountains and woods." "It is an evocation of a state of mind whose symbolic meaning far outweighs its depiction of reality." "Ni Zan, a highly educated man, took the opposite path by refusing offiice under the Mongols." "He was forced to sell the family estate and thereafter lived on a boat on the lakes." "He painted in light ink on paper with delicate, dry brushwork." "Using crisply etched lines, his paintings depict scene after scene of desolate silence and loneliness." "Pine trees on an island symbolize himself and his scholar friends." "Asked why his paintings never show any figures, he answered:" "'How can there be any human beings in this age of ours?" "'" "For Ni Zan, and most Chinese Mandarin painters after him, scenery was a state of mind." "And if we look closely we can also find the Confucian philosophy of the Mandarins in their paintings." "Confucius taught respect for the authority of ancient masters, and so the scholar-painters often followed the style of one of the great masters of an earlier period, sometimes copying them stroke for stroke." "Forgery took on a new ambiguity." "Artists were supposed to closely copy old masterworks." "Thus, a Chinese painting from 100 years ago often looks very similar to one painted a thousand years ago." "As you can imagine, having so many copies around made it diffiicult to tell an original from a fake." "So Chinese painters often stamped their paintings with seals in red ink to guard against forgery." "Chinese collectors would also sometimes stamp an acquired painting to show their ownership and refined taste." "The seals may seem distracting at first, but for Chinese connoisseurs, seals provide an additional dimension and depth to the experience of viewing a painting." "The mandarins realized well-placed seals could play a pleasing role in a painting's overall composition." "However they can also have the opposite effect." "One particular emperor in the eighteenth century was so fond of his paintings he was determined to place his giant seal in the middle of many masterpieces, defacing them forever with his imperial vandalism." "He stamped the beautiful calligraphy of Wang Xishi, painted 1,500 years before." "And the greatest landscape paintings." "Fortunately his offiicials were able to slip him some fakes from time to time, and save the originals from defacement." "But most Mandarins stamped their own paintings with taste, and stamped ancient paintings out of respect, to continue a dialogue with the ancient past." "Chinese painting has maintained a remarkable continuity over the centuries" "Because, for the Chinese Mandarin painter, the hard-won knowledge of ancient masters was not to be thrown away or wasted." "It was a tradition to be cherished and emulated." "Another factor which makes Chinese paintings look so unique is the set of tools used by the Mandarin artists." "Known as the 'four treasures of the scholar's table,' these tools were the primary materials for both calligraphy and painting." "The first and most important of these four treasures is the brush." "The Chinese brush is used for both writing and painting." "In Europe on the other hand, the quill pen on paper took over from the stylus and reed pen that the ancient Mesopotamians had used on their soft clay tablets." "There was a clear division:" "Western painting went the way of the brush, while writing went the way of the pen." "In China there was no such division." "We have so many types of brushes." "One stroke you've got to run from here to there." "Hairs from goat, hairs from also horse with goat inside." "This is feather of the bird." "The horse hair, horse hair, bear's hair and... this brush is made by the baby's hair." "You know the baby's hair when the baby's born, say about 4 or 5 days, they cut the hair, and make it like this." "So we keep this baby's hair brush until the baby is about 21 years old then we give it to him as a present." "It'll be very nice." "The Chinese brush is a suprisingly hi-tech little instrument composed of carefully selected animal hairs, which are formed into a conical clump and fixed into the end of a bamboo tube." "The hairs in the brush tip form a reservoir that can hold enough ink to allow the drawing of long, continuous lines;" "which if the tip is held perpendicular to the surface, can move in any direction." "By applying pressure and releasing, the calligrapher can modulate the thickness of the line, allowing for more artistic expression." "Chinese painters used the 'undulating line' of calligraphy to express the first rule of Chinese painting " ""the transmission of the spirit"." "And so from the earliest times." "The expressive line of calligraphy also flowed into the art of painting" "Very few paintings of court artists of the great Tang dynasty of 7th and 8th century remain," "but in Shaanxi province in Western China, we can find the tomb of Princess Yongtai, who in the year 701 at the tender age of 17 was ordered to commit suicide by evil empress Wu Zetien." "Although pillaged by robbers centuries ago... murals on the walls remain to show the good life the princess should have enjoyed, and reveal the style of the court painters of the time." "Here we can see the calligraphic line of Wang Xishi, with thick lines delineating the figures, and thin lines describing the features of the girls." "To this day this expressive line painted with the versatile Chinese brush dominates Chinese painting." "Mastery of the brush was essential, but so was a deep understanding of the ink." "The Chinese say," "'The brush dances, but the ink sings.'" "Around the time of Wang Xishi the Chinese had developed an ink that made clear and durable marks on paper which we call 'India ink', because it was imported by the British via India." "The French more accurately call it" ""I'encre de Chine" or 'Chinese ink.'" "The second treasure of the scholar's table." ""Chinese painters often used black inkwashes to depict color." "In fact, they have an expression, that all six colors could be effectively expressed using black ink alone."" "This painting by a Buddhist monk, entitled 'Persimmons' shows an incredible mastery of the subtleties of ink to suggest color." "This is the 13th century artist Liang Kai's "Inkwash Painted Immortal"." "We see the painter's tonal range varies from the sheer black of the immortal's belt painted with heavily saturated ink to the light washes uses to paint his robe." "Brush and ink work together to convey the artist's spirit when painting this immortal." "Mountains fading into the distance were rendered by washes of light ink or blue color alone without preliminary outlines and modeling." "The third treasure is paper, which was invented in China some 2,000 years ago." "Before that the Chinese wrote on thin strips of bamboo, which they would roll up into cumbersome scrolls." "The emergence of calligraphy as an art was made possible by the use of paper as a medium," "because its absorbency enabled it to catch every nuance of the writer's touch more effectively than the bamboo surface." "The fourth and final treasure is the inkstone, which is used as a surface to grind down the inkstick and mix it with water." "A highly prized item, fine examples are passed from one generation to the next." "We keep a lot of inkstones, like different type of inkstones." "And inkstones you must massage it everyday." "See you hold it and you massage." "And you'll find in the winter, when you rub it, very cold the weather very cold and you'll hopefully sweat." "Why?" "Because all these acupuncture points in your hand here." "You massage, you touch it and there's a relationship, a friendship, a love for the ink." "So this is my biggest inkstone." "I brought it back from China." "Very heavy..." "I don't know how many tons it is." "The unique set of tools used by painters influenced the unique look of Chinese paintings." "Their painting techniques also heavily influenced the look and composition of these paintings." "Many Westerners assume that the Chinese painters had no grasp of western realistic painting techniques, for if they had, they would have used them." "For example, in the year 1804 one English visitor to China reported the Chinese were 'unable to pencil out a correct outline of many objects, to give body to the same by the application of proper lights and shadows," "and to lay on the nice shades of colour, so as to resemble the tints of nature.'" "Traditional western painting utilizes a fixed point of view, with linear perspective." "This means these painting contain a vanishing point, just where two train tracks, for example, meet on the horizon." "Likewise, western paintings employ a fixed light source to throw shadows." "But the Chinese did understand and use these techniques." "In fact, ever since the Song dynasty in the 12th century, there has been a school of Chinese painting that specialises in realistic techniques of perspective and color." "This tradition was championed by the emperor Huizong, who hated the abstract landscapes so much favored by his father, in fact he ordered them to be used to wipe up the mess in the painting studio." "Huizong advocated a strict representational realism." "His court painters painted birds and flowers, exquisitely observed, in enamel-bright colors." "It is a style full removed from the great landscapes of the 11 th century." "But many scholars thought the court painters were missing the point." "Just as Song dynasty painting presented a degree of realism never before matched, the famous scholar-offiicial Su Shih defended the great Mandarin abstract tradition of Wang Xishi and Fan Kuan." "One time while correcting examinations," "Su Shih was inspired to paint bamboo but found himself without black ink;" "all that was available was the red ink used for correcting student exams." "So he used this red ink to paint red bamboo." "When he showed this red bamboo to his fellow painters at the academy, they laughed at him and mockingly asked" ""Where in the world does bamboo grow red?"" "The crafty Su Shih replied" ""And where in the world does it grow with the colors of black ink?" "Then he uttered his famous objection:" ""Those who discuss painting in terms of lifelikeness have the understanding of a child"." "This got him in trouble." "His calligraphy was banned from the court of Huizong, and his name posted in an offiicial list of enemies." "But later Chinese painters revered Su Shih as the champion of the abstract mandarin painting tradition." "After Su Shih, the opposing trends in Chinese painting history were set." "From then on the term Northern school was used to describe those who sought to paint outward appearance with bright realistic colors, and the term southern school for those sought to paint inner reality with black ink." "The clash of these two schools is nowhere better illustrated than the story of when the Mandarins first saw a western painting." "In the year 1601, after a 20-year wait," "European missionaries managed finally to get invited to the forbidden city because the emperor had heard rumors they bore fabulous gifts." "One Jesuit brought a painting for the emperor which would be the talk of the court." "When he unveiled it there was a large gasp - they had never seen anything so lifelike." "The Mandarins were also impressed by the lifelike painting, but like Westerners when they first beheld Chinese painting, they said it wasn't art, but rather the work of fine craftsmen." "But the emperors had traditionally favored the Northern school, with its colorful, realistic style." "And so some missionaries actually became members of the imperial painting academy." "The most famous of these was Lang Shih-ning, whose original name was Guiseppe Castiglione." "His "Eight Prize Steeds" was depicted with near photographic realism thanks to sophisticated techniques of anatomy and perspective developed in Europe since the Renaissance." "But the Mandarins artist remained uninpressed." "Like Su Shih centuries before, they felt that these realistic techniques were merely methods of creating an optical illusion." "They felt that Western painting missed the point;" "and that the true reality of things lies behind the illusion of outward appearances." "The Mandarin painters of China rejected representational realistic painting techniques because they failed to realize the first rule of Chinese art:" "To express the hidden reality behind the illusion of surface appearances." "For example, in contrast to Western painting's utilization of a single, fixed light source;" "one finds in Chinese painting a fluid interplay between light and dark, with no single source of illumination." "This approach, which may at first seem to reflect a lack of understanding of physical properties, highlights the Chinese painter's emphasis of movement, vitality and spirit." "In addition, Mandarin painters rejected single-point perspective." "Unlike a Western landscape, the painting is designed to be looked into rather than looked at." "So there is no single vanishing point:" "Instead the viewer's eye travels around the scenery, like a traveler wandering on foot." "Said one 11 th century critic," "'All landscapes should be viewed from the angle of totality:" "To see the totality of its unending ranges.'" "In fact, many Chinese paintings adopted a moving perspective - a trick no still camera or a fixed point of view painting could achieve." "Chinese landscape artists would often incorporate different views of the same mountain into the same painting." "So, how did they deal with the problem caused by putting different perspectives, or views of the same subject right next to each other?"" "Well, one way was to use mist or clouds to harmoniously integrate the different perspectives into a pleasing whole." "A Chinese landscape artist wandered around mountains or a garden and, returning to his scholar's desk, closed his eyes to meditate." "He called upon his cultivated memory and deep emotion to paint the mountain "from the angle of totality"." "For the Mandarins," "Taoist meditation and artistic creation were inseparable." "'The idea precedes the brush' was their motto." "The famous landscape painter Kuo H'si, who painted his magnificent landscape "Early Spring", said:" "'Wonderfully lofty are these mountains, inexhaustible are their mystery." "In order to grasp their creations, one must love them utterly and never cease contemplating them and wandering among them, storing impressions one by one in the heart." "Then in painting them, the eye will not be aware of the silk, nor will the hand consciously wield the brush. '" ""In western paintings, people tend to be the main subject of the painting..." ""And landscape serves more as a backdrop..." "Now in Chinese paintings in contrast, the landscape tends to dominate, and people are tiny within it." "Part of the overall Taoist totality and flow of nature."" "We have to seek them out in the overall composition." "When we do, we may find a solitary fisherman." "A humble peasant walking through the mountains..." "Where he fits in inconspicuously, merging like a drop of water in the ocean of the Tao - the cosmic force that animates all things." "Or a Taoist sitting in contemplation on a rocky crag in the mountains, oops, good thing he's immortal."" "The Mandarin's main purpose in painting was summed up beautifully by another famous landscape painter:" "He said:" ""One approach to the Tao is by inner meditation alone;" "another is through the beauty of mountains and water." "The beauty of Mount Hua, the very mystery of the Dark Spirit of the Universe, all may be captured in a single picture."" "There is another reason why Chinese paintings look so unique:" "The subject matter." "The various beautiful landscapes of China are found nowhere else in the world." "Not only did Chinese artists look at the landscapes differently and use the tools of calligraphy to paint these landscapes, the landscapes themselves are different." "Such as the great Loess soil central plains of China, eroded to create incredible craggy mountain peaks." "Or the great karst formations of the Guilin valley along the Li river." "The scholar-artists developed a very sophisticated technical vocabulary of brushstrokes to describe the various landscapes of China." "Early in the 10th and 11 th centuries, the great masters of landscape painting would paint the craggy holy mountains of Northwestern China." "To paint the surfaces of boulders and mountain-faces of Mount Hua," "Fan Kuan used the "rain-drop" texture stroke to convey the impression of a mountain worn by thousands of years of wind and rain." "The artist Kuo H'si created the "cloud-top" texturing effect that captures the nature of the misty mountain landscapes of central China." "Chinese artists represented the different in environment by creating new brushstrokes and canvases to describe their new surroundings." "In the year 1127 tartars from the North attacked and overran the Chinese capital at Kaifeng and destroyed the imperial painting academy." "Over 6,000 paintings, masterpieces all, were destroyed." "But the Court managed to flee to Hangzhou, on the south-eastern coast of China, a setting that would change the course of Chinese painting forever." "Ah..." "I found it." "When the imperial court moved from Kaifeng in the mountains, to Hangzhou in the lake district, horizontal scrolls like this one began to become very popular, because they were very suitable... for showing the flat landscapes around lakes." "More popular in fact then the hanging vertical scrolls that had been used to depict mountains." "Unrolling a handscroll painting tis a bit like watching a movie." "A visual journey through space and time with constantly changing scenery." "The moody scenery around Hangzhou inspired the scholar Hsia Kuei to paint "Pure and Remote Views of Stream and Hills"." "Painters like Hsia Kuei created new brush-strokes to describe the landscapes around Hangzhou." "Using the side of the brush, and swept across to create triangular shapes, the axe-cut stroke was perfect to paint the cliffs around the lakes." "Rock faces are seemingly chiseled right out of the paper, their hard, solid textures as palpable as granite." "Around Hangzhou, the scholar-painters used different texture strokes to produce radically different visual and emotional effects." "Hwang Kung-Wang's "Dwelling in the Fu-ch'un Mountains"" "provides a classic demonstration of the "hemp fiber stroke", which are soft strokes to suggest earthy hills." "Within the soft, moist texturing is an overflowing sense of life." "So what does make Chinese painting so distinctive?" "Well, its 3 things." "The unique landscapes of China... the origins of Chinese painting in brush calligraphy... and the unique culture of the scholar offiicial artists that we know as mandarins." "Developed more than a thousand years ago, and brought to perfection by generations of master painters," "Chinese paintings are far more than simple representations of what the eye sees." "They seek to depict the essence of the subject, not its external appearance." "When viewing a Chinese painting, accept the invitation of the artist to explore with him his experience of the fantastic landscapes of China." "And pause to appreciate not only his skilled brushwork but also the profound philosophies that informed his vision." "A very long time ago, far away in China, a villager living along the banks of the Yellow River built a simple mud hut to shelter his family." "Thousands of years later in the year 1420, the empire's best craftsmen put the final touches on the ultimate masterpiece of Chinese architecture - the Temple of Heaven." "Chinese buildings evolved from simple shelters into complex magnificent structures with great swooping roofs, stately columns, and rich detail." "Between this simple mud hut and this amazingly complex structure - its every detail full with cosmological symbolism - is a tale of emperors, monks, scholars and genius craftsmen " "a story which explains an architectural tradition of great beauty and flexibility." "And to start this story at the beginning, we have to leap back two millennia, to when the brilliant tyrant Qin Shihuang becomes the first emperor of a unified China." "In 1938, an American fighter pilot flying over a remote part of China spotted giant pyramid-like structures below." "In his excitement he took a photo and declared to the world that he had discovered a lost civilization." "What he discovered, however, weren't pyramids, but massive tomb mounds." "And the grandest of them all was the tomb of the man who unified China." "Our story begins with the tomb of Qin Shihuang the first emperor of China, who lived 200 years before Christ." "A brilliant warrior and tactician, he annihilated all his rival states and created the imperial system which survived until the year 1904." "And the grandeur of his tomb matched that of his ambitions:" "For more than thirty years he used 700,000 workers- probably more manpower than the pharaohs had assembled to build the pyramids - to re-construct his kingdom in the private underground world of his tomb, with palaces and courts for a hundred offiicials," "rooms containing countless gems, rivers of mercury and candles which would never burn out." "They sat you can't take it with you, but Qin Shihuang sure tried." "His tomb was guarded by hundreds of terracotta warriors, but just as fascinating were the clay model houses that were found inside his tomb."" "Because of their belief that people had to provide for their ancestors in death, the early