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Some 10,000 kilometers from the Pacific
to the Atlantic Ocean,

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a formidable distance, 
even in today's world,

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and yet over that vast distance,

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human beings have pursued
one of history's greatest enterprises:

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The Silk Road.

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A tremendously profitable trade route

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and so much more.

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For thousands of years,

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exotic goods,

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new technologies,

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conquering armies,

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and brilliant ideas

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travelled along the Silk Road.

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Silk Road trade helped to build empires

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and to break them.

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It fanned the fires of revolution,

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drove great explorations,

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and forged powerful bonds
between far away peoples.

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The Silk Road made human beings realize

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that there are other people out there,

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and it opened the eyes 
of the east and the west.

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This is the story of how Silk Road trade 
made so much more than money.

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It's the epic tale of how the Silk Road
helped create a world,

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a world that created us.

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2,000 years ago, the Roman Empire
seemed unstoppable.

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Rome had conquered much of Europe

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and was sending its legions beyond
the eastern Mediterranean

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to the Middle East

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-- gateway to the riches of Asia.

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But a journey to the east 
could become a road of blood.

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In 53 BC. near the Mesopotamian
town of Carrhae,

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the Parthians — an empire blending
Persian and Greek cultures —

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confronted a Roman army.

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The outcome of the battle
seemed beyond doubt.

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Some 40,000 Romans
faced only 10,000 Parthians.

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And Rome's legions
were Europe's finest foot soldiers.

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There was just one problem.

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The Parthian army didn't fight on foot.

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The Parthians, they were cavalry.

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They were horse archers.

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Versatile. Rode like the wind.

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What the Romans did
was what the Romans always did.

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They took a fixed position.

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They were ordered into a hollow square
defending all sides.

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But that was nothing 
to the Parthian horse archers

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because they could just ride
around them, and they did.

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They galloped around and around 
and around and around,

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shooting as they went.

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Thousands and thousands of arrows
loosed into those Romans.

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What the Romans eventually did 
was they were ordered to go into testudo.

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That's that Roman formation
where they lock their shields together

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and put the next layer
of shields to make a roof.

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Testudo is Latin for tortoise.

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But the Parthians 
had the answer to this tortoise.

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They had a hammer 
to break open its shell.

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The Parthian hammer was a cataphract,

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a Greek word meaning 
"clothed in full armor".

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Horse and rider wore heavy coats of mail.

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The cataphract was the ancient world
equivalent of a battle tank.

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At Carrhae, charging cataphracts
broke open the testudo,

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exposing the Romans inside
to more arrow attacks.

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Some 30,000 Romans 
were killed or captured.

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Parthian losses were minor.

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It was one of Rome's 
worst military defeats.

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But it may have been 
something else as well.

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A Roman historian wrote

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that the Parthians dazzled the Romans

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with banners made of a beautiful fabric:

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silk.

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That may only be a legend.

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But around the time of Carrhae,

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Romans began coveting Chinese silk,

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and China began selling silk to Rome

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in exchange for fine
Roman glassware and gold,

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inspiring the name
we give Eurasian trade today:

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the Silk Road.

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But long before Romans and Parthians
fought at Carrhae,

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trade between the peoples of Eurasia
were shaping lives,

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making new things possible,

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and changing the world.

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At Carrhae, the Parthians 
won with a style of warfare

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that had evolved centuries earlier

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and thousands of kilometers away.

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On the steppes of Central Asia,

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an ocean of land,

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where victory in battle, and life itself,

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depended on moving 
very far, very fast,

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thousands of years 
before the battle of Carrhae,

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a transportation revolution 
took place on these vast plains.

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There's good evidence for the existence
of domesticated horses

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in what is today Kazakhstan
and southern Russia by 3500 BC.

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And we actually think that probably
horses were domesticated

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and began to be ridden 
500 or maybe 1,000 years before that,

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maybe as early as 4500 BC.

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The domestication of the horse

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was the first step
towards cavalry warfare.

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But the second step 
would be a long time coming.

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The first use of horses in warfare 
was with chariot warfare,

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and we have that well established
Tutankhamun's chariot,

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which many people have seen
in museum exhibits.

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And we know that people
were using chariots in warfare

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starting in the Near East
in about 1600, 1700 BC.

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Horses were not used as organized cavalry

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until after about 900 BC,

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almost 1,000 years 
after chariot warfare began.

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And it's always seemed odd to me
that cavalry began after chariotry.

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Chariotry is very difficult to manage.

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You have to train horses to work together.

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They have to pull this clumsy vehicle

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that has two people in it:
a driver and a warrior.

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Training the units to work together,
very difficult thing to do,

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whereas jumping on the back of a horse
is an easy thing.

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So, why did cavalry come after chariotry?

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I think the real reason 
that cavalry waited

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is that you needed to have
really three innovations.

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The earliest evidence for the recurved bow
is in Shang Dynasty, China,

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probably dated between 1300 and 1100 BC.

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Shang emperors communicated 
with their ancestors

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by heating animal bones or turtle shells
until they cracked

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and then interpreting
the patterns made by the cracks.

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One of these so-called oracle bones

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is carved with the Chinese 
character for bow

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— the earliest known image
of a recurved bow.

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And in the tomb of Lady Fu Hao

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— an imperial consort 
and renowned military commander —

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archaeologists found more evidence.

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It's a thumb cover 
for drawing bow string

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and there's another piece that went
in the middle of a recurved bow,

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a handgrip.

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The bows themselves are not preserved,

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so, it's a difficult thing to identify
the origins of the recurved bow.

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The different components of it

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probably came from different places
geographically.

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Just how far the recurved bow
traveled across Eurasia

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was revealed in 2005 at Yanghai,
in China's Xinjiang region.

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Wooden bows rarely survive 
burial in the ground,

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but Xinjiang's cold, dry climate
preserved one

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in a 3,000-year-old tomb.