Chinese buried their deceased with clay models of the structures they depended on in life - granaries, houses, watchtowers and the like." "These 2,000 year-old models are the only surviving examples of early" "Chinese wooden architecture, and from them we can see how houses were constructed around the time of the first emperor." "These models show a type of wooden house that incredibly can still be seen today." "So why did the ancient Chinese build in wood rather than stone, like the ancient Europeans?" "The availability of wood in the extensive forests of early China was no doubt a major factor." "The ancient Chinese did know how to build with stone, and how to use the arch... and they used the arch extensively for tombs, gates and bridges." "And yet they rejected the stone arch for building houses, temples and palaces." "To see why we can again find clue from the tomb of the first emperor." "Archaeologists recently excavated from the tomb a 2,000 year-old sword that is still sharp as a razor." "The reason it is still sharp is because it is coated with chrome - a fact that may not seem too amazing until you realize that chromium wasn't invented until 1938 - the same year the tombs were spotted by that American pilot." "This means is that the ancient Chinese developed incredible metal-working skills very early in their history, and so they had metal woodworking tools at a very early date." "Stone can be used to fashion and work stone, as early Britons must have done to build Stonehenge." "But iron tools were necessary for wood carving and joinery." "And with such tools, however primitive, wood construction was much easier than construction in stone." "Western cultures began their architecture without iron tools." "So they started in stone and brick and continued building with these materials." "The Chinese, on the other hand, began building with wood and continued to do so for 6,000 years, starting with the basic Chinese house which was first developed on the flood plain of the yellow river." "In areas prone to flooding, this structure was raised on pilings." "In the central yellow river valley of China it rested on solid platform." "Stone bases for each column, twice the diameter of the column, were placed on this platform, then the column raised on top of this." "So, the elevation of a Chinese building has three elements:" "The podium underneath, the columns in between and big roof resting on top of the columns." "Four columns form what is called a bay;" "groups of bays then form the different types of buildings." "From the earliest times the Chinese separated the supporting from the enclosing elements of a building." "This meant the interior columns supported the roof weight completely, while the walls were just for privacy and protection from the elements." "In a country plagued by powerful earthquakes, the Chinese didn't build solid walls, which could be cracked and rent apart by an upheaval of the earth's crust, but rather they built flexible structures without using glue or nails." "These structures could ride the heaving earth like a boat, shifting and settling back, with the platform acting almost like a raft." "Heavy roofs with tiles were supported by columns built of white fir which was four times stronger than steel, and six times more flexible than concrete." "It was the beginning of an architecture of great beauty, elegance and practicality." "The first feature of a Chinese building that usually impresses a visitor is the elegant, sweeping and seemingly gigantic roof." "Western architecture, with its spires and Greek columns - and more recently skyscrapers - usually emphasizes the vertical." "And since the introduction of concrete, steel and glass, modern Western architecture has remained a vertical architecture of walls, facades, and invisible roofs." "Chinese architecture offers a delightful contrast." "The most expressive element is the roof, with its great curving slope, and the emphasis is on the horizontal." "The approaching pedestrian can see the whole roof, even as he begins to enter the building." "While Europeans built their roofs using a truss system incorporating diagonal beams, the Chinese used a post and beam system; there are no diagonals." "The stepped shape allowed for the curvature of the roof." "Using this system roofs could be expanded to create buildings of impressive scale." "The height of a building has never equaled status in China." "In the year 1747, the emperor Qianlong commissioned European missionaries to design a summer palace in "the manner of European Barbarians"." "The emperor had them build a two-story facade in front of traditional one-story Chinese halls, because the emperor had no wish 'to live in the air' like Europeans who, as the emperor commented ' must be very poverty-stricken and lack land'" "to live in such a fashion." "Instead of height, the rank and importance of Chinese buildings is determined by the roof design." "One can see that this temple was patronized by the imperial family by the yellow diamond on the roof." "Elaborate roof ornaments also denote the importance of a building." "The part that looks like the tail of a fish at either end of the main ridge is known as the ridge-devouring beast:" "The mythical son of the Sea dragon, able to whip up waves and create rain." "These ornaments were in fact symbolic fire extinguishers." "Along the sloping ridge there might also be a string of smaller animals:" "Nine for imperial buildings," "with the number of animals decreasing as the importance of the building decreases." "Often found sitting on the corner is this evil prince riding on a hen, which represents a legendary tyrant who was cruel to his people." "He is fated to suffer the elements for all eternity." "Not just heavy with symbolic meaning, the actual physical weight of a Chinese roof is enormous- around four times the weight of a traditional western tiled roof." "Roofs were covered with heavy glazed tiles - typically gray, but sometimes also quite colorful; blue, green, and in the Forbidden City, they are glazed an imperial yellow." "The columns that hold these enormous roofs had to be stout." "As protection from weather and termites, the pillars were often painted with lacquer or an oil and hemp mixture which had brick dust mixed into it;" "from this came the custom of painting the columns a bold red color, which later of course became symbolic of good fortune." "The heavy tiled roofs would seem to require a dense forest of columns to support them." "But the Chinese secret of supporting a heavy roof on only a few columns is ingenious." "The columns bear this enormous weight roofs with the assistance of brackets." "In western architecture, much of the complexity of a building is in its foundation." "In the East, it's in a complicated pyramidal system of brackets and crossbeams designed to hold a heavy tiled roof, and which give it its characteristic curved shape." "This ingenious system is called duo gong, and its elements are fundamentally quite simple." "It's made up of brackets which sit on top of columns, and into which are fitted crossbeams." "They have three parts - the Duo, a block, like a capital, placed at the top of a column." "The gong, a bracket placed across the top of the deng, and the spacers between them, called the sheng." "The degree of complexity is wonderful, with brackets locking together like a Chinese puzzle without any nails or glue." "With these duo gong the Chinese could extend the roof overhand, without having to build more and more columns inside." "To extend the overhang even further, the Chinese devised a clever solution." "The roof overhang is one end of a kind of see-saw." "Its weight is counterbalanced by the weight of the center of the roof, at the other end of the see-saw, on the fulcrum ofjust one column." "This device, called an ang, lets one column to do the work of three," "And makes the heavy tiled roof seem to float in mid-air." "Heavy roofs create what is known as 'shear stress'." "The Europeans built "flying buttresses" to bear the enormous stress created by a cathedral dome." "The Chinese on the other hand used brackets at the joints of frames to carry this shear stress down through the brackets and columns into the ground." "Increasingly complex bracketing accompanied ever larger, more complex multi-leveled roofs:" "Which came in a myriad of shapes and sizes." "A standardized system of architectural measurement was established in the year 1103, with the publication of Li Chieh's Methods and forms of architecture, a treatise adopted throughout the vast, yet centralized, empire." "This book defined the basic units of measurement as standardized sizes of the duo gong bracket arms." "Depending on the size of the bracket was determined the size of every other element in the building:" "Such as the thickness and height of the columns." "This standard survived into modern times." "These rules of Chinese architecture governed not only the construction of an individual buildings but also the planning of the layout of a town, a temple, or a palace complex." "Ancient Chinese Shamans oriented buildings according to the dictates of feng shui, or wind and water, a way of determining mystical forces flowing through the earth." "The principles of feng shui were turned into rules used to align man-made structures harmoniously with the currents of the earth's forces, known as chi." "These rules controlled siting, ground plan, decoration, and even color." "Although steeped in ancient Chinese animistic religion, most of these seemingly mystical rules have their origin in a few simple and practical facts about the climate of central China." "China is situated in the temperate zone, with a southwest prevailing wind." "By orienting buildings to the south or southeast, the Chinese take advantage of the warmth winds and sunshine from the south to provide people living in halls and courtyards with a pleasant micro-climate." "Not only buildings faced south but also cities, palaces and tombs." "Ancient Chinese shamans found the directions with the aid of a sinan:" "History's first magnetic compass." "The pointer, shaped like a spoon, was made out of magnetic lodestone." "It sits within a circle to represent heaven, and on a square plate representing earth." "This spoon always points south, and represents the great bear, or big dipper." "The big dipper had special meaning because it always points to the north star - the emperor was considered to be the earthly counterpart of this star." "The sinan compass evolved into this classic feng shui compass, with a needle to point direction." "Diviners would use it with ancient rules set down in books like these to orient tombs and buildings." "Each direction had deep symbolic meaning, and is associated with a color and a symbolic animal." "South was the direction of the Red Phoenix, the fire bird and the summer sun." "South-facing city gates and entrances were named after this mythical bird." "From the west came the white tiger and autumn, the death of summer, and where the sun sets at the day's end." "White thus became the color worn for mourning the deceased in China." "East is the home of the green sea dragon, whence comes rain, indispensable for life, growth and prosperity." "North is the home of the black tortoise, symbol of winter, night, and the death of sunlight, cold wind from the desert and invading nomadic hordes." "Just as Chinese acupuncturists did with the microcosm of the human body, and astronomers did in the macrocosm of the heavens, feng shui masters attempted to identify and measure the invisible lines of energy called chi to find the most auspicious place in harmony with the breaths and" "currents of the earth's forces." "The mapping of these chi flows, and their re-direction or enhancement are the main principles of feng shui." "Sometimes it was necessary to correct, enhance, or deflect them." "Even today many Chinese believe that placing a small mirror called pa qua or a wind-chime precisely at the correct place can make an enormous difference in one's life by deflecting bad influences and evil spirits." "Natural wandering watercourses were thought to halt and accumulate chi, but fast flowing straight rivers cannot hold and accumulate chi." "So feng shui masters tried to find sites with meandering, slow moving water in front." "Thus in the Forbidden City they constructed this artificial river to bring in a slow flow of auspicious chi to the imperial confines." "To the North should be a hill or mountain, to block the cold wind and stop barbarian invasions and other evil influences coming from the North." "Sure enough, we find a giant artificial hill - called coal hill - behind the Forbidden City." "It didn't prove very auspicious, however, as the last emperor of the Ming dynasty, facing a peasant revolt, hanged himself here on this pine tree." "These rules of feng shui go back thousands of years, as we can see from the orientation of the palace of the first emperor." "This huge palace complex was built north of a river and south of a mountain, and so the first emperor named his capital city Xianyang - or doubly auspicious." "This is all that is left of the great hall of the first emperor, near the modern city of Xian." "What did the great palace look like?" "Well, maybe something..." "like this!" "Supposedly the grand hall constructed to face south could seat 10,000 people!" "The emperor melted down all the arms of the states he had defeated and had 12 colossal bronze statues of the immortals, each weighing 30 tons, to stand in the palace courtyards." "Two thousand years later, people in Hong Kong and Singapore still orient their homes and businesses using the rules of feng shui." "Tall buildings have taken the place of mountains and hills, and streets flowing with traffiic now function as rivers." "A famous example of the continuing use of feng shui in the modern world is at the Hyatt hotel in Singapore." "Soon after the hotel opened business was not so good." "A feng shui master was called in." "He advised angling the doors toward the fast moving flow of cars in front of the hotel, so as to catch the chi forces better, and to build a gurgling fountain in front to bring in auspicious chi." "Sure enough, soon thereafter business boomed." "A traditional Chinese city, busy and thriving as it may well have been, was a carefully designed symbol of the Chinese view of the universe." "There is a key to understanding the Chinese concept of a city, and it can be found on this 12th century scroll depicting the bustling capital city of Kaifeng." "Going back to the yellow river valley, Archaeologists have found ancient wells shaped like a square." "These wells are quite literally the roots of Chinese civilization." "Ancient offiicials concluded that eight families should settle around these wells, with the land surrounding the well being common ground." "The distance along the edge of one settlement became one 'li' - the Chinese unit of distance." "From the records of the Zhou dynasty - about 2,000 BC - we find a city was meant to be nine 'li' square, with the central well being occupied by the emperor's palace - the spiritual well, of the people." "And if we look at a traditional courtyard house, we can find the courtyard, the 'heavenly well' as it's called, at the heart of the complex." "The city was a symbol of the cosmos, the residence a symbol of the city." "In this traditional Chinese city, there was no public square for people to gather - public gatherings in fact were strongly discouraged during the period of the imperial system." "In fact, Tianamen square in Beijing is a very western idea created by the founders of the People's Republic for mass rallies and military reviews." "The Tang dynasty capital of Chang'an, today called Xian, was built following many of these ancient concepts." "This fabulous city was destroyed, but from surviving rammed-earth foundations and literary records," "Dr. Heng Chye Kiang and his team at the National University of Singapore have been able to reconstruct what, in the early 8th century was the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the world." ""Over the last 5 years, we at the National University of Singapore, together with the students here, we have been working on the re-construction of Tang period" "Chang'an, that is Chang'an, the capital of China between 618 and 907 AD."" ""Very little of the city exists today, except for a couple of pagodas." "The rest of it is basically one to three meters below the current city."" ""We depended on stone rubbings from the period translated into line drawings, we also looked at paintings and murals from the Dunhuang caves, and depended on archaeological reports such as this and this." "And we also consulted texts, early texts from the period."" "During the Tang dynasty, Chang'an's careful planning clearly reflected the gridiron layouts of earlier Chinese imperial cities." "Its plan was widely copied for many other capital cities in East Asia, including Nara in Japan." "Measuring 84 square kilometers, the city was large even by modern standards." "About the size of New York City." "At its peak, over a million people lived within its massive walls." "The city was strictly divided into separate districts containing palaces, government bureaus, markets, and residential wards" "Urban life and activities were strictly limited." "Citizens lived in walled compounds, and they were subject to strict supervision." "They were forbidden to leave the wards after curfew." "Guards stationed in police posts located at junctions of the avenues enforced compliance." ""There are two ways to read this." "One is for the protection of the citizens from external incursions, whatever they may be, and the other way of course is to read it as protecting the emperor from social unrest, from the people themselves."" "Trade was severely controlled and residents were allowed to use the main streets only during the day." "The main gate to the city, the 'Ming De' gate, with five passageways, was an imposing structure - more than 50 meters long." "And for the visitor to the city, once he crosses that gate, a bigger surprise awaits him, because he will be confronted with a very wide avenue, about 155 meters wide." "Tanjie, or the heavenly street." "Today just a normal thoroughfare" "In Tang times, it measured 155 meters wide - the equivalent of a 45-lane highway!" "In the year 841, the emperor Wuzong proceeded down this avenue to the altar of heaven accompanied by ' two hundred thousand guards and soldiers'!" "The imperial city was the administrative heart of the empire." "Within its large walled enclosure were government offiices of both civil and military functions, headquarters of imperial guards and the spectacular palaces of the imperial family." "It was also here that the emperor came to conduct ritual sacrifices at the imperial ancestral temple and at the imperial heav" "Its streets were full of foreigners from India, Central Asia and Japan - travelers, merchants and missionaries lured by tales of China's fabulous wealth." "It was a time of openness to new ideas, and of religious tolerance." "And so in the year 742 the emperor allowed a great mosque to be erected in the Muslim quarter of the city of Chang'an, where it still caters to the faithful today." "This mosque is built like a Chinese courtyard temple but with an east-west, rather than the customary north-south axis, so the temple can face Mecca." "The type of building the West most identifies with China is the pagoda." "But it is not originally a Chinese building at all." "Chinese historians have traced how the pagoda made its way to China from India." "During the first century AD, the emperor at the capital of Luoyang opened the silk road, exporting silks and ceramics from China and importing spices and medicines." "With these imports came something that would change China forever:" "Rumors of a new immortal called Sakyamuni:" "The Buddha." "In 67 AD the emperor had a dream about a golden flying holy man." "So he sent offiicials to India to find out more about this new immortal." "These offiicials met two Indian monks who brought back Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures to Luoyang on a white horse." "The emperor was pleased and so the two Indian monks founded the first Buddhist temple in China - the white horse temple right here in Luoyang." "In this building the two Indian monks carefully translated the Buddhist scriptures into Chinese; scriptures which would have profound impact not just on China, but on the cultures of Korea and Japan." "And on the grounds of this temple the monks supervised the construction of a new type of building never seen before in China - a pagoda." "But what exactly is a pagoda?" "In Sanskrit, the ancient language of the Buddhist sutras, the word "Stupa" or "Dagoba" means a heap, as in putting dirt or stone in a pile on top of a tomb to mark the place of burial of a holy man" "or of some part of his bodily remains, a lock of hair, a fingernail or a bone." "So the pagoda began as a shrine which held a holy relic." "That original pagoda at the white horse temple is gone, but just a few miles away nestled against one of China's five holy mountains, lies the oldest surviving pagoda in China." "The Songyue pagoda was built in 523 AD, and retains the original Indian shape of a stupa." "Close by is the Shaolin temple - birthplace of Zen Buddhism and more famously, Kung Fu." "Successive Abbots of the order were buried here behind the temple - at the famous forest of pagodas." "The oldest one here is 1400 years old, with the newest one erected just a few years ago." "This Indian form of stupa eventually mixed with the native Chinese watchtower to form the distinctive Chinese style pagoda that is so symbolic of China's landscapes." "Soon pagodas incorporated many classic Chinese architectural elements like post and beam construction, and duo gong brackets." "Later pagodas copied these design features in stone and brick to carefully mimic the classical wooden structures." "The largest and most imposing of these is perhaps the most famous pagoda in all of China... the wild goose pagoda." "This pagoda was originally built in wood in the year 704 at the specific request of the monk X uanzong, hero of the famous Monkey King legend 'Journey to the West'." "It was built to house the sacred Buddhist texts which he had brought back from India." "Though originally wooden, it was later rebuilt in brick and stone." "An endless variety of pagodas were built in China, and eventually the original meaning as a shrine containing a holy relic was diminished." "In China the pagoda evolved into both a practical watch tower and a defense against evil spirits." "Pagodas could be seen at a great distance to aid travelers." "And almost every town or city in ancient China had at least one pagoda built in the North-east corner of the town to block the entry of evil spirits coming from that inauspicious" ""devil direction"." "One emperor took the on architectural legacy of his ancestors, and outdid them all." "The vision of the Emperor Yongle was most grandiose in Chinese history." "We can find a monument to this vision in an unlikely place." "The Yangshan stone tablet, nestled the hills outside the old capital of" "Nanjing in southeastern China, is not described in tourist guidebooks and even many Chinese living in Nanjing don't know about it." "Probably because it's just a rock." "But what a rock!" "The site is an old imperial quarry." "The emperor Yongle, who ruled in the early 15th century, wanted to construct the grandest tomb imaginable for his father, Hongwu, the founder of the Ming dynasty." "So in this quarry, he ordered the construction of a headstone in three parts " "base, tablet and cap stone." "It was to be the biggest memorial in the world." "Court engineers designed a tablet that would have been 85 meters or 256 feet high - longer than a 747 passenger plane." "Thousands of workers spent years of unimaginable labor carving the stone from the mountain." "It was only then they began to think about how they were going to move the tablet to the gravesite." "It weighs 31,000 tons, and even with today's technology there is probably no way it could be easily moved." "In the end, the emperor Yongle conceded failure, but he had many other grand building projects in mind, and, as we see from this rock, Yongle, never did anything in a small way." "Because he had wrested the throne away from a rightful heir, he took pains to show filial piety." "And so for his mother he built the famous porcelain pagoda of Nanjing." "Destroyed in the last century;" "it is still remembered today as one of the great wonders of the world during the middle ages." "Its fame inspired countless imitations in European gardens, like this pagoda in the royal gardens at Kew in England." "When Yongle moved his capital to from Nanjing to Beijing, he envisioned a magnificent shining city rising out of the plain, built on the spot where Khubilai Khan had set his winter capital." "At its center would be the imperial city, facing south, and just south of the city would be a fabulous temple at which he could pray to heaven." "Countless workers and artisans turned Yongle's dream into reality." "Craftsmen from throughout the land came to adorn the city with symbolic detail, such as nine rows of nine knobs on all the doors, screens of nine dragons, and pairs of lions to guard important halls." "Again we see the symbolic importance of the number nine - the largest odd integer, representing the emperor." "After Yongle, twenty-three emperors spanning nearly five hundred years ruled from this palace and worshipped at this altar." "Yongle named his palace the purple forbidden city - alluding to the purple pole Star, which we have seen is a celestial metaphor for the emperor's pivotal role in the terrestrial world." "But this is his masterpiece:" "The Temple of Heaven." "The whole park was designed to create a dialogue between man and heaven;" "a dialogue transmitted through the emperor with his Mantle and mandate of Heaven." "Here, at the winter solstice, the emperor performed his most important task:" "To pay homage and to report to Heaven on the state of the realm." "During the two-day service, all traffiic in Beijing stopped and all windows and doors were closed while the emperor proceeded from the forbidden city to the temple." "The temple complex consists of three sections on a north-south axis:" "The Temple of Annual Prayers is where the emperor prayed for a good harvest." "The blue roof tiles symbolize heaven - and three roofs respectively earth, heaven and the emperor as intermediary between them." "The 4 central columns represent the seasons;" "the 24 outer columns stand for the 12 months and 12 hours into which the Chinese divided the day." "Detailed decorations highlight the dragon, symbol of the emperor, and the phoenix, symbol of the empress." "The Temple of the Universe housed the tablets of the Ancestors, and the incredible acoustics of the courtyard highlight the precision of its construction." "A clap on the third of the three stones in front of the altar produces three echoes," "two on the second, and one on the first, much to the delight of tourists." "Duo gong bracketing, now purely decorative, was built in ceramic perhaps because of the scarcity of wood in China since the 11 th century." "Indeed, when the temple was rebuilt after a fire in the last century, the giant fir wood columns used to rebuild it had to be imported from the American state of Oregon" "The third and final altar visited by the emperor during his ritual was the Round Mound, a simple and magnificent design consisting of three ascending tiers of white marble." "After fasting and donning special robes the emperor ascended the nine steps up to the altar stand alone before Heaven." "Kneeling in a circle in the middle of nine slabs and prostrating himself nine times, he offered his report on the state of the empire and asked for guidance and blessings." "The acoustics at the center of the mound created an echo, like a voice from heaven, that only the emperor standing at the center could hear." "In Yongle's magnificent temple of Heaven the ancient traditions of the pagoda and of Chinese architectural symbolism had found their grandest expression." "So even for an imported structure like an Indian stupa, the Chinese used their own construction techniques and symbolism." "They made it thoroughly their own." "In a pagoda we see the Chinese concept of the universe exemplified as we do for instance in this vase or in this old Chinese coin:" "Earth square, heaven round." "Classic Chinese architecture is an elegant and practical building system." "But its other purpose was to use symbols to impart meaning to man's environment." "Both by the way they selected sites and built buildings, the ancient Chinese filled their world with structured which physically embodied and articulated their understanding of the" "Venice, Italy in the year 1295." "Marco Polo returns to his family home after spending 24 years in the fabled land of China, where he learned the secrets of the orient in his position as advisor to the great Mongol ruler of China," "Khubilai Khan." "His relatives had given him up for dead." "And so when the shabby Polo showed up at the family door, looking more like a Mongol than Venetian they would have nothing to do with him!" "But their memories were quickly refreshed when his saddlebags revealed secret treasure - gold, diamonds, jade... and a strange white translucent incense burner." "They'd never seen anything like it." "When pieces of Chinese porcelain like this one, were first seen in the West, they were so rare and exquisite that they very quickly became more valuable than gold." "Why?" "Because Europeans really had no idea how porcelain was made." "It was to become a mystery that would baffle and enchant the West for centuries." "In China, porcelain is not called by its appearance, but by the sound it makes when its struck." "The clearer the sound, the higher the quality." "So where do we get this word porcelain?" "Where does that word come from?"" "With the death of Khubilai Khan, the Mongol empire went into rapid decline, and in the year 1368, a former peasant and Buddhist monk" " Zhu Yuanzhang - rose through the ranks to lead a rebel army which captured Beijing." "He declared himself first emperor of the Ming dynasty, and claimed the title of Hongwu, meaning 'vast military power'." "On the legendary silk road," "Trade between east and west continued, but with the memory of foreign occupation fresh in their minds," "Ming emperors became increasingly inward looking, fortifying the great wall, and eventually ordering the great overland trade routes closed!" "Trade continued by sea, however." "Arab traders obtained rare specimens of porcelain from Chinese," "South East Asian and Indian merchants on the East coast of Africa." "The Arab traders then carried the porcelain in their dhows up the Persian Gulf;" "then overland to the Eastern Mediterranean, where Italian Merchants from Venice and Genoa traded large sums of gold for the magically painted pieces, and took them back to Italy as precious treasures." "When medieval Italian merchants first saw pieces of Chinese porcelain, they couldn't believe that they were man made." "The only thing that they could compare them to was a cowry shell, because a cowry shell has that same exquisite smooth surface as a piece of porcelain." "Now, in Italian a cowry shell is called a Porcellino... a little pig, because it kind of looks like a little suckling pig... hence, our word 'porcelain'." "The Europeans were immediately obsessed with the secret of porcelain manufacture leading to all kinds of crazy theories:" "Some thought it was crushed eggshells... others thought it was a special fish paste, which they would leave to ripen in the earth for one hundred years." "No wonder it would be centuries before the Europeans would even begin to unravel the great mystery of porcelain." "It took the Chinese themselves thousands of years to discover the secret of porcelain - the product of a search for perfection which began more than six millennia ago." "Their story began here in the fertile Yellow River valley, the cradle of Chinese civilization, where the ancient Chinese began to farm and domesticate animals." "Unlike their contemporaries in Europe, the inhabitants of Neolithic China showed little interest in carving or wall-painting;" "instead they directed their creative energies to make earthenware to store rice and grain." "To fire these pots, they produced their first kilns, which Marvels of Neolithic technology, a fire was made below the pots, and vents in the floor allowed the flames and heat to rise." "From the beginning, these clay pots were sacred to the Chinese, and were often decorated with symbolic designs." "On this piece, two fish appear to be whispering into the ears of a human head wearing what might be a shaman's headdress." "The marks around the rim were probably meant to orient the pot for ritual use." "Despite its fragility, pottery is often the only material to survive the ravages of time, and reveal valuable clues to the nature of vanished cultures." "Scholars today are only beginning to unravel the mysteries of prehistoric Chinese pottery, and its ritual significance." ""This is about 5,000 years old, and it's a Longshan stem cup."" ""It was thrown on a potter's wheel in several parts..." ""probably to give it a little bit more significance in some sort of ritual."" ""And these stem cups have been found buried with their owners, alongside oracle bones and ritual jades."" "In 3000 BC, the various Neolithic cultures of China were conquered by a warlike people called the Shang." "The tyrannical kings of the Shang dynasty replaced the clay pots on their altars with magnificent ritual bronzes." "These miraculous works of art would be treasured by the Chinese people for thousands of years to come." "Bronze." "The visible symbol of power for the ancient kings of China." ""The shapes of very early bronze vessels like this ding were based on the shapes of early earthenware cooking pots." "But they weren't just used for cooking - they had tremendous ritual significance..." ""for the nobility and imperial court of the mysterious Shang dynasty" "They cast huge numbers of these exquisite ritual vessels in precious bronze." "In them they would offer tribute to the gods, including wine offerings." "Finely decorated, they were symbols of the divine right of Chinese kings that would in later centuries be called 'the mandate of heaven'." "Ceramic production grew out of the technology used to fire these bronzes." "From clay moulds packed in earth would come richly detailed works of art." "Only a prosperous empire could muster the resources to produce such a huge amount of these expensive bronzes." "When the feudal empire established by the Shang collapsed in 771 BC," "China was fragmented into many different states." "Bronze vessels lost much of their significance as symbols of imperial power and became too costly to produce." "As a result, bronzes were replaced by ceramics as the sacred vessels of the Chinese." ""Ancient ritual bronzes like this wine cup were often copied in less costly and easier to produce ceramic." "And the ceramic often reguired significance of the bronze original."" "To fire these early vessels in quantity, the fabled 'dragon kiln' was born." "The dragon kiln got its name from the way it was constructed - resting on the side of a hill like a 80 meter-long dragon." "The enormous belly of this dragon kiln, could hold over 3,000 pots." "This one, in Singapore, was the last one to have operated." "Working around the clock, skilled kiln masters could check the temperature of the kiln by observing the color of the flames." "By the time the flames died, the dragon would have consumed an incredible six tons of firewood!" "The kiln was opened after cooling for 36 hours." "But they had to wait yet another 36 hours before the pots were cool enough to handle." "As early as the Shang dynasty, potters unpacking the kilns noticed that ash had fallen on the pots and formed spots of shiny glaze." "They experimented to produce glazes that would evenly cover the whole surface of ceramic and stoneware vessels when fired." "By the time of the rise of the Roman empire, the Chinese were coating pottery with clear tinted glazes, colored by the addition of metals, that became glass-like when fired." "These colored glazes were also used to cover burial figurines, and models of everyday necessities that accompanied the nobility into the afterlife." ""This is a model of a stove that the deceased would have used in their lifetime." "Um, it was believed that these possessions would be taken into the afterlife by the deceased and they wanted to insure that they had just as good a time in the afterlife as they did in their previous lives." ""And it's lead-glazed " "You can see here on the top of the stove the cooking pots, the raw ingredients like the fish, and the prawns, the dumplings, the hook and the ladle, perhaps a turtle or a chicken," "and a stoke-hole to stoke the fire." "And a small figure of a lady stoking the fire."" ""And these lead glazes were also in use at the height of the Roman empire, in Rome further west." "And it's debatable whether lead glazes could have actually could have been introduced from the west."" "Some experts think Chinese potters learned to make lead glazes by watching Taoist alchemists proto-scientists, who were obsessed with the secret of immortality." "Since the earliest times," "Taoist alchemists in their search for immortality developed potions involving the use of smelted lead." "These elixirs were believed to be capable of transforming the body, and making it immortal when swallowed." "What the Taoist alchemists had stumbled upon instead was an elixir of mortality, as numerous emperors were killed off by these evil milkshakes." "Their research also led to the discovery of gunpowder - which was of course immediately used in warfare." "Some immortality potion!" "The Taoists melted lead with sand and clay during the preparation of these potions." "Many scholars believe Chinese potters adapted the process for use in their green glazes." "Ah, here it is..." "By the 8th century the most popular kind of ceramic in China, and even as far away as the middle east, was this pale green celadon." "One of the favorite uses of celadon in China was as teacups and the green color was thought to accentuate the green color of the Chinese tea and supposedly it actually made it taste better." "Celadon plates were particularly prized by the sultans of Turkey, who thought they were magical, and would crack if poisoned food were served on them probably a pretty useful item at the sometimes dangerous Turkish court."" "Nestled in the mountains of Shaanxi province in western China is the remote village of Cheng Lu." "Far removed from the changes sweeping through modern China, the villagers here were making Celadon for the Chinese court as early as the 10th century." "Nine centuries later, that tradition lives on." "Each member of the community contributes a different element of the craft, perfected over many generations." "Even though this potter's wheel now runs on electricity, ancient methods of throwing and shaping the pottery endure to this day." "Some families specialize in particular skills, such as etching the fine designs that later become visible under the translucent green glaze." "And where wood was once used to fire their kilns, these days coal is the only fuel to be found in their deforested mountains." "The vases produced in this humble abode are famous throughout China, and are made on order for government offiicials." "Perhaps this man's ancestors were similarly appointed to supply the imperial court." "Although he is unlikely to ever live in the comfortable modern environments now decorated by his vases, he is proud of his craft, and remains true to its heritage." "And his wares are popular export items, just as they were a thousand years ago." "The traditions of Cheng Lu village are passed from generation to generation with little or no change... save for the occasional satellite dish." "Who knows whether these children will carry on the legacy of their ancestors, or if the attractions of modern life will lure them away from the ancient craft of celadon making." "In Chinese these green celadon wares are called simply, well... green!" "In the west we call them 'celadon' and how they got that name is a pretty interesting little story." "Celadon was the hero of the French stage romance, 'L'Astree', which was all the rage in Paris in the early 17th century." "It was about this time that Chinese green ware made its debut in Paris." "People compared the color to Celadon's suit and started to call the green ware 'Celadon.'" "During the ninth-century Tang dynasty, a different class of celadon appeared which attained new importance for ceramics:" "The legendary 'secret celadon'." "Only the emperors of the Tang dynasty knew the recipe for its manufacture, and the last Tang emperor took the secret with him to his grave." "For a thousand years nobody knew whether this secret celadon really existed or was just the stuff of legend." "Until in 1981 an earthquake caused a partial collapse of this ancient pagoda." "As workers were clearing up the rubble, they discovered stone slabs under the base of the fallen pagoda." "When they lifted the slabs, in the beam of their flashlights, they saw something glistening below." "Racing to the scene, a local archaeologist descended a short flight of stairs and came upon a treasure chamber." "He discovered exquisite gold statues," "silver boxes containing fingerbones of the Buddha, and beside these holy relics... sky blue celadon, paper-thin, and shiny as a mirror." "The secret celadon of the ancient emperors, lost for a thousand years, had at last been found." "Jade." "More valuable than gold to the Chinese." "A symbolic link of communication between heaven and earth, of exchange between man and the spiritual world." "One emperor traded 15 cities for a single jade sculpture that he could hold in one hand." "Ancient Chinese nobility wore jade amulets shaped like phoenixes and dragons to symbolize their moral integrity, and they buried their loved ones with jade to comfort their souls and prevent the decay of the physical body." "Jade is the everlasting symbol of Chinese civilization." "And the illusive dream of ancient Chinese potters, for centuries they had striven to create a comparable pure and translucent substance." "With the creation of celadon, they felt the dream within reach." "But what they were really dreaming about was porcelain." "Porcelain and glazed pottery are very very different." "This piece of celadon, for instance, is a iron-based green glaze over stoneware." "With porcelain, the body and the glaze are fused together into one glass-like substance." "So when porcelain was as