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Other grave goods 
and the human remains

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found in the Yanghai tombs

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confirmed that the bow was made
by the Scythians,

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a highly sophisticated culture
that originated in southern Russia

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and migrated on horseback

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across the length and breadth of Eurasia.

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The true birthplace 
of the recurved composite bow

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remains an archaeological mystery.

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But there is no doubt 
that 3,000 years ago

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anyone who fought on horseback
would have found it revolutionary.

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A bow is as strong as it is long.

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It derives its strength from its length.

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And the recurved bow 
packs the same length

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into this very short bow

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that can be swung over the horse's rear 
and over the horse's neck.

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And it was much, much easier 
to use on horseback.

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And the recurved bows are
technologically quite difficult to make.

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It took a long time to develop
the craft of bow making to that point.

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The recurve all these sinewy bends
— reflex and deflex —

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that gives it in-built spring.

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But that can only be created
with composite materials.

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What we mean by that is
it's made of a number of materials.

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The heart of it is wood, usually beech.

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And then you have horn,
horn from a water buffalo,

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and then sinew, the tendons of an animal.

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That, when you bash it,

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you can tease apart
and get these very fine fibers,

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fibers with tremendous tensile strength,

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that has elasticity and spring,

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and it stops the bow bursting apart.

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These are all materials that enhance
the power, the spring of the bow.

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But only if bow makers
could solve a very big problem.

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How to keep such a powerful bow

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made from so many different materials

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from breaking up when its own power
was pulling it apart?

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Somewhere in Eurasia, sometime long ago,

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some unknown genius discovered the answer.

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This is the swim bladder of a sturgeon
— a fish from the Black Sea.

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And if you start to break these up 
then put it in hot water,

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and you get this wonderful, viscous glue.

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This simple idea of making a glue
out of a swim bladder of a fish

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was a technological breakthrough
of immense consequences.

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It is what enabled
the composite bow to exist.

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And in turn the composite bow
was a military revolution

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of far-reaching consequences.

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00:14:51,694 --> 00:14:56,156
The composite recurved bow
gave birth to a new kind of warrior

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00:14:57,135 --> 00:14:59,121
the horse archer.

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The horse archer was able
to shoot from the saddle

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in part because of the new technology
of the composite bow.

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They were short, compact bows,

189
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and that meant that you 
can shoot them from horseback.

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You see I can cross
to the other side of the horse,

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I can turn and shoot behind.

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It's much more suitable
for shooting on horseback.

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00:15:21,783 --> 00:15:24,541
Everyone who fought with Eurasian nomads,

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whether as enemy or friend,

195
00:15:26,745 --> 00:15:29,542
wanted a recurved composite bow.

196
00:15:29,662 --> 00:15:31,880
By the early first millennium BC,

197
00:15:31,900 --> 00:15:35,224
it was in use from east Asia
to eastern Europe.

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00:15:40,004 --> 00:15:44,618
A recurved bow gave a horse archer
unprecedented killing power.

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00:15:48,478 --> 00:15:50,635
But it didn't make him a cavalryman.

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00:15:53,185 --> 00:15:57,308
Before horse archers could fight
as an effective military force,

201
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they needed a large supply
of identical arrows.

202
00:16:04,055 --> 00:16:06,683
And that didn't exist.

203
00:16:09,631 --> 00:16:12,515
Arrowheads were a variety 
of different sizes and weights.

204
00:16:12,945 --> 00:16:14,727
Some were made of bone.

205
00:16:14,787 --> 00:16:16,743
Some were made out of flint.

206
00:16:16,853 --> 00:16:18,541
Some were made out of bronze.

207
00:16:18,621 --> 00:16:20,775
All of them would be individually made

208
00:16:20,805 --> 00:16:24,106
and you had to adjust your shot
for the weight of different arrows.

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00:16:24,662 --> 00:16:27,791
Also, a unit of soldiers 
who were firing at the same time

210
00:16:27,821 --> 00:16:30,950
would be firing arrows
of slightly different weights

211
00:16:31,030 --> 00:16:33,675
and they might go different distances.

212
00:16:34,395 --> 00:16:37,927
One of the features of a stone arrowhead
is its flattened rear.

213
00:16:38,437 --> 00:16:40,653
But how did it connect 
with the arrow shaft?

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00:16:40,683 --> 00:16:44,066
It can only be tied to the shaft
by rope or ox tendons.

215
00:16:44,126 --> 00:16:45,707
But what about the disadvantages?

216
00:16:45,707 --> 00:16:49,733
First, the released arrows 
tend to change direction easily.

217
00:16:49,773 --> 00:16:52,569
Second, they are likely to fall off.

218
00:16:57,709 --> 00:16:59,922
One of the technological innovations

219
00:16:59,932 --> 00:17:03,555
was the invention
of the socketed arrowhead.

220
00:17:04,685 --> 00:17:07,815
They were made of bronze, usually,

221
00:17:07,875 --> 00:17:11,648
and they were made in a mold 
and cast in a mold,

222
00:17:12,138 --> 00:17:17,323
so that an infinite number 
of socketed arrowheads of the same weight

223
00:17:17,343 --> 00:17:19,365
could be made from the same mold.

224
00:17:23,145 --> 00:17:27,736
Making socketed projectile points 
was actually a big deal.

225
00:17:30,626 --> 00:17:36,126
You have to have a mold with a core
where the socket is going to be

226
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that you can pour molten metal around

227
00:17:39,378 --> 00:17:42,600
so that it's the same thickness 
all the way around.

228
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Making arrowheads
of the same size and weight

229
00:17:51,457 --> 00:17:55,023
was another Central Asian
technological revolution.

230
00:17:59,083 --> 00:18:02,249
For the first time, mounted warriors
could unleash

231
00:18:02,249 --> 00:18:05,222
coordinated arrow attacks 
on their enemies.

232
00:18:07,677 --> 00:18:10,399
With arrowheads of the same weight,

233
00:18:10,399 --> 00:18:13,844
every time you drew the bow to shoot

234
00:18:13,844 --> 00:18:16,170
you knew that you were firing an arrow

235
00:18:16,237 --> 00:18:19,496
that was exactly the same weight
as the last arrow that you fired,

236
00:18:19,568 --> 00:18:23,694
so, you could determine
the range and the distance well.

237
00:18:24,124 --> 00:18:28,648
And also, all of the archers 
that were firing,

238
00:18:28,692 --> 00:18:32,726
were firing arrowheads
at the same weight at the same time.

239
00:18:32,966 --> 00:18:36,437
So, the distance for all of them 
would be the same.

240
00:18:36,740 --> 00:18:39,514
With a socketed arrowhead

241
00:18:39,714 --> 00:18:44,436
you can directly insert 
the head into the shaft.

242
00:18:44,625 --> 00:18:46,690
It looks like this.

243
00:18:47,450 --> 00:18:50,453
So, what are the advantages
of this type of arrowhead?

244
00:18:50,453 --> 00:18:52,314
Its improvements greatly enhanced

245
00:18:52,314 --> 00:18:54,671
the lethality and efficiency
of ancient arrows.

246
00:18:54,722 --> 00:18:58,341
Even in the chaos of war, the shooter 
could aim the target easily.

247
00:18:58,465 --> 00:19:01,835
He wouldn't lose the direction
by aiming t the target quickly.

248
00:19:02,379 --> 00:19:06,048
This invention is a giant leap 
in the development of human history.

249
00:19:07,768 --> 00:19:11,888
Archaeologists believe that sometime
in the second millennium BC,

250
00:19:12,368 --> 00:19:15,494
socketed bronze arrowheads
began spreading east

251
00:19:15,819 --> 00:19:19,879
while the composite 
recurved bow spread west.

252
00:19:20,649 --> 00:19:23,004
Sometime around 900 BC,

253
00:19:23,004 --> 00:19:25,559
socketed arrowheads and recurved bows

254
00:19:25,589 --> 00:19:28,649
met in the Tarim Basin area 
of Central Asia,

255
00:19:31,069 --> 00:19:35,284
brought together by traders,
warriors, and migrating nomads.

256
00:19:38,804 --> 00:19:43,773
After about 700 BC, you begin to see
thousands and thousands of arrowheads

257
00:19:43,813 --> 00:19:47,510
and dozens of arrowheads
in a single quiver in a grave.

258
00:19:47,591 --> 00:19:50,089
It's like they're being mass produced.

259
00:19:52,259 --> 00:19:56,263
Bronze socketed arrowheads
turned central Asia into an arsenal,

260
00:19:56,643 --> 00:19:59,506
but cavalries still couldn't exist

261
00:20:00,883 --> 00:20:03,871
until warriors could become soldiers.

262
00:20:08,057 --> 00:20:10,619
It was really the age of heroic warfare

263
00:20:10,619 --> 00:20:14,484
— individuals going out 
and doing great deeds by themselves

264
00:20:14,534 --> 00:20:16,926
and attracting glory for their own name.

265
00:20:17,016 --> 00:20:19,714
And this is the kind of warfare
that's described

266
00:20:20,034 --> 00:20:23,878
in the "Iliad", in the "Odyssey," 
or in the "Rigveda,"

267
00:20:23,928 --> 00:20:27,955
a religious text that's at the deep roots
of modern Hinduism.

268
00:20:29,201 --> 00:20:32,503
What had to change
was a psychological change

269
00:20:32,503 --> 00:20:35,099
in the nature of the warrior.

270
00:20:35,759 --> 00:20:39,152
You had to change
from individuals to units

271
00:20:39,262 --> 00:20:42,983
working under the command
of a commanding general,

272
00:20:43,152 --> 00:20:46,468
who would attack and retreat
upon command.

273
00:20:48,305 --> 00:20:52,343
The psychological change 
from the heroic warrior to the soldier,

274
00:20:53,735 --> 00:20:57,461
probably is a feature of urban warfare.

275
00:20:57,891 --> 00:21:00,384
The armies that were associated

276
00:21:00,384 --> 00:21:04,198
with the great cities 
of Mesopotamia and Iran.

277
00:21:06,516 --> 00:21:11,536
That psychology had to spread 
northward up into the steppes

278
00:21:12,168 --> 00:21:16,350
and be accepted by warriors
in the steppes,

279
00:21:16,652 --> 00:21:19,336
in the same area 
where the recurved bows

280
00:21:19,396 --> 00:21:22,090
and the socketed arrowheads were crossing.

281
00:21:24,630 --> 00:21:27,214
While recurved bows were spreading west

282
00:21:27,244 --> 00:21:29,656
and socketed arrowheads
were spreading east,

283
00:21:29,676 --> 00:21:32,922
the concept of military discipline
was spreading north.

284
00:21:36,462 --> 00:21:38,905
Sometime around 900 BC,

285
00:21:39,085 --> 00:21:42,561
all three combined
in the heart of central Asia.

286
00:21:44,861 --> 00:21:47,169
When those three things came together,

287
00:21:47,169 --> 00:21:51,922
cavalry became a really deadly form
of military force.

288
00:21:55,182 --> 00:21:59,542
A force that would severely test
the ancient world's most powerful armies.

289
00:22:02,318 --> 00:22:03,836
2,000 years ago,

290
00:22:03,846 --> 00:22:07,500
as the Romans pushed east 
to expand their empire,

291
00:22:08,340 --> 00:22:10,652
China was pushing west.

292
00:22:13,224 --> 00:22:15,063
And like the Romans,

293
00:22:15,093 --> 00:22:18,376
the Chinese encountered
a formidable enemy on horseback.

294
00:22:23,008 --> 00:22:26,584
The Xiongnu were nomads
from the Central Asian steppes.

295
00:22:28,044 --> 00:22:30,964
Armed with recurved bows
and socketed arrows,

296
00:22:30,964 --> 00:22:34,660
they fought under commanders 
as a disciplined military force.