we know it today was invented during the Tang dynasty around the year 700, the Chinese potter had finally attained his elusive dream of producing a pure, translucent material with many of the qualities of precious jade." "This breakthrough came about by combining two ingredients the Chinese call the 'flesh and bones' of porcelain... a special fine white clay called Kaolin and crushed feldspar rock." "And by attaining Kiln temperatures of 1300 degrees Celsius, body and glaze were fused completely." "This formed a glossy, translucent ware that produced a clear ring when struck." "With this refinement, true porcelain had finally been invented after thousands of years of trial and error." "Although soon after its invention porcelain was highly prized, but 500 years glazed stoneware still held its place as the most prestigious of Chinese ceramics." "The most famous, most sophisticated wares of China were produced in and around the ancient capital of Kaifeng, today a sleepy industrial town." "It is hard to believe that from the 10th to 13th centuries, just about when the black death was ravaging Europe, this city wall enclosed the largest and most vibrant metropolis in the world." "The scholar-offiicials of this Northern Song period were great connoisseurs of antiques and ceramics, and became investors in and patrons of many kilns." "The emperor Huizong brought these distinguished artistic tastes to the dragon throne in Kaifeng, in the year 1100." "Here at his palace, he amassed a legendary collection of art treasures from every corner of his realm." "When it became known that Huizong wanted to commission a new mperial ware, the famous kiln masters around Kaifeng all headed to the capital with samples of their finest work to compete for the emperor's favor." "One of those presented was the ivory-glazed ding ware." "This is a piece of Song Dynasty Ding ware." "It's a dish with molded decoration, and the most obvious thing about this dish is that it has a copper rim." "The reason it has a copper rim is because after the piece was made and glazed, the glaze was wiped awayfrom the rim, the whole piece was turned upside down... and placed in a special saggar - which is a container to protect pieces" "from kiln grit and dirt during the firing." "And when it was resting on its rim, this position actually gave the piece more support in firing, and reduced the likelihood of it warping." "After the firing, of course the rim would be quite rough because there's no glaze." "These white wares were made specifically for the Imperial Court, until later in the Song the Emperor rejected these white wares in favour of some of the other exquisite wares of the Song - known as the 5 great wares of the Song:" "Such as ru, jun, guan and ge." "The Ge ware, often molded into appealing ancient shapes resembling ritual jade objects, was too thick and heavy for the personal use of the emperor." "The Jun ware was exquisite in color and quality, and so was accepted for use at court, but it was also not deemed exquisite enough for the special use of the emperor." "The emperor had even higher expectations:" "He had read and heard of the legendary secret celadon which gleamed with the exact, smoky blue-green of Jade." "And so when he inspected the sky blue ware of the Ru kiln, he was greatly pleased." "He commissioned the Ru kiln to produce a ware 'the color of the sky through the clouds after rain'." "Today, only around 40 pieces remain." "When the Chinese moved their capital to Hangchou in the 12th century, the kilns at Jingdezhen began making wares for the imperial court." "One European painting of Jingdezhen depicted a largely imaginary countryside of rustic buildings, which bore absolutely no resemblance what's ever to the polluted, industrial landscape of the city, where a visiting Jesuit priest reported in the year 1712" "that many thousands of families kept kilns burning day and night." "The Chinese called it 'City of all-day thunder and lightning." "By the end of the 14th century the ceramics industry was firmly concentrated around Jingdezhen, mostly because of the abundance of raw materials." "Here the Chinese set up their fabled assembly line to churn out thousands upon thousands of pieces of porcelain to ship around the world." "The workers at Jingdezhen soon became adept in the well-defined skills that gave the city its lasting reputation as the ceramics capital of the world." "Despite most factories in Jingdezhen being modernized, a careful search in the hills around the city reveal a group of men who still operate the same type of production-line which 500 years ago allowed Jingdezhen to dominate the international ceramics trade." "Each piece was, and still is, carefully handcrafted so a high degree of uniformity is achieved in particular styles." "The fact that the process has resisted the trend to mechanization in an industrialized world adds to the artistic value of the pieces produced here." "For a product which is still hand-made, however, the output is prolific." "The Jingdezhen kilns differed from their predecessors and offered a notable advantage:" "They were a new type of effiicient egg-shaped kiln that allowed for exact temperature control so potters could achieve very precise color." "These kilns produced the first examples of blue and white porcelain during the mid-14th century, under the patronage of the Mongol court." "Its a little known fact that the famous blue floral decorative style on Ming dynasty porcelain was not originally Chinese at all, but a style imported from the middle east." "In fact the Chinese originally called the color "Mohammedan blue", after the Mohammed, the prophet of Islam." ""And the Mongols were very interested in trade, and particularly with West Asia." "And as you can see this very rich, cobalt blue decoration is a direct result of that trade because the cobalt was imported from Iran." "They used stem cups like this for drinking some of the different types of wines they introduced to the Han Chinese." "They had a whole range of wines - fermented mare's milk, honey wine, grape wine, rice wine..." "And that was what these pieces were used for." "Adding colored decoration had always been diffiicult because few pigments could withstand the high temperatures needed to fire the white clay." "Ground cobalt, a blackish pigment, could be mixed with water and painted on an unfired piece of porcelain." "Glaze would then be applied, either by dipping or blowing it through a bamboo pipe;" "a process simplified in the modern age." "This glaze later becomes transparent when fired, to reveal the intricate designs painted underneath." "During firing, the cobalt would turn a rich shade of blue, like a butterfly magically emerging from a cocoon." "This enchanting Chinese blue and white porcelain would soon be shipped ound the world - captivating Europeans and Egyptians, Japanese and Javanese alike for centuries to come." "Well before Europeans discovered the sea-routes to Asia, in junks like these Ming blue and white ceramics were being exported to Southeast Asia, Africa, India, and a few even got to Europe through Arab and Italian traders." "The mystique of Chinese ceramics affected many Southeast Asian cultures." "The Dayaks of Indonesia so cherished a Chinese glazed mataban jar as a family heirloom, that Dayak men in debt would sometimes sell a family member into slavery rather than part with the jar." "As far away the Philippines," "Chinese ceramics were included as burial objects, a testament to their importance in ancient Filipino culture." "Over the centuries many Chinese junks went down in the waters off southeast Asia, and when salvaged today their cargoes of blue and white porcelain fetch millions of dollars at auction houses around the world." "These are pieces of Ming blue and white that were found in a 15th century..." "Chinese shipwreck near Ayuttayah, the ancient capital of Thailand." "Who knows, perhaps they were part of an order placed by the King of Siam that never made it to the palace." "When Mongol rule ended in 1368, ceramic production increased dramatically, and underglaze blue and red became increasingly popular exports." "Ming dynasty potters started painting enameled colors on top the glaze of an already fired porcelain." "They would then fire the piece a second time to set the enamels." "Overglaze, enameled ceramics like this magic square dish were exported to Islamic markets around the world." "The Magic Square was mathematical model used by 9th Century trologists in West Asia." "In Persia they were used as medicine bowls, and have been found in India and Indonesia." "In 1494, the Ming emperor in the Forbidden city still imagined himself the center of the Universe." "He could never have dreamed that the new world, including Asia, was being divided between Portugal and Spain for sea trade and colonization." "At this time porcelain was still scarce in Europe because the only source of ceramics were those Arab and Italian middlemen importing small amounts from Africa and Middle East." "Porcelain was so rare it was given as gifts by the Sultans of Egypt the Doges of Venice." "Porcelain also appeared in paintings of the period, where its rarity made it a fitting embellishment to scenes of the holy family." "But this situation changed forever in 1498, when the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama succeeded in finding a sea route to the orient, establishing direct commerce with South and East Asia." ""By about 1550 the Portuguese and the Dutch had begun to travel in the other direction..."" "Dreaming of the riches of the orient, they sailed from Europe down the West coast of Africa, then around the Cape of Good Hope, where they caught the scent of spices and coffee on the trade winds and followed it to India." "Some went on to SE Asia... and the bravest sailed all the way to the exotic ports of China." "There they filled their cargo holds with porcelain and other treasures to import back to Europe, bypassing the earlier route through Africa and the Mediterranean." "Putting those Italian and Arab middle-men out of business." "And the porcelain rush was on." "In the sixteenth century, Portugal," "Holland, England and France all fought for the right to import the marvelous Chinese porcelain." "But Europeans were still eating off wooden trenchers and the wealthy off pewter and silver plates." "This began to change in the early 17th century however, as more and more Chinese porcelain was shipped directly to Europe." "Suddenly, this new luxury began to show up in the homes of the wealthy." "Statues of the Buddhist goddess guan yin became particularly popular, because Europeans sometime mistook her to be the Virgin Mary." "A vogue for things Chinese - "Chinoiserie" - soon became the rage all across Europe, a fad embodied by the royal pavilion at Brighton in England." "Chinoiserie was originally ignited by the claims of Marco Polo, claims which were substantiated by the unexplainable beauty of the ceramics making their way west." "Every European royal family had to have a 'porcelain room' in their palace." "In 1635 the Dutch began sending drawings as well as models to China to be copied." "Soon, the European buyers were instructing the Chinese how to make oriental styles!" "For instances, the willow pattern, which is not a Chinese design at all, but a British one." "French emperors, Russian czars and English kings all ordered fine porcelains, bearing their royal crests and special designs." "Of course, huge amounts of simpler and coarser blue and white wares were also being made for export." "By 1638, over three million pieces of mass-produced Chinese porcelain called Kraak ware had been shipped to Europe by the Dutch alone." ""It's a lovely small shape." "Um, and a real break from tradition for the Chinese potter really..."" ""A small crack soup bowl made for the Dutch market."" ""One of the interesting things about this and the reason it's my favorite piece, is that it's very small, and it has this flared rim."" ""The Dutch drank their soup with a soup spoon." "And the spoon would be able to rest on this rim here."" ""And kraak comes from possiblely the name of the caraak, the Portuguese ships that took such wares to Europe in the early 17th century." "It may also come from the Dutch word Kraaken, which means easily breakable."" "There were countless attempts by the Europeans to discover the secret of porcelain manufacture in the 16th and 17th centuries... but all failed." "The first near-success of European porcelain manufacture was in Florence in 1575 under the patronage of Grand Duke Francesco de Medici." "However, as almost every example was deformed during firing, it is no surprise that production ended after his death." "Meanwhile, in China, ceramic art reached a high standard of technical perfection during the Qing dynasty, when the influx of technology and art from the west began having a significant impact on the Chinese ceramic industry." "Emperor Kangxi, who reigned for sixty one years, was fascinated by Western science and culture." "And so he allowed Jesuit missionaries to join his court as advisors." "These priests introduced new enamels and western painting styles to the imperial potters." "Two of these Jesuits were ordered by the emperor to work in the imperial enamel workshops." "But they could not stand the horrible conditions in the enameling factory." "And besides, they were in China to find converts, not to decorate vases, so they purposely painted badly - and were both fired by the emperor who complained:" ""Enough of that business!"." "But the importation of western enamels made possible a whole new range of colors for the imperial potters at Jingdezhen." "Such as famille rose, which had as its principal color a delicate opaque pink, derived from gold in the enamel." "The famille rose colors could be mixed for shading and allowed miniature precision in drawing." "The Emperor Qianlong, grandson of Kangxi, and a great connoisseur of the arts, personally challenged himself to raise the art of porcelain to heavenly perfection." "Imperial Qianlong ware was supreme in workmanship, and extravagant in design, and often copied famous earlier styles." "His imperial potters created exquisite new colored glazes." "This piece... made to hang inside a sedan chair - boasts decoration in the style of the ancient bronzes of the Shang dynasty kings." "A poem, composed by the emperor himself, sings the praises of Ru ware, which his imperial potters had succeeded in closely copying." "Once again, porcelain became much more than a copy of more precious materials - it had become the precious material itself." "Monochrome wares were used on imperial altars:" "Red for the altar of the sun, blue for the moon and yellow for earth." "And yet during the Renaissance," "European scientists were still baffled by the composition of Chinese porcelain." "Then in the year 1709, in the city of Meissen in the kingdom of Saxony, an alchemist named Johann Friedrich Bottger was imprisoned in a castle by Augustus the Strong, the ruler of Saxony, for having failed to turn lead into gold." "At the suggestion of the court chemist," "Walther von Tschirnhaus," "Bottger was ordered to discover the next best thing:" "The secret of porcelain manufacture." "For 18 months Bottger slaved away." "A sign he placed above the door of his workshop underlined the irony of his situation." ""God our creator has turned a gold-maker into a potter."" "Because Bottger was a mineralogist, he was able to find a large deposit of kaolin clay, used to powder the white wigs worn in Europe at the time." "Using his expertise as an alchemist, he attained a kiln temperature of 1350 degrees Celsius, a level never before achieved in Europe." "And, for the first time... porcelain was fired outside of China." "The secret of porcelain manufacture quickly spread from Saxony to Paris and St. Petersburg, and the European ceramics industry was born." "Thus ended the mystery, but not the magic, of Chinese porcelain." "The story of the substance born in the earthenware kilns of prehistoric China, which captured the imagination of China's greatest emperors, and which has beguiled the world for so many centuries, did not end with the discovery of porcelain manufacture in Europe." "Ceramics are one the strongest, most heat-resistant materials ever made." "They are at the cutting edge of high technology engineering materials:" "From artificial joints to packages for super-speed computer chips." "A new chapter is being written in space, where ceramic tiles protect the space shuttle from burning up upon re-entering the earth's atmosphere." "While its value as an ancient treasure remains undiminished," "Ceramic and percelain may yield even greater surprises in the future." "The sword of the Japanese samurai warrior." "A weapon of mythical strength and lethal effectiveness." "But each unique samurai sword is also an artifact." "A crystallized piece of Japanese history and culture." "Frozen forever." "Captured in steel." "Why has the samurai sword always been such a powerful symbol of Japanese culture?" "Well, the man pictured on this 5,000-yen note tried to answer that question for the world." "His name was Dr. Inazo Nitobe, a Japanese diplomat at the League of Nations." "He was asked by a western colleague how without religious instruction the Japanese could teach their children right from wrong." "So in the year 1900" "Dr. Nitobe wrote a book in English called Bushido the code of the samurai." "He wrote that this warrior code became the credo by which most Japanese lived their lives." "And, he wrote, just as the code of the samurai is the soul of Japan, the sword is the soul of the samurai." "For Dr. Nitobe, the sword is a work of art that represents the soul of the samurai." "But originally the sword was not the samurai's weapon of choice." "In the beginning, they fought from horseback." "And their skill was with the bow and arrow." "They lived by a code called "kyuba no michi":" "The way of the Horse and Bow." "So why did the sword, not the bow and arrow, become so important to the samurai and to Japan?" "To find the answer we must go deep into the history and legends of this ancient land." "The origins of this fierce warrior class-the samurai are to be found at the very beginning of Japanese history." "These mounted warriors galloped into history during the reign of emperor Temmu who built his capital in Nara, modeled after the ancient Chinese capital of Chang'an." "Emperor Temmu's army of peasants armed with crossbows was failing to subdue the mobile calvary of the unruly tribes of the north." "Tribes which may have included the Ainu the indigenous peoples of Japan." "And so emperor Temmu made a fateful decision." "He dissolved his ineffective national army." "Instead he ordered local chieftains to create bands of elite mounted warriors to enforce his authority in rural areas, and to challenge the northern tribes." "These were the first samurai." "The word samurai means 'to serve', and this is how they began:" "As warriors serving the emperor." "While the imperial court prayed to the gods for their success, the mounted warriors rode out to hunt down the proud barbarians of the north." "Once and for all..." "But the tribesmen were crafty fighters adept at ambush." "The warriors often had to forsake their bows and fight with their straight Chinese swords." "Swords which in the heat of battle, chopping downward from horseback, often snapped in two." "The samurai needed better swords." "According to legend, a swordsmith named Amakuni rose to the challenge." "One day standing in his doorway," "Amakuni noticed that the warriors returning from battle were carrying broken swords." "Ones that he had forged." "The emperor himself passed by and frowned at the disgraced smith." "Amakuni's problem was the classic problem of swordsmiths all over the world." "How do you make a sword that is very sharp, but also tough enough not to break?" "When working with steel, a swordsmith must control three things:" "The rate of cooling, the carbon content, and the elimination of impurities." "If he cools red-hot metal too quickly, it becomes hard enough to sharpen to a fine edge, but also very brittle, liable to snap in two." "If he cools the metal too slowly, the sword will be very tough and flexible, but won't take a sharp edge." "Likewise, if he adds too much carbon, the steel will be brittle and if not enough, too soft." "Amakuni experimented until he developed the techniques to solve these problems." "He selected the finest iron ore and carefully refined it, adding just the proper amount of carbon to the steel." "He then broke the iron block and reassembled the pieces like a puzzle to make another block, to further purify the metal." "The block was then folded and hammered out, over and over, to distribute the carbon evenly and to eliminate impurities that might create weak spots in the finished sword." "Next he lengthened the block into a blade, and gave the sword a curve to make it slice more effectively on the downward stroke from horseback." "What he did next is one of the secrets of the samurai sword." "He covered the body of the sword with clay, and left only the edge exposed." "He then plunged the hot blade into water." "The unprotected edge cooled quickly, becoming very hard so it could be sharpened to a fine edge, while the clay covering it allowed the body of the blade to cool more slowly and remain softer and more flexible, less brittle." "This produced a distinctive wavy pattern along