297
00:22:38,250 --> 00:22:41,093
They raided Chinese villages

298
00:22:41,483 --> 00:22:44,956
and plundered the growing trade
between East and West,

299
00:22:46,304 --> 00:22:48,915
and no one could stop them.

300
00:22:49,745 --> 00:22:55,806
The Xiongnu was the migraine
of the ancient world for the Chinese.

301
00:22:56,820 --> 00:23:01,401
They simply just kept coming
and they would not stop.

302
00:23:04,731 --> 00:23:12,270
The Xiongnu wanted the finest
material goods produced by the Chinese.

303
00:23:16,115 --> 00:23:18,742
That is why they raided.

304
00:23:23,311 --> 00:23:27,025
Imagine you're a villager in China
and these men come from nowhere.

305
00:23:27,055 --> 00:23:29,196
They come from over the hill 
without warning,

306
00:23:29,286 --> 00:23:30,919
tearing into your village.

307
00:23:30,937 --> 00:23:33,294
They shoot the headman, 
they shoot your husband.

308
00:23:33,334 --> 00:23:34,822
They chase the women out.

309
00:23:34,862 --> 00:23:38,426
There is no hiding place
and there's a flurry of dust and arrows.

310
00:23:38,436 --> 00:23:41,649
They're in and they're out 
and they take the stuff and they go.

311
00:23:44,788 --> 00:23:47,693
China sent its military might
against the Xiongnu.

312
00:23:49,819 --> 00:23:51,696
The famed Terracotta Warriors

313
00:23:51,716 --> 00:23:54,504
reveal the size and power
of Chinese armies.

314
00:23:56,543 --> 00:23:59,883
But the Chinese fought on foot
and from chariots.

315
00:24:02,723 --> 00:24:05,683
Not effective against hit-and-run cavalry.

316
00:24:07,030 --> 00:24:12,857
A Chinese courtier wrote that the Xiongnu
moved like a flock of birds over the land,

317
00:24:13,227 --> 00:24:15,600
impossible to control.

318
00:24:16,420 --> 00:24:20,101
Once mounted warfare really
became deadly and effective,

319
00:24:20,261 --> 00:24:22,666
it became a real problem.

320
00:24:22,856 --> 00:24:27,669
If you're a farmer, the nomads know
where you're going to be all the time.

321
00:24:27,729 --> 00:24:31,276
Your house is in the same place
12 months of the year,

322
00:24:31,445 --> 00:24:35,321
and when your crops become ripe,
you have to harvest,

323
00:24:35,548 --> 00:24:39,257
and the nomads know when that season is.

324
00:24:40,187 --> 00:24:43,152
Whereas when you're trying
to strike them back,

325
00:24:43,172 --> 00:24:45,759
it's impossible to know
where they're going to be

326
00:24:45,799 --> 00:24:47,698
or when they're going to be there.

327
00:24:47,868 --> 00:24:50,017
You have to search to find them.

328
00:24:53,188 --> 00:24:58,168
To beat the Xiongnu, the Chinese 
needed soldiers who could fight like them.

329
00:25:01,089 --> 00:25:03,077
They needed cavalry.

330
00:25:06,198 --> 00:25:09,357
There are manuals of warfare
that were written

331
00:25:09,367 --> 00:25:12,638
to instruct Chinese warriors

332
00:25:12,638 --> 00:25:16,694
on how to counter the tactics
and the methods of the Xiongnu.

333
00:25:17,824 --> 00:25:20,522
Those manuals introduced 
the idea of cavalry

334
00:25:20,572 --> 00:25:22,641
to the Chinese military.

335
00:25:23,151 --> 00:25:26,266
The Chinese military
had not really used cavalry

336
00:25:26,306 --> 00:25:28,801
before about probably 350 BC.

337
00:25:30,628 --> 00:25:34,009
Chinese military, at first 
with some resistance

338
00:25:34,029 --> 00:25:36,750
from the old aristocratic families, said:

339
00:25:36,870 --> 00:25:39,004
"Well, my father fought on a chariot,

340
00:25:39,034 --> 00:25:40,871
"and his father fought on a chariot,

341
00:25:40,891 --> 00:25:44,809
"and I'm gonna fight on a chariot
in my long robes like my ancestors."

342
00:25:46,409 --> 00:25:49,020
But it wasn't long before Chinese warriors

343
00:25:49,050 --> 00:25:51,742
traded their traditional
long, flowing robes

344
00:25:52,462 --> 00:25:56,665
for shorter tunics that didn't get
in the way of fighting on horseback.

345
00:25:59,165 --> 00:26:05,109
Eventually, the practicalities
forced them to get rid of their robes,

346
00:26:05,162 --> 00:26:07,968
to put on riding trousers,

347
00:26:08,008 --> 00:26:10,786
to learn to shoot the bow on horseback,

348
00:26:10,981 --> 00:26:14,655
and they, too, became 
a mighty horse archer force.

349
00:26:19,656 --> 00:26:23,613
Chinese cavalry became experts
at shooting the recurved composite bow,

350
00:26:25,623 --> 00:26:30,134
and a lethal Chinese weapon, the crossbow.

351
00:26:34,132 --> 00:26:36,403
While its cavalry trained,

352
00:26:36,473 --> 00:26:41,043
China agreed to Xiongnu demands
for payments of money and silk

353
00:26:42,343 --> 00:26:45,283
until the year 133 BC,

354
00:26:46,103 --> 00:26:49,249
when Emperor Han Wudi refused to pay

355
00:26:53,218 --> 00:26:55,696
and sent his army to attack the Xiongnu.

356
00:27:30,952 --> 00:27:33,645
Chinese cavalry defeated the nomads.

357
00:27:37,305 --> 00:27:40,802
And China seized
new territories in the steppes,

358
00:27:42,932 --> 00:27:46,654
pacifying trade routes 
and opening new horizons.