the cutting edge, called a 'hamon' the mark of a true handcrafted samurai sword." "When the warriors returned from battle the following year, the emperor stopped to tell the smith" ""You are a master sword-maker." "None of your swords have failed."" "These early curved swords were called tachi, and were worn edge downward from the belt." "Armed with these swords, the samurai increased in power and in pride." "From the 12th century onwards, samurai began to serve samurai lords... and no other." "The capital was moved to the sacred city of Kyoto where Kammu, the 50th emperor of Japan built a magnificent new palace an impressive symbol of imperial authority." "But while the samurai gained in power, imperial power gradually weakened." "One samurai named Taira Masakado even dared to proclaim himself emperor." "He was defeated, but for most of the next 1,000 years the samurai would fight among themselves to dominate the imperial court." "But the samurai were not the only ones fighting for control of the emperor." "Monks became warriors in their quest for power." "One 12th century emperor said that besides the samurai, there were three things he could not control:" "The fall of the dice when gambling, the floodwaters of the Kamo river," "and the warrior monks of Mt." "Hiei." "These monks fought with this nasty-looking weapon called a naginata." "Today a peaceful mountain retreat, this temple on Mt." "Hiei was once the headquarters of the largest and most formidable army in Japan an army of warrior monks called the sohei." "At its height the temple complex boasted over 3,000 buildings!" "Wielding their fierce Naginatas, a huge war party of sohei monks would often flow down into the city of Kyoto, to press their demands for privileges on the imperial court." "Monks are supposedly peaceful." "But the sohei monks were legendary warriors." "One of the most impressive feats of martial history took place here at Uji bridge in the year 1180." "A band of monks, hopelessly outnumbered by attacking samurai, tore up the planks of the bridge to defend their retreat." "One of the monks climbed up on the bridge's pilings, and, whirring his naginata like a propeller deflected the arrows that were being shot at him." "For this he was dubbed "Tajima the arrow-cutter"." "But despite their fighting prowess the monks were finally no match for the powerful samurai clans, who eventually tamed them." "In the 13th century, the most powerful clan of all - the Taira were at war with their archenemies - the Minamoto." "These were the classic battles of early samurai history, full of pomp and ritual." "First commanders would gallop out and proudly announce their ancestry, proclaim their greatness as warriors, and then throw the vilest insult they could think of at their opponent." "Next they shot their arrows and charged each other, hoping to dispatch their foe with a single stroke of their sword." "Onlooking warriors would not stain the honor of the combatants by lending any help." "For the samurai, honor was everything more precious than life itself." "They would kill or die in an instant to defend it." "And there was a very practical reason for this obsession with honor." "A samurai's status and his lands were not protected by law, only granted by his lord." "Failure or defeat in battle meant loss of his lands and status;" "reducing him and his decendents instantly to peasants." "His easily offended honor and incredible loyalty was in a sense pure job insecurity." "And so the samurai brought back enemy heads after a battle, which they presented to their lords as proof of a kill." "Their lord rewarded them with land and titles." "If a samurai were defeated in battle, but survived with his head intact, he often preferred to take his own life rather than face the disgrace of his failure." "One early suicide was done with such style and finesse that it was to provide a model for noble and heroic ritual suicide for centuries to come." "After one fearsome battle with the Taira clan, the defeated samurai Minamoto Yorimasa retreated here inside the Byodo-in temple." "After his defeat by the forces of the Taira at Uji bridge" "Minamoto Yorimasa came to this spot while his sons defended the gate outside... and penned his death poem on a war fan before committing ritual suicide." ""How sad that the old fossil tree should die without a single blossoming."" "Yorimasa killed himself in the most painful and thus the most heroic-way possible." "By plunging his short sword into his abdomen." "This act took more that just courage or practical calculation." "It took supreme conviction." "This obscure temple hides a little known relic that speaks volumes about the place of honor given to samurai who committed ritual suicide." "A group of samurai failed to defend a castle for their lord." "Rather than accept defeat, 384 of them committed suicide in the main hall of the castle." "Their lord honored them by taking the floor of the hall and making it the ceiling of this Buddhist temple raising their act of suicide to a spiritual plane." "What possessed the samurai to take their own lives in such a slow and painful fashion?" "Suicide was a rational and practical choice, preferable to the dishonor that would doom not only a samurai himself but also his family and descendants to a brutal life of a peasant, or a highway robber." "The samurai were trained from childhood to welcome an honorable death." "They were taught the Zen Buddhist belief that life is but a brief illusion." "A flash of lightning." "A bubble in a stream." "In his warrior's mind, the very point of living was a noble death." "Preferably on the battlefield with honor, but failing that by his own hand." "And a noble death became more than elegant, dignified and beautiful." "It was seen as an almost holy act, a release from the cycle of life's suffering." "It was this total lack of fear that allowed the samurai of the Minamoto clan to triumph over the Taira in a desperate sea battle in the year 1192." "The Minamoto leader Yoritomo was not content merely to be the military leader of Japan." "He rejected the titles given him by the emperor, and established his own government." "Yoritomo became shogun." "Military dictator." "The first samurai ruler of Japan." "He chose the easily defended town of Kamakura, far from Kyoto and its court intrigues, to be his headquarters." "Yoritomo built this giant Buddha, now famous throughout the world, but his real legacy was the code that he required his warriors to follow." "He ordered his samurai to live lives of simple frugality, to have no fear of death and to serve him, their absolute master, with unswerving loyalty." "During this peaceful age the best swords were products of imperial support for the art of sword making." "The cloistered emperor Gotoba himself was an accomplished swordsmith." "He called in the best smiths of Japan and had them restudy all sword-making methods of the past." "Their great accomplishment was to develop a new two-piece body for the blade." "Until this time, swords were made from a single piece of high-carbon steel." "These imperial smiths soon learned to insert a sort core of low-carbon steel into the sword." "The sword of the samurai became even more flexible, while retaining its razor-sharp edge." "This time of peace was the age the Classical samurai." "And the golden age of the Japanese sword." "But this fragile peace was soon shattered." "In the year 1274 a terrible danger appeared on the horizon" "The Mongol hordes of Kublai Khan, the conqueror of China in an invasion fleet of over 800 ships with 30,000 seasoned battle-troops." "The samurai charged down onto the beach and yelled out their customary challenges for duels." "Their challenges were answered with hails of poisoned arrows and gunpowder bombs." "The Mongols were surprised, however at the desperate strength of the samurai, and their sharp swords that somehow cut through their armor like a knife through butter." "And then suddenly, a terrible storm swept into the bay." "Their fleet was destroyed by a typhoon." "Expecting a second invasion, the Japanese constructed an enormous defensive wall on the beach where they expected the Mongols to land." "Sure enough, they came again, this time with 4,000 ships and over 200,000 men." "The samurai defended the beach fiercely, preventing the Mongol force from landing." "But the force was too large." "But then, amazingly, for the second time, a typhoon swept in, destroying the entire Mongol fleet." "Two-thirds of the Mongol invaders perished." "Thus Japan was saved from invasion - twice." "This convinced the Japanese that their land was protected by the gods, and they honored the storm with the name of Kamikaze, or divine wind." "The samurai learned a great deal from their battles with the Mongols." "On the beaches the blade, not the spur, had saved the day." "And so the stress on mounted archery lessened and, over the next century, the samurai became a swordsman who fought on foot." "The long tachi calvary sword was replaced by the shorter, infantry katana, which was worn edge upright so the samurai could draw and slash in a single stroke." "The battles with the Mongols taught the samurai another thing." "Their tempered edges of their supposedly perfect swords often chipped." "Correcting this defect was the triumph of the greatest swordsmiths who ever lived" "Masamune." "Masamune heated his blades to over the critical temperature of 750 Celsius." "Next he welded three pieces of steel of different carbon content together into a single blade." "The samurai sword had at last been perfected." "Japanese swordsmiths all began to copy Masamune's methods." "The swords made by the master smith Muramasa, in particular, were legendary for the sharpness of their cutting edge." "So sharp were these swords, that they apparently made the bearer go mad with blood lust, almost as if the very effectiveness of the blade forced it to be used to kill." "Armed with these perfect swords the samurai could almost magically cut through a person in a single fluid stroke." "The culmination of a samurai's rigorous training became the ability, without conscious thought, to execute this perfect attacking stroke." "This stroke could only be perfectly executed, if it were done with an empty mind, the "no-mind" of Zen Buddhism." "Now, "no-mind" may seem like a mystical concept that only the samurai could master." "But in fact, it is something that most of us do everyday." "For example, anyone can type by the hunt and peck method." "But touch-typing is much faster, and you don't have to look where the individual letters are." "In fact, you almost forget where they're located." "This loss of memory, while retaining a practiced skill, is a perfect example of "No-mind"." "Practicing this stroke became a kind of meditation." "A way to develop discipline and character." "Some say you can see a pale residual image of this perfect no-mind stroke at Japanese driving ranges." "In the swings of countless golfers who spend endless hours trying to perfect their stroke, even though they rarely if ever play on a golf course." "One samurai in particular was held up as the ultimate example of the virtue of loyalty to one's master." "Kusunosuke Masashige." "So total was his loyalty, so effective was his resistance that the emperor was able to return from exile, defeat the Shogun in Kamakura and re-assume power." "But this legendary samurai loyalty usually had its limits." "The temptation of power was too strong." "In the century after the Mongol invasion proud samurai warlords, many with imperial blood in their veins aspired to be shogun." "The prize was there for the taking for any warlord who could seize and hold it." "This led to the Sengoku jidai the age of the country at war." "The inevitable result of the previous 1000 years of Japanese feudalism." "The war of all-against-all engulfed Japan." "The name of samurai became synonymous with the most flagrant examples of brutality." "New and more formidable castles were raised." "Treachery and cowardice were widespread." "And there was a great reliance on espionage." "The samurai with their code of honor could not be expected to undertake these covert tasks." "To fill this niche there flourished in the small mountain village of Iga a group of secret warriors." "The powers of the Ninja have been shrouded in a mystique of incredible proportions." "For protection against these covert mercenaries, many samurai castles and houses built nightingale floors, specially constructed to loudly squeak when trod upon a high-tech security system designed to catch the Ninja." "With the decline in the warrior ethic came a decline in sword quality." "Mass production resulted in many inferior blades." "It was during this period of intense warfare that a new weapon arrived on the battlefield." "A weapon that would end forever the dominance of the classical warrior." "In 1542, a Chinese junk arrived on the shores of Japan." "On board were three Portuguese who became the first westerners to land on Japanese soil." "They were strange and exotic, but what really caught the attention of the Japanese were the guns that they carried." "The samurai understood immediately that guns threatened their very existence." "Their forefathers always had known who they killed and who defeated them." "With guns, how could they prove their valor to their lord?" "How could he reward courage?" "Even lowly merchants and peasants could fight with these cowardly weapons." "Tradition soon gave way to technology." "Many swordsmiths became gunsmiths." "Soon Japan was actually manufacturing better and a larger amount of guns than any European country." "Guns, along with professional military organization, finally ended the age of total war." "Three great generals each contributed in his own way to a unified Japan." "The first of these unifiers, Oda Nobunaga - who was born a peasant eagerly took advantage of the superior supply of gunpowder available in his province." "With his fearsome musket regiment," "Nobunaga led an attack on Takeda Shingen, to whose son his own daughter was betrothed." "Such were the times." "Facing Nobunaga's troops in the field were the mounted samurai of Takeda." "The cream of Japan's warrior elite." "Proud inheritors of the Minamoto classical tradition." "A tradition that left them no choice but to attack." "Nobunaga's musketeers moved the front lines, a place of honor traditionally reserved for the best swordsmen." "The Takeda calvary charged down the hill." "Only to be met with the deafening roar of 3000 guns firing at once." "While one rank fired, two reloaded." "This was the first time this devastating strategy called rolling volley fire had been used in world history." "When the smoke cleared, 10,000 Takeda samurai lay dead in the field." "Japan would never be the same." "For all of its lethal beauty, its noble tradition and the incredible skill required to wield it, the sword, even in the hands of the most courageous samurai, could not compete with a bullet fired from a gun" "in the hands of an uncultured peasant soldier." "In the 16th century, on the strength of his guns," "Nobunaga began to unify Japan's warring samurai clans." "But at the height of his power the ruthless and brutal Nobunaga was assassinated by one of his own generals." "His death was avenged by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, his clever lieutenant, who laid the head of Nobunaga's killer on the grave of his slain commander." "Hideyoshi was not just a brilliant soldier;" "he was also shrewd judge of human nature." "A master of diplomacy and compromise." "Skills which he exercised on rival warlords in portable tea ceremony room with which he traveled." "He soon became the unrivalled master of all Japan." "In 1588, Hideyoshi instigated the 'Great sword hunt'." "He collected guns and swords from all the peasants and melted them down to make an enormous bell, and a giant statue of the Buddha." "The statue is gone." "All that remains of it is this piece of the Buddha's nose." "But the enormous bell, famous throughout Japan, is still here." "The tolling of this great bell signaled the end of social mobility in Japan." "From this time forward one had to be born a samurai to wear the sword." "Never again would a peasant rise up to usurp power, as Hideyoshi himself had done." "Hideyoshi's next project was to build a formidable castle at Osaka designed to guard his legacy." "And his ambition did not stop there." "Hideyoshi decided he wanted to rule an empire." "To him there was only one thing bigger than Japan, and that was China." "The invasion did not go well." "Meanwhile, the third unifier, Ieyasu Tokugawa, a powerful lord who traced his ancestry to the first Shogun Yoritomo, pulled back to his own provinces during Hideyoshi's invasion of China and bided his time, strengthening his position." "After Hideyoshi's death," "Tokugawa had the largest standing army in Japan." "Hideyoshi had made Tokugawa swear to be loyal to his heir." "An oath that Tokugawa broke when he attacked the heir's forces at Osaka castle." "Despite its massive walls the castle was no match for" "Tokugawa's superior siege guns and cannon." "Tokugawa in his turn, became lord of all Japan." "The last and greatest of the three generals had finally brought the bloody civil wars to an end." "Once in absolute power and control" "Tokugawa refashioned Japan into his ideal of an inflexible and rigidly structured society." "He expelled foreigners, forbade Japanese to travel abroad, and, amazingly, he outlawed all guns." "Japan went back to the sword." "But in this unprecedented time of peace the samurai no longer had a reason to use their swords." "There were no more battles, and the Tokugawa government outlawed sword duels and vendettas among the samurai." "Domestic peace had a serious eroding effect on the warrior ideal Tokugawa tried to instill into his samurai." "They ate, drank, played games and dreamt of glory in times gone by." "The samurai were able to take solace in the law that required them to wear the daisho, a two-sword combination." "This set of swords served as a distinctive badge that indicated their privileged social status." "But these swords were mostly symbolic." "Almost anyone of high rank began wearing them to denote their status, such as sumo wrestlers." "In this long age of peace, production of blades came almost to a standstill, whereas the creation of mountings and fittings for swords became a prosperous business." "Precious metals were used to make extremely elaborate decorations for swords Like these gold inlaid guards." "Small pieces of metal were attached to the sword's hilt under the silk wrapping to create a firm grip." "These were called menuki, and they became intricate miniature sculptures." "And more attention was given to the external beautification of the blade itself." "Designing the hamon, the pattern along the edge of the blade, became an art in itself." "A kind of abstract painting on a steel canvas." "Different smiths created signature hamon patterns on their swords, such a heartbeat," "cherry blossoms, or crab's claws." "During this long peace the samurai fought an increasingly desperate battle to keep their identities, their reason for being." "Mock battles were held at the foot of Mt." "Fuji." "Martial arts such as kendo flourished in the absence of real war." "The samurai needed a new purpose in life." "The shogun's government began to build the entire society on the rhetoric of warrior ideals." "Bushido became not just the way of the samurai, but the way of Japan." "And the samurai themselves?" "They became the enforcers of social order." "Ironically, it was only during this unprecedented time of peace that the first formal written version of the code of Bushido was written down by a samurai named Yamaga Soko." "Yamaga's most famous student and a romantic believer in the code of Bushido was Oishi Yoshio, who led the famous raid of the 47 loyal retainers of Ako in 1702." "A story that has become one of the defining legends of Japanese culture told and retold in countless books, plays and movies." "As the story goes, in 1701, lord Asano was publicly insulted by the lord Kira, making him draw his sword." "This was against the law in the Shogun's castle and he was forced in punishment to commit suicide." "The samurai retainers of Lord Asano, now ronin, or masterless samurai, became beggars and drunkards for two years to alleviate suspicion while they plotted their revenge" "Eventually on a bitterly cold December night they gathered and killed lord Kira in a daring attack." "Then the 47 ronin, carrying lord Kira's severed head, walked slowly up this very hill, knowing that they had acted honorably and that they would probably very soon be dead." "They came to this place, and in classic Bushido tradition, laid the head of his enemy on the grave of their lord." "Just right here." "The actions of the 47 ronin put the government into a real quandary should they reward this sublime expression of the code of Bushido, or should they enforce the law against vendettas that had kept the peace for so long?" "This was no longer classical Japan, where the code of Bushido was the ultimate code." "Now the laws that kept the peace were much more important." "And so they were forced to commit seppuku, ritual suicide, in the moonlight." "The 47 ronin were buried here next to the tomb of their lord." "And their graves have become something of a shrine to Bushido." "But was the code of Bushido also laid to rest here?" "Well, yes and no." "Soon after the death of the 47 ronin, centuries of peace had finally turned the samurai into petty bureaucrats." "The samurai desperately tried to hold on to their remaining status fighting skirmishes with swords against the guns of the new government conscript army." "Some became so impoverished, they were forced to do the unthinkable sell their swords." "Money raised in this fashion was called 'namida no kane' or 'the money of tears'." "Faced with the threat of Western domination, the Japanese knew that they had to iscard the old ways and adopt the new as quickly as possible." "The samurai were ordered to cut off their topknots." "Their swords were confiscated." "Their traditions and privileges were revoked." "But the samurai had ruled Japan for more than a millennium." "Bushido would be far from forgotten." "After the samurai had disappeared," "Japan's new leaders designed their education system and social codes to preserve the values on which their warrior ancestors had prided themselves." "They turned Masashige's loyalty to the emperor into an ideal." "Unfortunately, this allowed the dark militaristic side of Bushido the love of death and blind obedience to survive into the twentieth century with tragic results." "But today the brighter and nobler aspects of Bushido the virtues of loyalty, honor and perseverance, live on." "Part of the legacy of Bushido is the universal politeness and mutual respect so characteristic of Japanese society." "Time and again, the Japanese have turned to their samurai past in defining their national identity." "In schools, sports clubs and the workplace, group identities continue to hold sway reflecting the loyalty of the samurai to his clan." "Many modern Japanese are taught that the three great unifying generals together possess the ideal qualities of today's business warrior:" "Nobunaga's innovation," "Hideyoshi's diplomacy and Tokugawa's patience." "All qualities which are embodied in this artifact of the feudal age of Japan." "The value of a sword is far greater than its material worth." "It is a repository of history." "Its owner, a temporary guardian of the spirits of past owners, thus obliged to cherish, respect and maintain it for future generations so that it can pass on to them the spirit it embodies." "Just as the sword is the soul of the samurai," "Bushido, the way of the warrior, is still in many ways the soul of Japan." "Today's Japan..." "Everywhere you look amazing images fight for your attention..." "Bright lights, comics books, advertisements, and posters..." "This is the graphic art for which Japan is justly famous." "It's an art which has it's roots in one of the most dynamic periods of Japan's past..." "The age of the woodblock print, or 'Ukiyo-e'." "An artifact of the legendary 'floating world'..." "The Japanese woodblock print." "An art form whose impact was as revolutionary in Japan as Gutenberg's printed books were in the west." "And an art form that had a tremendous impact on modern western impressionism." "While the paintings of the impressionists Monet," "Van Gogh, Degas are glittering treasures of western culture, their inspiration wasn't western at all." "The real source of their new vision was not in France, not even in Europe, but in a country on the other side of the world." "In Japan!" "By the mid-19th Century, after a long period of isolation," "Japan was once again trading with the world..." "In the Bustling capital city of Edo, later to be known as Tokyo, artists and artisans were busy creating items for trade." "In Edo, most woodblock prints were things to be admired and then thrown away like comics books or newspapers today." "And so discarded prints were sometimes used to pack ceramics for export to America and Europe." "This is how Japanese woodblock prints first found their way into the oriental curiosity shops of London and Paris." "Initially they were almost unnoticed among the Asian artifacts flooding into Europe." "But when these brightly colored prints were discovered by the art world, exhibitions were quickly organized." "These Japanese prints would rock the foundations of Western Art." "In the mid-1800's, Western art was in a crisis." "The realistic school of painting in Europe had reached sort of a dead-end." "The new-fangled technology of the photograph produced a picture far more realistic than any artist could ever hope to paint." "And so, in search of inspiration for a new direction in their art, painters would gather to marvel at and collect the latest Japanese imports." "These prints that they so avidly sought were more than just collectibles." "They were revolutionary." "The Japanese woodblock print offered a strikingly different model for what art could be:" "Not photographic, but stylized, and impressionistic." "They emphasized the surface pattern of the print, rather than try to create the illusion of space beyond the flat surface of the canvas." "While the impressionists admired these unique prints from an exotic land, they also actually copied them." "Some Japanese prints became the models for some of the best-loved masterpieces of the impressionists!" "To these western artists, the woodblock print of Japan was a startling revelation." "Here was a fully evolved artistic tradition from a distant land profoundly different from their own." "Here was the inspiration for which they had been so desperately searching." "Take, for instance, Claude Monet's Japanese bridge in his famous waterlily garden in Giverny." "What inspired Monet to build and paint this bridge as he developed his impressionistic style?" "Well, the Japanese prints on the walls of his home." "Like Monet," "Van Gogh had an extensive collection of Japanese woodblock prints, which he arranged in his studio for inspiration." "All of his later work shows the profound influence of Japanese prints as he proudly admits in his letters to his brother Theo:" ""Dear Theo," "I want to paint this room in the Japanese manner..." "The shadows and cast shadows are left out and it is painted in bright flat tints like the Japanese prints."" "In a way all my work is founded on Japanese art..."" "But Van Gogh understood Japanese culture just about as much as he could read Japanese writing not at all." "He found Japanese characters so graphically interesting, that he used them to decorate his copies of Japanese woodblock prints." "No doubt he would have been surprised to learn that these characters, in fact, pell out an advertisement for a house of pleasure in the red-light district in Edo." "Clearly, Van Gogh and the other impressionists didn't understand the mysterious and distant culture that had produced these beguiling prints." "Despite these cultural misunderstandings, in Europe these prints helped bring about a revolution in art." "But in Japan, they helped give birth to a different kind of revolution a social revolution- one which changed the destiny of their nation." "To help us understand both of these revolutions, we need to investigate what was behind the creation of these prints." "This, then, is the incredible story of" "Ukiyo-e - prints of the floating world." "'E' means picture, and Ukiyo means 'floating world'." "What was this 'floating world'?" "It was a place that looked a bit like this" "Gion, the geisha quarter of Kyoto, where even today you can catch a glimpse of these highly trained entertainers devoted to the traditional arts of Japan." "In Edo, the geisha and lower-class courtesans could be found only in the Yoshiwara, also called Ukiyo, the floating world." "It was a magical place the center of all sorts of amusements." "On the surface, not much of it is left." "It's still here though, in the theatres, the bookshops and in the nightclubs of the red light districts." "This floating world, the Yoshiwara, was built at a unique moment in Japanese history." "At the beginning of the 17th century" "Japan had been plagued by the violent anarchy of civil war for well over a hundred years as regional lords battled for power." "This bloodshed only ended when a series of three warlords, the great unifiers of Japan, managed to subdue the warring clans." "The last of this trio, the military dictator or 'Shogun', Ieyasu Tokugawa, brought lasting peace and prosperity to Japan." "Once in power, he moved the capital from the old imperial city of Kyoto and established his capital at the small fishing village of Edo." "Within a few decades, Edo became the largest city in the world." "Behind me was the headquarters of the Tokugawa Shogun." "From his great castle, the center of Edo, he ruled all of Japan." "First, to keep the regional lords in check, he ordered them and their families to spend part of the year in Edo making them undertake long and costly journeys, and draining their warchests." "To prevent these lords from having any rebellious ideas when they went back home to the provinces, their family members were held here, practically as hostages." "This system managed to keep the peace for more than 250 years." "Next, the Shogun froze the class system." "For the first time, samurai status became hereditary." "But if you were one of the lowest of the low -a merchant or "Chonin"" "you and your family had no hope of ever rising in station." "In the now peaceful Edo period Japan the Samurai were forbidden to fight amongst themselves." "But they continued to be bullying and arrogant towards the merchants who were - despite their wealth socially at the bottom of the ladder." "And so, while the Samurai didn't have the wealth, they had all the power." "The merchants, on the other hand, had almost all the money, but none of the power." "Naturally, this created tension..." "The Yoshiwara pleasure district was built as a kind of pressure valve to release this class tension, as a place where the merchants were allowed the pursuit of pleasure and conspicuous consumption, and where they had some status and respect." "Built outside of the city literally floating on a swamp, with the only access by a long wooden walkway lit by lamps at night, the floating world was a separate reality, cut off from the rest of feudal Japan." "This walled compound, known as the Yoshiwara, quickly grew into its own self-contained quarter, filled with brothels, theatres, bars, teahouses, restaurants, and its own parks." "This district, and the stylish life lived within was called ukiyo, or the floating world." "The concept of Ukiyo comes from Buddhism." "Buddhism teaches that life, worldly pleasures, and desires are transient." "The concept had been important to the warrior code of the samurai, called Bushido," "For the samurai, only detachment from these desires could insure calm and fearlessness in the face of death." "In the hedonistic world of the Yoshiwara, the merchant class turned this concept on its head." "If pleasures are fleeting, why not enjoy them to the full while they last?" "Seize the day!" "The symbol of this attitude were cherry blossoms, which last only a few days in spring before the first rain washes them away forever." "The main street of the Yoshiwara was planted with cherry trees." "When they bloomed, a parade of courtesans and dandies strolled down this street to admire their beauty and to show off their own, equally fleeting fashions." "The samurai weren't allowed in this world." "Some Samurai being human, managed to sneak in of course." "Many of them fell deeply into debt tying to pursue a life-style they could ill-afford." "There was a haiku poem that said:" "In the Yoshiwara, The Way of the Warrior Cannot Conquer." "One Samurai described his experiences in the floating world thus:" ""Living only for the moment, gazing at the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves;" "singing songs, drinking wine, diverting ourselves in just floating, floating;" "caring not a fig for the problems staring us in the face, and floating like a gourd in the river current:" "That is what we call the floating world."" "Like Dickens in England and Balzac in France," "Japan had its own novelist, Ihara Saikaku, who documented how money came to dominate society in this period:" ""A man may be descended from the noblest of the Fujiwara, but if he dwells among shop keepers and lives in poverty, he is lower than a beggar."" "These rich merchants became patrons of the arts." "Arts which drew their subjects from the amusements of the Yoshiwara." "Like the floating world itself, images of it in woodblock prints on thin paper were thought of as impermanent and transient not of works of art to be kept and treasured." "But because of a new ingenious method of mass-production, in the newly prosperous Japan these prints were affordable for almost everyone, like fashion magazines or posters today" "'You figure today we've got magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, a million different kinds of media." "In the old days there was none of those things, none of those things." "These Ukiyo-e prints were a very very important way of circulating new ideas, and new concepts and all things like this.'" "This mass-production of woodblock prints was a team effort involving artists, engravers, printers and publishers." "The process often started with a publisher contacting an artist with a proposal for a new project." "Often the new fashion of the week being worn by a famous courtesan." "The artist would then produce an underdrawing in black ink." "The publisher would submit the drawing to the Shogun's censor." "If the design was acceptable, it was stamped with seals proving that it had been inspected." "In the next step an engraver spread the design upside down on a block, usually made of straight-grained cherry wood." "And he would then carve the design" "This was exacting work carvers could represent a single strand of a courtesan's hair or a rain shower by cutting away wood on either side of a line as narrow as a tenth of a centimetre." "The block of wood used by the carver was limited by the size of the cherry tree from which it came." "This meant that images much wider than 10 inches could not be produced." "Larger images were created by joining blocks together usually into a triptych." "This had an interesting result." "If you have just panel of a triptych, people and things are brutally amputated at the edges." "Some western artists misunderstood this and thought it was a revolutionary approach to composition." "Edgar Degas, for one adapted the practice chopping off horses and buggies at the edges." "Once the ink block had been carved it then went to the printer who produced a number of black and white prints." "This was done by painting it with black ink, then pressing a piece of high-quality paper on top and rubbing it with a pressing pad." "At the beginning wood block prints were just this-black and white line pictures." "These early artists produced woodblock prints in the form of illustrated books, which were widely popular in the early 17th Century in Japan." "But in the year 1657, disaster struck." "A great fire destroyed nearly all of Edo." "In the aftermath of this catastrophe, people struggled to rebuild their homes and there was a ready market for cheap decoration." "Spotting this demand, Hishikawa Moronobu, an illustrator, persuaded his publishers to sell his work as separate sheets with no text." "And so Moronobu became the father of Ukiyo-e." "Although the period before full color printing is called the "primitive Period"" "There is nothing primitive about the work of Moronobu..." "One of Moronobu's most famous prints is called The Lovers which he produced in 1680." "Look at the man's knee in the lower right, echoed by the lady's knee in the center." "The tree behind them is a mirror of the same curve..." "You can almost feel the intimate swaying motion of the couple's embrace." "The production of these calendar prints led to rapid advances in technique especially the process of positioning a single sheet of paper precisely on different wood blocks to form a multi-colored print." "The engraver would carve register marks on the wood block-called kento." "These acted as guides for the color printers so that all the different colors lined up." "These prints in progress were delivered to the artist who marked the areas that were to be printed a particular color one sheet for each color." "Next the color-block carvers went to work, pasting the proof sheets onto separate blocks of wood and carving out the design for each different color" "The ink block and color blocks were then handed to the printer." "Using the ink block as a base, he used the color blocks to transfer the colors one at a time to produce the final print." "Once the artist had approved the specimen print and made any needed corrections, printing got underway in earnest." "The process of making a thousand or so copies might take three weeks to a month of intense concentrated work." "Printers were understandably notorious for going off on drinking binges once a run was completed." "The people of Edo were delighted with these new multicolored prints." "But they saw them in a different light than we do today." "That's the big misunderstanding now among everybody who thinks about woodblock prints." "To think of a... to speak of a print now is to speak of a picture." "People look at the picture and say 'oh that's beautiful' " "Utamaro's picture, or Hiroshige's picture." "That's wrong it misses most of what these things are about." "They are not pictures, they are objects." "In today's world now every room has this light hanging from the ceiling." "We look at it under this light and it becomes a flat picture." "It's beautiful, but it's just a picture." "But go back 150 years to the era when these things were made, there were none of these lights." "The light all came horizontally, and this thing is transformed!" "The light strikes the paper, we can see the embossing, the beautiful colors blending." "It's now a 3-dimensional object." "Not something made by one guy, the famous Hiroshige whose name we remember." "No." "Hiroshige, and a carver, and a printer, and the man who made the paper and the man who made the baren," "20 people together worked to make this beautiful thing." "And now nobody, nobody knows that." "Some townspeople took to gluing these new beautifully colored prints to the supporting pillars in their homes." "An artist named Harunobu ingeniously responded to this vogue by producing tall and narrow pillar prints." "This shape is a uniquely Japanese format and helped push the print makers to the very limits of their creativity." "Here Harunobu takes advantage of the height of the format by using the uprights of the fence and house to emphasize it and he place the two figures one over the other." "The greatest master of the pillar print was Isoda Koryusai." "Originally a samurai, he gave up his rank and privileges to become a ukiyo-e artist." "Often the best selling prints were those of actors in the newly invented and most popular form of theatre in Edo" " Kabuki." "Just as the woodblock print was the art of the people, kabuki was their theatre." "It was less formal, more dramatic than the traditional aristocratic Noh theatre of the samurai." "The Shogun also banned the samurai from wearing swords in the theatre." "This excluded the proud samurai, who refused to give them up." "Nor were they willing to stoop to enter the tiny 'mouse door', entrance which made equal and humbled all who entered." "Of course, some samurai couldn't resist the temptation." "In a society in which their lives were rigidly controlled, kabuki gave room for the commoners to vent emotions they could not normally express in public." "The sets and acting were flamboyant." "The audience took great delight in hissing at the villain and applauding the heroes." "Despite their low social status, actors became extremely popular and some became extraordinarily wealthy like movie or pop stars today." "Their flamboyant lifestyles attracted the admiration of the populace and often, the wrath of the authorities." "This emotion and flamboyant pageant of Kabuki naturally attracted Ukiyo-e artists." "The first great artist to capture it was Kiyonobu." "He started out painting signboards for the theatre, but quickly graduated to making ukiyo prints of the actors." "Like his posters and signs, he made them as commercial products some prints actually advertised commercial goods." "And, kabuki actors themselves sometimes slyly plugged commercial goods on stage." "Product placement in the mass media is not an entirely modern phenomenon!" "In 1794 at the height of Kabuki's popularity," "Tsutaya, the greatest publisher of ukiyo-e, was in serious trouble." "In a government crackdown, his publications were suspended, half his profits confiscated and his shop... closed." "He needed a new series of Ukiyo-e prints" "Kabuki prints to recuperate his losses." "The artist he picked to produce them was a complete unknown." "He signed himself Sharaku, but no one actually knows who he was." "Was he an aristocrat, an actor, a Samurai, another artist working under a pseudonym or maybe, a foreigner?" "What we do know is that he produced a series of startling prints that reveal him to be, along with Rembrandt and Goya, one of the great portraitists of all time." "Look at the power of this portrayal of the actor Ebizo in the role of a man driven to suicide by the disgrace of his daughter." "The grey lines of his collar lead down to his twisting hands, expressing his grief, resignation, and his awful decision." "However for some Sharaku was too good..." "Critics of the time wrote that he:" ""Was skillful