359
00:27:52,030 --> 00:27:55,019
On one hand, 
we have this perpetual conflict

360
00:27:55,119 --> 00:27:59,400
— in Chinese culture would be
the Xiongnu and the Han Chinese

361
00:28:00,381 --> 00:28:03,985
that created incessant warfare.

362
00:28:05,390 --> 00:28:08,557
On the other hand, it is this conflict

363
00:28:08,567 --> 00:28:11,954
that demolished physical boundaries.

364
00:28:12,995 --> 00:28:17,054
Even territory boundaries 
were constantly being pushed farther,

365
00:28:17,154 --> 00:28:20,144
pushed back between the two forces.

366
00:28:20,554 --> 00:28:26,029
This was a stimulus for exchanges,

367
00:28:26,753 --> 00:28:28,876
for political changes,

368
00:28:28,876 --> 00:28:32,607
for new ideas, for artistic traditions.

369
00:28:36,057 --> 00:28:38,684
It was also a new era for the Silk Road.

370
00:28:40,488 --> 00:28:43,677
A fortune in Roman gold 
traveled east

371
00:28:43,677 --> 00:28:46,138
in exchange for Chinese silks.

372
00:28:51,400 --> 00:28:53,940
And the Central Asian kingdom of Kushan

373
00:28:54,000 --> 00:28:57,355
made its own fortune 
selling another luxury to China:

374
00:28:59,565 --> 00:29:00,868
jade.

375
00:29:03,915 --> 00:29:06,613
Silk Road caravans passed 
through this border station

376
00:29:06,613 --> 00:29:08,988
on China's western frontier.

377
00:29:10,839 --> 00:29:13,380
So many of them carried Kushan jade

378
00:29:13,430 --> 00:29:16,570
that this station became known 
as the Jade Gate.

379
00:29:21,860 --> 00:29:25,450
Chinese aristocrats
coveted jade for its beauty

380
00:29:25,493 --> 00:29:27,414
and something more.

381
00:29:30,034 --> 00:29:33,659
They believed that jade 
would keep them alive forever.

382
00:29:36,789 --> 00:29:39,538
The ruling elite commissioned 
jade burial suits

383
00:29:39,558 --> 00:29:42,327
to preserve their bodies in the grave.

384
00:29:45,617 --> 00:29:48,722
They believed that, upon death,

385
00:29:48,762 --> 00:29:51,822
all the orifices should be plugged in

386
00:29:51,842 --> 00:29:56,076
to preserve the spirit inside the person.

387
00:29:56,966 --> 00:30:00,347
And this notion of jade

388
00:30:00,347 --> 00:30:05,318
as a material with protective power
in the afterlife,

389
00:30:05,368 --> 00:30:08,348
is further enhanced by the fact

390
00:30:08,348 --> 00:30:11,062
that they built an armor

391
00:30:11,062 --> 00:30:16,876
made of thousands
of pieces of jade.

392
00:30:17,916 --> 00:30:20,120
And of course, if you're the emperor,

393
00:30:20,120 --> 00:30:25,855
your jade armor would be made
from the finest jade

394
00:30:26,997 --> 00:30:29,731
from the western regions.

395
00:30:30,451 --> 00:30:33,523
During the Roman empire,
Silk Road trade flourished

396
00:30:33,569 --> 00:30:36,522
as Chinese, Persian, and Kushan armies

397
00:30:36,532 --> 00:30:39,173
kept the trade routes open across Eurasia.

398
00:30:46,743 --> 00:30:48,568
China had leveled the battlefield

399
00:30:48,629 --> 00:30:51,282
with nomad raiders from the steppes.

400
00:30:57,492 --> 00:30:59,757
But Central Asian horse archers

401
00:30:59,757 --> 00:31:02,717
were about to carve
their names on History.

402
00:31:04,452 --> 00:31:08,912
In the 4th century CE, Europe was invaded
by a Central Asian people

403
00:31:09,042 --> 00:31:12,174
whose name still evokes barbaric cruelty.

404
00:31:18,664 --> 00:31:22,464
The Huns, who fought their way West,
all the way to Rome.

405
00:31:32,708 --> 00:31:35,214
European peoples
like the Goths and Visigoths

406
00:31:35,268 --> 00:31:37,703
— the so-called barbarians —

407
00:31:37,713 --> 00:31:39,410
fled before their onslaught,

408
00:31:39,440 --> 00:31:41,894
and sought refuge in Roman territory.

409
00:31:43,684 --> 00:31:46,662
When the Huns withdrew
from the Roman world,

410
00:31:46,732 --> 00:31:49,439
those barbarian refugees stayed.

411
00:31:55,449 --> 00:31:58,197
And the rest is History.

412
00:32:02,387 --> 00:32:05,882
The western Roman empire 
was plunged into chaos

413
00:32:07,766 --> 00:32:10,655
as barbarian tribes, 
dissatisfied with their lot,

414
00:32:10,685 --> 00:32:13,835
rebelled against Roman authority,

415
00:32:14,138 --> 00:32:17,303
and weak Roman emperors 
failed to crush them.

416
00:32:21,743 --> 00:32:26,209
As Rome declined, migrating 
horse archers, called the Avars,

417
00:32:26,209 --> 00:32:30,436
carved their own country 
out of eastern Europe,

418
00:32:30,436 --> 00:32:33,949
bringing with them 
another Asian military innovation:

419
00:32:36,739 --> 00:32:38,252
the stirrup.

420
00:32:41,755 --> 00:32:44,703
This Chinese statue 
from the fourth century CE,

421
00:32:44,783 --> 00:32:48,092
is the earliest known
depiction of stirrups.

422
00:32:52,572 --> 00:32:54,788
Some 300 years later,

423
00:32:54,788 --> 00:32:57,218
an Avar horseman
was riding with these stirrups

424
00:32:57,264 --> 00:32:59,440
across Hungary.

425
00:33:05,428 --> 00:33:07,277
By the eighth century CE,

426
00:33:07,287 --> 00:33:11,633
the stirrup had spread
from one end of Eurasia to the other

427
00:33:11,831 --> 00:33:14,997
and mounted warfare
was entering a new era.