at the depiction of their facial features and their habitual expressions, but he destroyed their appeal, and the actors came to resent him."" "After all, nobody likes a harsh critic" "Irate actors weren't Sharaku's only problem his work also suffered from government meddling" "Sharaku was a master at painting on flecked mica backgrounds." "These gave his prints an ominous quality... an effect which critics described as" ""Like a frenzied lunatic dancing about in a courtyard under the light of the moon."" "The government slapped a ban on the use of mica on prints no more frenzied lunatics!" "We read the history books now and they went back and forth and back and forth." "And uh, the printmakers and the artists tried to make things more opulent, and uh, luxurious, meanwhile the government was trying to put all these edicts down you can only use three colors, you can't use mica powder," "and stuff like this." "It was trying to keep things plain and simple and not so exciting, not so interesting." "But human nature is human nature, you know, people want to live a new way, they want to better their position in life." "And this media, this medium was one way in which those ideas were really, really circulated." "This went on for a hundred years the battle went back and forth between people trying to better themselves, and the government trying to say ' you will stay as you are'." "In another edict, the shogunate decided to stamp out immorality in the theatre and banned women on the stage!" "And so male actors who impersonated women called onnagata, made their debut." "Sharaku's depictions of onnagata were brilliant." "He perfectly captures the role and personality of this onnagata, with the effeminate hand gesture, and his pursed lips, with an economy of line that is nothing short of astounding." "Sharaku produced 140 astonishing prints in a mere 10 months, land disappeared completely." "Tsutaya died two years later without revealing Sharaku's identity or what happened to him." "It was rumored that he was murdered by an enraged kabuki actor." "In the streets of Edo the only people who could rival the kabuki actors for star status were the famous geisha and courtesans." "Dressed beautifully in very expensive and colorful kimonos, the most popular were talented poets, painters, musicians, and highly skilled conversationalists." "They were dream figures - unreachable and untouchable by average men." "Only the most wealthy and favored could ever hope to have women like these entertain them in a teahouse, and this was the heart of the problem for the authorities." "'When your status in society began to be measured by the elegant courtesan you could buy instead of by your birthright, which is a feudal way of structuring a society, when you status began to be measured that way," "boy, the end was in sight for the structure." "So these prints I feel were very very much an important part of that.'" "Prints of these courtesans created a revolution in expectations and styles." "Ukiyo-e printmakers went to the Yoshiwara to sketch, lounge in the tearooms, talk and enjoy the company of the courtesans." "The foremost of these was Kitagawa Utamaro." "Utamaro's portraits offer profound psychological insight into the women of the Yoshiwara." "He was fascinated with women in all of their guises, but simultaneously reduced all of them to an ideal type." "Utamaro was the man who loved women." "He was the only artist who was able to express the deep and often confused emotions and the unhappy lives of the women who lived in the floating world." "Look at these different portraits of a very real young girl the tea house waitress Ohisa." "Here she is portrayed just another pretty face on the arm of a local celebrity." "But when Utamaro portrayed her, she's no longer just a teahouse waitress." "She's Ingrid Bergman, she's Marilyn Monroe." "He turns her into an icon." "A distant and enigmatic beauty, aware of the impression she is creating on the men who see her." "Utamaro was trying through his drawings of idealized females to somehow capture the essence of beauty, happiness and desire." "He was trying to find the meaning of life and love in the heart of the floating world, a heart which was ultimately, empty." "At the end of his life a disillusioned Utamaro produced a series of drawings satirizing the very men who had created the inflexible shogunate." "He was arrested and taken away in wooden handcuffs." "His spirit broken, he died just two years later." "With his death, the classic age of the woodblock print drew to a close." "It's hard now for us 200 years or 150 years after the fact to really realize the impact that this stuff" "I think had on that society." "You think of it as uh..." "it wasn't outwardly subversive." "The people who made these pictures weren't trying to bring down the government or stuff like that." "But the fact that these pictures were circulated and this lifestyle was promoted by such circulation, it was absolutely antithetical to the stated aim of the government to keep everybody in their place and maintain a feudal society." "And so print makers began to depict landmarks in and around the city." "There was an explosion of interest in these landscapes, largely because many normal people were forbidden to travel within Japan." "But the fundamental theme of Ukiyo, the transience and impermanence of life, was not abandoned." "It simply found a different expression particularly in the masterful hands of Katsushika Hokusai." "His Thirty-six views of Mt." "Fuji became the most popular and best selling series of prints ever" "Here the fleeting effect of the reddish light of dawn is captured along with the permanence and solidity of the mountain." "Hokusai also created one of the most popular works of Japanese art" "The Great Wave off Kanazawa." "This powerful print was hardly spontaneous." "He spent over 30 years perfecting this image." "In its final expression, the wave, topped with angry claws of foam looms high, at the very point of breaking." "The boats seem to be carried forward by the raging flood, passive before the towering wave their occupants seemingly accepting the threat with zen-like calmness." "Beneath the raging crest is a smaller wave that echoes the shape of mount Fuji in the distance." "The wave will crash and will be quickly replaced by another, just as transient." "But, in contrast, the solid mountain in the background will endure." "In all it is a brilliant comment on the values of ukiyo the fleeting impermanence of life." "Hokusai's deep devotion to his art is reflected perhaps most vividly in his sketchbooks." "He said of himself:" "Since I was six years old," "I've been obsessed with drawing the forms of things." "I had produced a great number of pictures, but nothing I did before seventy is worth anything." "When I reach eighty, I will have made some progress;" "at ninety, I will have reached the deep meaning of things;" "at one hundred, my work will be marvelous and at one hundred and ten, every dot and line will become truly alive." "He died at the age 89, calling himself an 'old man mad for drawing'." "Hokusai's sketchbooks were a revelation to Western painters who turned many of his sketches into powerful paintings." "Edgar Degas, in particular was enraptured by Hokusai's studies of human movement." "And on the Pacific island of Papeete the artist Paul Gaugin had access to Hokusai's manga, which were brought by sailors from Japan." "But artistic influences came back across the oceans to Japan as well." "Hokusai studied western paintings, and we can see their influence in his emphasis on spatial depth and linear perspective." "And the deep blue so prevalent in his works was called Berorin no ai or Berlin color, what we call Prussian Blue, because this synthetic dye was imported from Germany at the time of Hokusai." "Ando Hiroshige's series of prints entitled The Fifty-three stations of the Tokaido Road became even more successful." "The Tokaido road was used not only by nobles but also by normal traffiic journeying between Edo the seat of government and Kyoto, the home of the emperor and the religious capital of the land." "The road began at Nihonbashi bridge and ended here the famous Sanjo bridge in Kyoto." "The final destination of the busiest road in the world at that time." "What a relief it must have been to arrive at and cross over the bridge bringing to an end the three hundred and ten mile trek by foot from Edo." "The journey was probably made a bit more comfortable by 53 way stations that were built along the route to cater to the needs of this vast army of travelers." "The scenery along this road was both picturesque and rugged." "These changing landscapes and the human traffiic along the road were Hiroshige's inspiration." "Hiroshige was a master at celebrating both wild nature, and human nature." "With his gentle sense of humor and poetic spirit he captured people in their daily existence their transient passage through ever-changing landscapes." "For many, these prints continue to define traditional Japan." "He was a master of using almost cartoon-like figures to show the people in his landscapes." "Drawn with a few deft strokes he accurately shows human gesture and motion that complement the landscape." "Never a characature, always an essence." "Hiroshige was the direct ancestor of the modern day manga cartoonist." "You can clearly see his influence in the comic books of today." "He was a visionary graphic designer." "Many of his prints present a breathtaking tour de force of visual imagination, showing us the world through an eagle's eye well before such a view was humanly possible." "And just as he can invoke desolation, with equal skill he can populate a world." "The view from here at Edo castle used to overlook the samurai residential district, a view that was captured by Hiroshige in this print." "In those days, and still today, fish kites were flown to celebrate boy's day." "Because the carp swims upstream, the fish kite represents struggling and triumphing over adversity." "The fish, representing virility and business success, was the emblem adopted by the merchants." "And in Hiroshige's print, the kite seems more than just a kite it is a living, vigorous fish flying triumphantly and dwarfing the samurai district in the distance, a symbol of who really dominates Edo." "This print is a subtle but strong indictment of the samurai class and their tenion" "Within 10 years of the publication of this print, when the black ships of the American navy finally came knocking on Japan's door in the mid-1800's, the preparatory work had been done." "The feudal society, so outwardly strong and solid, was hollow at the core." "With the Meiji restoration it collapsed like a house of cards, and a new modern society arose in its place." "The introduction of western ideas, Western buildings and western fashions heralded the end of the samurai era." "And, sadly, the printing press and the photograph caused the decline of the woodblock print." "But the triumph of the merchants was complete." "Yet in many ways there is continuity with the past in Japan that can never be shattered." "One final print by Hiroshige illustrates this point." "A great paper lantern like the one in this print still hangs in the red-pillared Thundergate of Asakusa Temple." "It appears today unchanged from Hiroshige's time." "Not many people notice that the temple is not the one that appears in the print." "The original burned down in 1865 and was not rebuilt until 1960." "The modern Pagoda and temple were rebuilt on opposite side from the way they appear in Hiroshige's print." "And the thundergate itself was rebuilt from concrete, not the original wood." "Hiroshige's print was used as a guide to rebuild it 100 years later." "Although different, both the original and the reconstruction convey the same feeling." "The values of the samurai and of the merchants both still persist and animate modern Japan." "The tension between them may be part of what makes Japan such and unique and dynamic society." "The Ukiyo-e print sheds light on Japanese culture in a way that few other artifacts of that unique culture can." "Any single print of a beautiful, courtesan, no matter how revolutionary, could not cause the overthrow of a feudal society," "but the Ukiyo-e as an art form certainly played a major role, and that is perhaps the highest accolade that can possibly be paid to any genre of art." "They will live forever as a graphic example of the power of art to change the world." "Beautiful, smooth, soft, delicate, strong, and precious." "This amazing fabric has captivated human imagination for over 3000 years." "Throughout history it has clothed the rich and powerful." "But more than this, it has been a form of currency, a tool of diplomacy," "a badge of rank, and a fabric of the divine." "And silk, above all other treasures, has been the thread connecting East and West..." "It is an artifact that has truly shaped history." "At the end of the Twelfth Century" "Ghengis Khan and his army of horsemen the Mongol hoard, swept down from their capital in Karakorum, across these steppes, and conquered everything in their path." "These mounted warriors established the most far- reaching empire in the history of the world." "It covered all of central Asia, and stretched all the way from China to Poland." "Feared as ferocious bloodthirsty barbarians, the Mongols were actually one of the most professional and effective cavalry armies the world has ever seen." "Their skill on horseback has been passed down to their modern day descendants..." "Each soldier was a self-contained and self-suffiicient battle unit." "Not just skilled horseman, they were also deadly archers." "They carried two bows a heavy one for shooting targets at distance, and a light one for close combat." "A lance with a sickle-shaped hook and an axe completed their personal arsenals." "But their skill with weapons wasn't their only strength." "Their armor was made of several layers of thick leather strips." "And worn underneath their armor one of the secrets of their invincibility." "Silk underwear." "Under their leather outer armor the Mongolian warriors wore a silk undershirt." "And it was worn for a purpose." "Silk is such a strong material that if an arrow or a spear pierced their leather outer armor, it would pull the silk of their undershirt into the wound, preventing the barbs from catching in their skin and also keeping the point away" "from the wound thus preventing infection." "It also kept them warm." "Thus, garbed with their silk underclothes, the Mongolian warriors rode into battle in comfort and in safety." "But the Mongols were nomads and they didn't cultivate the silk worm and the mulberry bushes upon which they fed." "So where did they get enough silk to clothe the thousands of mounted warriors in the Mongol hoard?" "The discovery of silk is said to have taken place in China almost two and a half thousand years ago by the wife of the yellow emperor" " Huang Di." "Legend has it that the lady H'si Ling made her discovery when a silk moth cocoon fell from a mulberry tree into her hot tea, and began to unravel." "The empress has been revered ever since as the lady of silk who taught the Chinese to cultivate mulberry trees and raise silk worms." "Her discovery of the secret if silk would profoundly influence the history of the China, and the world." "This is the Great Wall at Simitai the northern boundary of ancient China." "Here an inscribed stone marks the boundary between the civilized Middle Kingdom" "China and the land of the northern barbarians." "Beyond the wall was to the ancient Chinese a land of legend strange, exotic and unknown." "It was also dangerous as this great defensive wall clearly shows." "But, the Great wall was not China's only protection." "Since the time of the earliest Empire in China, the Han, the Chinese paid, or rather bribed the nomads, called the Xiongnu, not to attack China with annual gifts of thousands of bolts of fine silk." "These are some of the earliest silks ever found." "They are from China and were used to line the coffiin of a Xiongnu warrior." "It is the same silk which over a thousand of years later the Mongols obtained from the Chinese as bribes, and so were able to make a shirt for every mounted warrior to protect them from wounds inflicted by Chinese arrows." "Once firmly in command of a unified China, the Han began to send silk westward in a search for allies against the barbarians at their borders, and they opened overland trade with more distant peoples to the West." "Thus, the Silk Road, which transformed the history of China in the East and Rome in the West, was born." "And so, 100 years before the birth of Christ, a great river of silk began to flow out from the Northwest borders of China over land routes across central Asia." "The silk road wasn't just one route, but a number of branching paths, which ran from oasis to oasis, and up high and dangerous mountain paths..." "Paths described by one 5th century Chinese pilgrim like this:" ""There is snow in both winter and summer, winds, rain, drifting sand, with steep crags and precipices along the way." "Going forward, there is no sure foothold."" "From the distance of space we can get a feeling of the true wilderness, the utter desolation of this terrain." "This is the southwest corner of China's Sinjiang Province." "The Silk Road passes east to west through this image." "The toughest part of the journey took them through the Taklamakan desert which means in dialect... 'lf you go into this place, you won't come out alive'." "Much of China's rapid progress during the Han dynasty came about because of traders who managed to make their way along this treacherous Silk route." "Ajourney to the West only made possible by the remarkable talents of this creature..." "The two-humped bactrian camel is not a speed demon it travels at only two and a half miles an hour but its endurance, and its life-saving skills as storm-detector and water-diviner are remarkable." "At the site of underground water old camels will paw at the ground, and before a human could sense a oncoming sandstorm they roar, huddle together and bury their noses in the sand, warning the traders and giving them a chance to take shelter." "Only these intrepid beasts could make it across the enormous and desolate stretches of the silk road." "But even with these camels the journey was deadly." "According to an early Chinese pilgrim, crossing the Taklamakan desert was so dangerous that it was impossible to know the way except for following the path of decaying bones, which showed the direction." "And even if you survived the elements, then you had to survive the bandits and brigands who descended like vultures out of mountain passes to fall on passing caravans." "So what was it that made men risk their lives to cross in this inhospitable wilderness?" "The incredible profits of the silk trade." "If you want to understand why Chinese silk was so special, and why it was so vastly profitable to Chinese traders, you have to get to know this rather unattractive creature:" "The blind, flightless Bombyx Mori moth which spins a cocoon for its larvae." "Today, this species is cultivated for silk production." "But the wild ancestor of this moth lived on the leaves of the white mulberry tree and was unique to China." "Today, after the raw silk is degummed in boiling water, before weaving in the traditional manner, it is dyed with colorful modern synthetic aniline dyes." "The silk that the moths spin is a continuous thread of incredible strength measuring from 500 to 1,500 meters in length." "Single filaments are too thin to use for weaving." "And so for production purposes, several filaments are combined with a slight twist into one strand." "This process is known as "silk reeling" or "filature"." "These threads are then stretched and re-spooled before weaving." "And finally the thread which is stronger than a similarly sized thread of steel is then woven by hand to produce the fabric." "This Chinese bombyx mori silk moth had a triangular shaped mouth." "To illustrate why this is important, lets look for a moment at human hair through a microscope." "Caucasian hair under magnification has a round cross-section, making it wavy." "Negroid hair is oval shaped, making it kinky or tightly curled." "Asian hair has a rounded triangular shape, making it lie straight and flat and appear smooth and shiny." "Like Asian hair, the silk filament extruded from the Chinese silk moth's uniquely shaped mouth has a similar triangular cross-section making it lie smooth and flat when woven into silk fabric." "That property, the triangular cross sectional shape of silk thread, is what makes woven silk fabric so soft, so smooth and so fine." "Other parts of the world had similar moths but the thread they produce is neither so fine nor capable of being continuously unreeled." "Whereas the Chinese learned almost 4,000 years ago to carefully unwind the unbroken thread of these cocoons, other cultures typically waited until the cocoon was hatched and the continuous filament broken before using it to make silk." "So outside of China, silk thread was typically coarser and thicker." "Usually a multi-strand spun thread which when woven, produced a far less fine silk material." "This very fine Chinese woven silk was often embroidered with fine silk thread." "In China so small were the stitches and so fine was this embroidery that it impaired the eyesight of the seamstresses who worked for the Imperial Court." "To save their eyesight, this very fine and extravagantly labor intensive 'forbidden stitch' was outlawed by the Communists when they came to power." "The Chinese were manufacturing and exporting massive amounts of silk as early as the second century before Christ." "At that time, who in the world was wealthy enough to buy all this exported silk?" "Well, the Romans, of course." "The sheer size and magnificence of these Roman ruins at Ephesus in modern Turkey give some indication of the wealth of the Roman empire." "Much of this wealth was spent on the purchase of silk from China." "More than 200 years before the birth of Christ, the Han dynasty of China was already exporting fine silk overland to the West." "At the same time the Roman empire had reached its greatest extent stretching from Northern England in the West, all the way to the borders of Turkey and Afghanistan in the East." "Silk from China arrived here in Ephesus, the Asian capital of the Roman empire, and the original western terminus of the silk road." "But its final destination was in Imperial Rome." "The Roman aristocracy put enormous value on this fine, almost transparent material, which they called 'Chinese tissue'." "They thought it grew on trees and sometime referred to it as 'Tree Wool'." "Ignorance about the mysterious origins of this material made it all the more glamorous and coveted, especially by roman ladies for their dresses." "The Roman author Pliny complained bitterly about the expensive extravagance, the immodesty, not to mention the cost, that was caused by the demand for this fine diaphanous material, especially by the women of the Roman upper classes." "During the reign of the emperor Augustus in 14BC, the Roman Senate even found it necessary to ban Roman citizens from wearing silken clothing in public." "The demand for Chinese silk grew steadily in Rome throughout the second and third centuries." "And in fact flourished throughout the imperial period." "Julius Caesar's triumphant entry into Rome was welcomed with silk canopies." "This street held stores selling luxury goods, among them silk." "And even at the end, in 408, when the Visigoths besieged Rome, their leader Alaric demanded and got from the city a ransom of over 4000 silk tunics, and other rich booty." "Over the centuries the Chinese traders didn't just bring back Roman gold." "They also brought home the exotic treasures of the West, never before seen in China." "Treasures that you can still discover in the Bazaars of Istanbul in Turkey, the crossroads of East and West." "Typically the goods that traveled across these routes were luxury goods." "Low volume, high value, portable and light." "King among them from the East of course was silk." "But from the west came extremely rare and valuable items." "Such as for instance, styrax - a resin that was use in perfumes and medicines." "Or orpiment, a yellow mineral that was used to dye in Chinese imperial robes." "And frankincense and myrrh, incredibly valuable incenses from the gulf area of the middle east." "One valuable item that traveled along the silk road was murex, the only fast, non-fading natural color dye." "Imperial purple." "This rare dye comes from a shellfish, found only in the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean." "Its use was restricted to the imperial courts." "It was used to color the robes of the Roman emperor, the Byzantine emperor, the Turkish sultans, and the Chinese Emperor." "This rare dye was the single most durable status symbol in the history of the world." "Another valuable export item from the west was Cobalt from Iran, which melts at a very high temperature and was therefore suitable for the blue underglaze decoration on ceramics." "Until China found its own domestic source of Cobalt it imported both the idea and the blue cobalt powder needed to produce blue and white ceramics." "China also traded their silk for Blown glass, as the Chinese had not yet perfected this skill." "Rare food items like dates and sweet clover were also sold in Chaina." "They coveted rare gems like lapis lazuli." "And Baltic and Russian amber was especially cherished." "Trade of such scarce and valuable luxury items was not really true commercial trade." "Rather it was essentially an exchange of luxury good between the ruling elites of different empires." "Silk and other luxury goods were used as diplomatic tools, and as ways to communicate between ruling elites." "As popular as silk was for Chinese robes and Roman togas, silk had many other uses in addition to clothing." "Silk was not just an item that could be purchased in these bazaars, it was often the medium of exchange itself." "Silk was a more than just a luxury good it was almost a substitute for cash a common currency along the silk route and in the cultural centers at either end in China, Byzantium, Persia and Western Europe." "Silk became kind of a standard cash a gold coin was worth 80 bolts of silk... a female slave -41, and a horse - a hundred!" "Trade across Asia depended upon the maintenance of strong imperial power at both ends." "But empires wax and wane." "So it was for the Han the founders of Imperial China, and for the Emperors of Rome." "At either end of the silk road, these empires were faced with many challenges the costly burden of defense, excessive taxes, rampant corruption, peasant uprisings and slave revolts," "natural disasters, ruinous competition for imperial power and invasion by barbarian tribes." "This led to the breakdown of central authority." "With the death of the last Han Emperor in the year 220 AD," "China broke up into smaller, less stable kingdoms." "And in the year 408, Rome fell to the barbarians." "As these Imperial states crumbled, international trade, in both commodities and luxury goods, including the trade in silk, suffered." "During this unstable period silk road was traveled only sporadically as merchants could not travel safely nor keep the profits from theirjournies." "The few travelers who braved the trip had to have motivations beyond mere profit." "They had to be on a mission inspired by faith." "They began to travel not to West as traders, but to the southwest to India, as pilgrims." "Silk and other luxury trade goods were not the only things that moved along the silk road." "Missionaries and religious pilgrims carried their beliefs with them." "And one of the most powerful and persuasive of these beliefs was Buddhism." "A robust trade grew up between China and India." "Incredible volumes of fine Chinese silk were brought from China to India where they were used to decorate temples and traded for Buddhists' relics which were reverently carried back to China, and enshrined in pagodas." "Among the Buddhist relics which were brought by Chinese pilgrims back from India was Indian silk." "Early silk textiles manufactured in India were considered ritually pure and still are today." "This giant statue of the Buddha, one of the largest in the world located in Mongolia, is hung with over 500 meters of silk, most of it from India's holiest city, Varanasi." "Increasing this hysteria over relics led to government crackdowns on the power of" "Buddhist monasteries in China." "But in the end, the government realized silk exchanged for relics was a small price to pay for the solace these relics gave to an exploited population." "Buddhist religion gave them hope and made them more passive in the face of the trials and tribulations of their diffiicult lives." "And so rather than ban religion," "China closely controlled and regulated it by Imperial decree." "In the centuries after the Han dynasty," "Missionaries and merchants of other faiths entered China and found many converts among impoverished peasants and the insecure merchant class." "There was for instance, a large Nestorian Christian community in Chang'an, the capital of China at that time." "In the sixth century, the most powerful ruler in the West, the successor of the Roman Emperors, became aware of these Christians living in China, and took advantage of the situation." "He was Justinian, the emperor of Byzantium, the eastern Christian empire." "Constructor of the greatest church in Christendom - the Hagia Sophia." "For the greater glory of Christ, not to mention the imperial treasury," "Justinian was desperate to learn what the Romans could only guess at the secret of silk manufacture." "He arranged to have two Nestorian Christian missionaries from Persia smuggle silkworm eggs out of China." "They hid the eggs in a hollow walking sticks and brought them to his court in Constantinople, what is today Istanbul." "After more than a thousand years," "China had finally lost her silk monopoly." "Once the Byzantines had broken the Chinese monopoly on silk production, they quickly established their own state monopoly, and imports from China declined." "Further East in China, it took about 300 years for the politics of the Region to stabilize..." "Eventually a Turkish nomadic plan called the Tang took China's land and customs as its own, and in the 7th Century the Tang Dynasty re-established security and safety of travel along the silk road." "But, by this time the Byzantine empire the successor to the might of Rome had joined China as a major silk production center." "Commerce between China and Byzantium flourished and both courts - the Byzantine and the Tang - luxuriated in silk." "In both China and Byzantium, silk was used to make magnificent court robes that denoted the rank of the wearer." "The clothing of the Tang Court not only used different colours of silk for different ranks, but in the year 694 the empress Wu Tse-t'ien created a kind of vest for offiicials to wear with different textile designs embroided on them." "At the Byzantine court, different ranks of offiicials wore robes with embroidered designs specific to each rank." "At the Byzantine court, the use of a different colored silk robe by each rank of court offiicial was design to eliminate any vestige of" "Roman Rebublican traditions from the imperial service." "The use of embroidered silk rank badges to denote the ranks of offiicials at the Chinese imperial court persisted all the way until 1912." "Offiicials in the military and civil ranks wore different symbols" "For instance, the first rank military was represented front and back by the Qilin, the Chinese mythical unicorn." "The symbols on military rank badges declined from the highest, through, in descending order, lions, tigers and bears." "The lowest ranks were an ox and a rhinoceros." "The nine civil ranks of the mandarin were denoted by birds." "The first rank was the crane." "The ranks descended from there through peacocks, ducks, egrets the eighth rank for instance was the quail." "This practice of using embroidered silk robes and rank badges, was an attempt to re-establish and legitimize a state-sanctioned bureaucratic heiarchy, and to eliminate any indication of individualism and independence that was not approved or controlled by the rulers." "By exercising a government monopoly control over the supply of silk, and assigning colors and badges with designs specific to each rank, the imperial masters were to very effectively able to create a system of highly visible rewards and punishments" "for those who obeyed or defied them." "It was a practical system, and psychologically very effective, and it lasted for a very long time." "But soon a new force in the world was threatening the safety of the empires that traded along the silk road." "A force springing from fervent belief in a new prophet." "Islam had begun its explosive expansion, galloping out of southern Arabian to inflict conversion by the sword on the peoples of Southern Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia." "By the late 15th century, the entire Taklamakan region had been thoroughly conquered and dominated by Islam." "The prophet Mohammed had decreed, to avoid the worship of icons, that no image of a human should be made." "And so statues and paintings of the Buddha were systematically destroyed by believers." "In the West proud Byzantium fell to the Muslim Ottoman Turks." "And Justinian's great church was converted into a mosque." "Minarets towers from which to call the faithful to prayer were built to dominate the dome of what was Christianity's greatest church." "Just as in Buddhism, silk became a cloth sacred to the Muslims." "The sacred Ka'Ba, the most important shrine in Mecca, is draped in black silk with the names of reigning Caliphs woven in to proclaim their piety, advertise their protection of the holy places and proclaim their right to rule as successors to the prophet." "Here in the city of Bursa in Anatolia, the silk industry flourished because of the local mulberry trees, on which the silk moths fed." "The Ottoman sultans inherited and continued the Byzantine silk monopoly, and they built this marketplace and trading post at the western end of the silk road called the koza han the silk cocoon market." "They built this marketplace to facilitate and control the trade in silk cocoons, and as an inn for traveling merchants." "And the Byzantine tradition of silk court robes was inherited by the Muslim Ottoman court." "Again because of the ban in Islam on human and animal imagery, floral and geometric patterns decorate these robes, rather than the eagle and duck patterns of the Byzantine court robes." "Many of these patterns were influenced by Chinese styles." "So skilled were the Ottoman weavers that European courts regularly ordered garments from Bursa." "So important were these silk robes to the Ottoman court that when greeting the sultan, visitors did not kiss his hand or ring as in the European tradition, but the hem of his robe." "The Tang ming and Qing emperors wore elaborately embroidered silk robes like this one colored with royal yellow orpiment dye imported from the west." "Their empresses wore equally elaborate robes covered with embroidered designs of Taoist symbols of immortality, delicately sewn with the elaborate forbidden stitch." "Although in the face of Islamic expansion the silk trade again went into a decline, silk making in China prospered as the new Song dynasty court concentrated on internal matters." "To buy themselves time and some security from attack, the Song dynasty Chinese resorted to the trick used by the Han 1000 years before they used their silk to buy protection from the marauding tribes on their borders..." "This worked for 300 years... until the advent of Ghengis Khan." "The great Khan united all peoples and tribes "living in felt tents"" "into an army that proceeded to conquer half the world." "As we saw, clad in their silk undershirts, the Mongols swept everything before them." "With a force of only 20,000 calvary, they conquered 80,000 Russian troops, swept through Poland into Germany, Hungary and the Balkans..." "They crushed China ruling it from the new capital at Beijing, invaded Burma, Vietnam and Cambodia." "Conquered Korea, and invaded Japan." "Eventually they controlled almost the entire Asian landmass." "Once again now under the protection of Mongol Empire silk began to flow westward out of China." "Silk manufactured in China under the Yuen dynasty of the Mongols was woven not only for high ranking offiicials of the Mongol Court but also to order for the Vatican in Rome and for export to Muslim markets in Spain and for mosques in Syria, Egypt and Arabia." "But the Mongol empire did not survive beyond three generations." "They were far better at conquest than at administration." "By the time Ghenghis Khan's grandchildren came to power, the Mongol empire had already begun to collapse in tribal squabbles, intrigues and squandering of their inheritance by the new Khans." "In China the Mongols were driven out and succeeded by the peasant leader," "Hong Wu who founded the Ming Dynasty." "With the rise of the Ming, the overland silk road once more went into decline." "At the western end it was controlled by Italian and Arabic middlemen who charged extortionate for luxury goods and dominated the trickle that did manage to cross Asia." "These encouraged explorers to set sail around the world looking for new ways to secure silk and spices from the East." "The discovery of alternative sea routes to the silk road broke the monopolies on the overland silk trade." "No longer would danger, diffiiculty and royal monopolies limit the availability of silk." "Silk shipped by sea became more easily and readily available." "Now the only restriction would be imposed by price." "During the early Ming dynasty, the silk trade flourised." "But quickly the import of luxury goods so severely taxed China's limited supply of silver that it inhibited this trade." "Rigidly conservative court offiicials decreed that such luxuries were too expensive and money were better spent on reinforcing the great wall." "By the middle years of the Ming dynasty, trade with foreigners began to be looked down upon." "In 1450, the borders of China were effectively closed the outside world, ending the centuries -old influx of foreign ideas, goods and culture." "X enophobia and anti-commercialism triumphed." "And the silk road fell into disuse." "The end of the silk road however, was by no means the end of the story of silk..." "While silk is not an inherently rare material, the incredible versatility of this fabric ensures that it continues to be one of the most useful materials ever made." "Its strength to weight ratio alone makes it extraordinarily valuable." "Silk is like gold, another unique material sometimes used as money and often worn to display status and wealth." "Like gold, silk has unique properties and numerous practical uses." "Silk is highly resistant to rot and oxidation." "Since it is not perishable, it is perfect as sewing thread for seams and embroidery." "Since silk is a natural fiber, it breathes and effiiciently conducts heat away from the body." "Its isothermal properties make it cool in summer and warm in winter." "Silk wadding is still the lightest, warmest and least bulky material for quilted insulation, superior even to goose down." "Silk is incredibly strong and light and thus the perfect material for such uses as parachutes where it can cover the greatest area for the lowest weight and bulk." "During the wars of the 20th century, silk was so strategically valuable that scientists spent years trying to synthesize it for use in military parachutes when the supply was insuffiicient or cut off." "Once they succeeded, by creating nylon as a substitute, its major peacetime use became woman's stockings." "The drive to develop a synthetic chemical substitute for silk led to the invention of plastic with everything that implies for life in the second half of the 20th century and beyond." "Even silk's smooth surface had an important and unexpected use value." "More than just a dashing fashion statement, the white silk scarves worn by the early pilots served an important practical purpose." "Since the pilots had to constantly swivel their heads to scan the sky for enemy aircraft, to prevent their necks from being chaffed raw against leather or wool, they wore a smooth silk scarf!" "Because of silk's incredible absorbency, it holds dye well, both natural and synthetic." "Modern Thai silks have become world famous for their brilliant and luminous colors." "Over the last 50 years, with the support Thailand's beautiful Queen Sirikit," "Thai silk has become world famous and successfully rekindled the fashion world's fascination with silk." "Thai silk is still big business today and not just for fashion." "Here at the Rajamangala Institute of Technology in Bangkok researchers are again discovering what the Mongols knew the incredible toughness of silk." "In 1998 the Police and Military of Thailand found that it was far too expensive to import Kevlar bulletproof vest for every offiicer and soldier." "Sujira Khojimate and his colleagues at the Textile Engineering Department of the institute considered this problem and decided there might be a locally available solution." "After visiting a silk weaving community in Northern Thailand," "Sujira returned to Bangkok and took sheets of silk fabric, water-proofed them and arranged them in layers at different angles to each other to provide strength in all directions." "This bundle of fabric made with more than 35 layers of silk was fashioned into a vest and put to the ultimate test:" "Gunfire." "The silk bulletproof vest blocked all bullets from." "11mm rounds to.38 specials." "In fact, they met the Type 1 standard for body armor set by the US governments National Institute of Justice, at 1/2 the cost of imported synthetic kevlar vests." "Ghenghis Khan's warriors dressed in their silk undershirts would have nodded and smiled and not been at all surprised." "Today the Thai police wear not kevlar, but an alternative kind of body armor." "One manufactured of locally produced Thai silk, and designed to stop bullets, just as the Mongol's silk undershirts stopped arrows." "From the army of the Mongol hordes to the police of modern day Thailand, people have been fascinated by the amazing properties of silk." "From the Roman, Chinese, and Byzantine emperors, to the courtiers who served them, their elegant wives and beautiful courtesans, people have been captivated by silk's beauty." "And throughout history, this amazing artifact has shaped the lives of the people who traded it, used it, paid their taxes, and honored their gods with it... weaving its way in of the very civilizations that prized it above all other fabrics."