428
00:33:18,083 --> 00:33:19,959
The importance of the stirrup

429
00:33:19,989 --> 00:33:24,087
relates to what kinds of weapons
can you use from horseback,

430
00:33:24,198 --> 00:33:28,682
and it made it possible to use 
certain kinds of weapons from horseback

431
00:33:28,682 --> 00:33:31,389
that you couldn't use without stirrups.

432
00:33:31,409 --> 00:33:33,958
Those weapons are the long sabre.

433
00:33:34,228 --> 00:33:37,720
You have to lean over and absorb shock,

434
00:33:38,062 --> 00:33:40,669
if you're going to use
a long sabre in battle.

435
00:33:40,699 --> 00:33:44,998
And the stirrups allow the rider 
to absorb the shock of contact

436
00:33:44,998 --> 00:33:47,308
with a stationary target.

437
00:33:47,788 --> 00:33:50,382
The other big weapon 
that was possible with stirrups

438
00:33:50,422 --> 00:33:54,074
was a seated lance held under the arm.

439
00:33:54,354 --> 00:33:58,796
You could stab somebody with the lance
and then remove it,

440
00:33:58,956 --> 00:34:01,992
riding past them without stirrups.

441
00:34:02,521 --> 00:34:07,639
But if you seated it under your arm
and used the lance as a shock weapon,

442
00:34:07,814 --> 00:34:10,428
it would knock you
off the back of the horse

443
00:34:10,468 --> 00:34:12,431
if you didn't have stirrups.

444
00:34:12,441 --> 00:34:16,693
So, stirrups made it possible to use
long swords and lances

445
00:34:16,812 --> 00:34:19,598
as shock weapons 
against stationary targets

446
00:34:19,608 --> 00:34:21,930
and keep your seat.

447
00:34:21,936 --> 00:34:27,150
And of course, that made it possible
to have really heavy mounted warriors.

448
00:34:28,090 --> 00:34:31,877
Now, the rider becomes 
a unit with the horse.

449
00:34:32,237 --> 00:34:35,295
He's so anchored with his stirrups,
anchored with this,

450
00:34:35,295 --> 00:34:37,535
and then with his long lance

451
00:34:37,585 --> 00:34:41,395
he becomes a single projectile unit.

452
00:34:43,320 --> 00:34:48,942
Man, horse, saddle, lance, 
all locked together for the impact charge.

453
00:34:52,762 --> 00:34:55,753
This was the age of the medieval knight.

454
00:35:01,108 --> 00:35:02,929
A medieval knight's power

455
00:35:02,969 --> 00:35:06,744
came from combining the Asian stirrup
and the ancient shock tactics

456
00:35:06,794 --> 00:35:10,868
of the Persian cataphract
with a European invention:

457
00:35:11,431 --> 00:35:13,788
articulated plate armor.

458
00:35:15,930 --> 00:35:19,354
Strong enough to protect the wearer 
from sword and lance thrusts

459
00:35:20,765 --> 00:35:24,918
while light enough to allow him 
to move freely on horseback

460
00:35:24,988 --> 00:35:26,769
and on foot.

461
00:35:29,519 --> 00:35:33,639
Heavy cavalry had never been
a more potent weapon of war.

462
00:35:35,719 --> 00:35:38,954
Medieval mounted warfare 
could be warfare

463
00:35:38,984 --> 00:35:42,707
that generated
a lot of force on the rider,

464
00:35:43,089 --> 00:35:45,175
a high impact warfare.

465
00:35:46,785 --> 00:35:49,517
In that case, the mounted warrior
is being used

466
00:35:49,577 --> 00:35:53,117
really as a shock weapon
to strike the enemy.

467
00:36:00,259 --> 00:36:03,229
But even Europe's 
formidable mounted knights

468
00:36:03,239 --> 00:36:06,634
would be outfought
by Central Asian cavalry

469
00:36:08,859 --> 00:36:12,129
that burst out of the steppes 
and changed the world.

470
00:36:16,821 --> 00:36:21,677
The largest conquest empire
that the Earth has ever seen

471
00:36:23,647 --> 00:36:27,743
was created by pastoral nomads
from Central Asia.

472
00:36:35,962 --> 00:36:37,929
In the 13th century,

473
00:36:37,929 --> 00:36:40,632
the Mongols conquered 
as far West as Poland

474
00:36:40,656 --> 00:36:43,328
and as far East as the Sea of Japan.

475
00:36:47,978 --> 00:36:52,019
Mongol armies combined the devastating
shock tactics of horse archers

476
00:36:52,259 --> 00:36:55,445
with a highly sophisticated
military organization.

477
00:36:57,796 --> 00:37:02,794
They could gather quickly
and march to distant battlefields.

478
00:37:04,690 --> 00:37:08,103
Then the cavalry could reach
the enemy's battlefield

479
00:37:08,162 --> 00:37:11,111
before they set up defenses

480
00:37:11,164 --> 00:37:16,014
which could deter their enemy
psychologically and strategically.

481
00:37:16,864 --> 00:37:21,052
It is said that the cavalry came suddenly

482
00:37:21,542 --> 00:37:25,241
like something falling from the sky

483
00:37:25,522 --> 00:37:29,485
and disappeared quickly

484
00:37:29,515 --> 00:37:32,625
leaving no trace at all.

485
00:37:32,715 --> 00:37:35,633
Western, especially European historians,

486
00:37:35,663 --> 00:37:41,281
wrote that the Mongols appeared 
far away like several spots

487
00:37:41,508 --> 00:37:46,011
but would suddenly gather
before you, like dark clouds.

488
00:37:46,311 --> 00:37:50,284
Unexpected attack was the core.

489
00:37:56,474 --> 00:38:00,091
The Mongols have gone down
in History as bloodthirsty killers,

490
00:38:00,895 --> 00:38:04,359
but they were also sophisticated,
open-minded,

491
00:38:04,359 --> 00:38:06,661
often generous conquerors.

492
00:38:08,671 --> 00:38:11,237
They pacified the Silk Road.

493
00:38:16,777 --> 00:38:18,783
Trade between West and East

494
00:38:18,783 --> 00:38:21,530
flourished under 
this Mongol-enforced peace,

495
00:38:21,580 --> 00:38:23,646
the Pax Mongolica.

496
00:38:26,376 --> 00:38:29,079
Before the age of Pax Mongolica,

497
00:38:29,129 --> 00:38:33,496
banditry was a very serious
problem for traders,

498
00:38:33,575 --> 00:38:36,039
for caravans, along the Silk Road.

499
00:38:37,089 --> 00:38:40,561
The reputation of Genghis Khan
and his descendants

500
00:38:41,433 --> 00:38:45,797
created peace and safe passage
along the Silk Road

501
00:38:45,867 --> 00:38:53,773
because bandits were so afraid
of the Mongol soldiers.

502
00:38:54,243 --> 00:38:56,821
The Pax Mongolica,

503
00:38:57,221 --> 00:39:05,071
the control of trade and exchange

504
00:39:05,499 --> 00:39:08,389
that was made possible under the Mongols

505
00:39:08,449 --> 00:39:12,334
connected China with Europe
and with the Near East

506
00:39:12,397 --> 00:39:16,196
in a really close way 
for the first time in world History.

507
00:39:16,586 --> 00:39:19,423
And that had a profound effect

508
00:39:19,490 --> 00:39:22,547
on the development
of European civilization.

509
00:39:24,355 --> 00:39:26,479
Protected by the Pax Mongolica,

510
00:39:26,479 --> 00:39:30,181
and anxious for good relations 
with the Mongol empire,

511
00:39:30,245 --> 00:39:34,099
Europeans began traveling East 
as never before.

512
00:39:36,243 --> 00:39:38,745
Merchants, missionaries, and diplomats

513
00:39:38,815 --> 00:39:41,346
flowed East along the trade routes,

514
00:39:43,386 --> 00:39:46,833
bringing back popular Asian goods
like cloth and spices

515
00:39:48,562 --> 00:39:51,975
and tales of the wealth 
and wonders of the East,

516
00:39:52,145 --> 00:39:56,265
some true, some fabulous, 
but all fascinating.

517
00:39:57,906 --> 00:39:59,571
From Europe to China,

518
00:39:59,581 --> 00:40:03,557
Silk Road trade spread 
new knowledge of far-away lands.

519
00:40:04,567 --> 00:40:09,079
The Silk Road made human beings realize

520
00:40:09,229 --> 00:40:12,077
that there are other people out there,

521
00:40:12,117 --> 00:40:15,975
and it opened the eyes 
of the East and the West.

522
00:40:19,672 --> 00:40:23,699
The Italian cities of Venice and Genoa
reaped huge rewards.

523
00:40:27,048 --> 00:40:29,951
Their merchants traveled safely
throughout Eurasia

524
00:40:31,681 --> 00:40:34,102
and founded trading posts on the Black Sea

525
00:40:34,142 --> 00:40:37,173
to receive and pass on Silk Road goods.

526
00:40:38,805 --> 00:40:42,831
Their Silk Road profits funded
magnificent art and architecture.

527
00:40:45,404 --> 00:40:49,333
But their competition frequently
plunged them into war with one another.

528
00:40:51,644 --> 00:40:56,149
In one of these wars, Genoa captured
a prosperous Venetian merchant

529
00:40:56,189 --> 00:40:58,101
named Marco Polo.

530
00:40:59,091 --> 00:41:02,774
Imprisoned by the Genoese, 
Polo dictated the story

531
00:41:02,823 --> 00:41:06,257
of his Silk Road journey to China
to a fellow prisoner.

532
00:41:09,170 --> 00:41:13,078
Today, experts debate whether
Marco Polo really visited China

533
00:41:14,308 --> 00:41:16,866
or was simply retelling stories

534
00:41:16,916 --> 00:41:19,264
he heard from fellow Silk Road travelers.

535
00:41:23,666 --> 00:41:26,991
But there's no debate 
that "The Travels of Marco Polo"

536
00:41:27,051 --> 00:41:31,256
was one of the most influential books
in all of human History.

537
00:41:32,036 --> 00:41:34,241
It tantalized Europe with tales

538
00:41:34,241 --> 00:41:37,926
of China's immense wealth 
and advanced civilization.

539
00:41:45,190 --> 00:41:49,887
And years before Marco Polo was telling
those tales in a Genoese prison,

540
00:41:52,717 --> 00:41:57,556
a Chinese invention was making
its way across Eurasia to the West.

541
00:42:02,566 --> 00:42:05,105
Something created centuries earlier

542
00:42:05,105 --> 00:42:08,815
when an experiment ended very badly.

543
00:42:19,455 --> 00:42:23,755
Ancient Chinese alchemists
prepared potions of lead or mercury

544
00:42:23,755 --> 00:42:26,050
for their aristocratic patrons

545
00:42:26,060 --> 00:42:29,402
who believed that drinking these metals
would help them live forever.

546
00:42:32,748 --> 00:42:36,934
Instead, those concoctions killed them 
or made them insane.

547
00:42:38,804 --> 00:42:41,684
Another deadly combination was sulfur

548
00:42:41,684 --> 00:42:45,634
heated with an organic nitrate
found in soil throughout China,

549
00:42:48,041 --> 00:42:50,750
known today as saltpeter.

550
00:42:52,950 --> 00:42:55,465
When alchemists experimented
with this formula,

551
00:42:55,525 --> 00:42:57,668
it burst into flame,

552
00:42:57,678 --> 00:42:59,741
injuring the alchemists,

553
00:42:59,822 --> 00:43:01,186
(Explosion)

554
00:43:01,256 --> 00:43:03,923
and burning down their laboratory.

555
00:43:05,943 --> 00:43:10,536
From that disaster was born 
a chemical mixture like none other.

556
00:43:15,036 --> 00:43:18,193
It may have failed
as an elixir of immortality,

557
00:43:18,193 --> 00:43:22,554
but it would prove to be
a potent agent of death.

558
00:43:25,273 --> 00:43:29,427
This Chinese Buddhist scroll 
dating from around 950 CE,

559
00:43:29,427 --> 00:43:32,819
depicts demons surrounding
a seated Buddha.

560
00:43:34,259 --> 00:43:39,465
One demon holds what the Chinese called
a "huo quiang", or fire lance.

561
00:43:42,352 --> 00:43:44,886
It's the earliest known image of a weapon

562
00:43:44,906 --> 00:43:48,328
powered by that deadly mixture 
of saltpeter and sulfur,

563
00:43:51,518 --> 00:43:55,739
known to history as gunpowder.

564
00:44:01,094 --> 00:44:03,545
In the early 13th century,

565
00:44:03,545 --> 00:44:06,695
the Mongols attacked China's Jin Dynasty.

566
00:44:07,205 --> 00:44:11,635
The Jin Dynasty's army fought back 
with exploding gunpowder bombs.

567
00:44:15,755 --> 00:44:18,860
But as the Mongols conquered 
more and more of China,

568
00:44:18,860 --> 00:44:22,368
Han Chinese artillerymen
joined their armies

569
00:44:22,418 --> 00:44:26,162
and marched West, bringing
their gunpowder weapons with them.

570
00:44:29,142 --> 00:44:32,284
The Mongols attacked 
Russian and Polish cities

571
00:44:32,294 --> 00:44:34,720
with exploding fire bombs.

572
00:44:36,120 --> 00:44:39,973
And Europeans found out the hard way 
what gunpowder could do.

573
00:44:44,396 --> 00:44:46,763
By the end of the 13th century,

574
00:44:46,763 --> 00:44:49,986
the formula for gunpowder 
was known as far West as England,

575
00:44:51,754 --> 00:44:55,953
and Europeans were inventing 
their own versions of the new weapons.

576
00:44:59,873 --> 00:45:04,479
It wasn't long before this Chinese 
invention changed European history.

577
00:45:08,385 --> 00:45:11,051
On 26th August, 1346,

578
00:45:11,417 --> 00:45:14,332
near the village of Crécy
in northern France,

579
00:45:14,692 --> 00:45:18,407
the armies of France and England
prepared to fight.

580
00:45:26,940 --> 00:45:30,543
Mounted on their war steeds, 
encased in their armor,

581
00:45:30,583 --> 00:45:33,959
the flower of French nobility 
formed their battle line,

582
00:45:42,728 --> 00:45:46,087
while the English deployed 
a very different force,

583
00:45:50,197 --> 00:45:52,966
thousands of expert archers.

584
00:45:59,966 --> 00:46:04,555
The French sent their higher Genoese
crossbowmen to attack the English

585
00:46:04,575 --> 00:46:07,650
before French knights annihilated them.

586
00:46:14,813 --> 00:46:17,429
But the English king, Edward III,

587
00:46:17,429 --> 00:46:20,537
had spent years training his longbow men.

588
00:46:24,517 --> 00:46:27,576
And all that training
was about to pay off.

589
00:46:41,426 --> 00:46:46,505
Nothing like this had been seen
on a western battlefield up to this time.

590
00:46:46,685 --> 00:46:51,754
The first time that a volley of arrows 
was unleashed by the archers at Crecy

591
00:46:52,214 --> 00:46:55,329
would have represented 
something completely new

592
00:46:55,369 --> 00:46:58,513
to many of those
in the French army watching it.

593
00:46:58,553 --> 00:47:01,150
A cloud of arrows descending towards them.

594
00:47:02,440 --> 00:47:04,713
It would have been frightening,

595
00:47:04,733 --> 00:47:07,630
and of course, the effect
was almost immediate.

596
00:47:11,660 --> 00:47:15,957
Showered by English arrows, 
the Genoese turned and ran,

597
00:47:17,318 --> 00:47:19,917
and according to medieval 
accounts of the battle,

598
00:47:19,917 --> 00:47:23,136
they were also panicked 
by another English weapon.

599
00:47:32,031 --> 00:47:35,156
Giovanni Villani, writing
very soon after the battle,

600
00:47:35,206 --> 00:47:39,563
says in his chronicle that 
so loud and intimidating

601
00:47:39,693 --> 00:47:42,235
was the noise created by the guns

602
00:47:42,355 --> 00:47:45,418
that they thought God was thundering.

603
00:47:48,997 --> 00:47:51,909
"The English guns cast
iron balls by means of fire.

604
00:47:52,689 --> 00:47:54,950
"They made a noise like thunder

605
00:47:55,020 --> 00:47:57,625
"and caused much loss
in men and horses."

606
00:48:04,835 --> 00:48:07,373
Noise like that would have been 
unprecedented

607
00:48:07,413 --> 00:48:09,911
to the soldiers on the battlefield.

608
00:48:10,538 --> 00:48:13,668
Nothing in their lives
could have prepared them

609
00:48:13,668 --> 00:48:15,464
for a bang of that size

610
00:48:15,464 --> 00:48:19,539
and accompanied by smoke
and acrid sulfur smell,

611
00:48:19,662 --> 00:48:22,219
which would hang in the air.

612
00:48:22,409 --> 00:48:25,043
The impact of which, of course,
they couldn't see

613
00:48:25,063 --> 00:48:27,387
until men around them dropped.

614
00:48:29,087 --> 00:48:32,119
Not even professional soldiers 
like the Genoese

615
00:48:32,298 --> 00:48:36,039
would have experienced anything 
like this before in their lives.

616
00:48:36,189 --> 00:48:38,776
That would have been terrifying,

617
00:48:38,806 --> 00:48:41,759
and it's no wonder
that they scattered and ran.

618
00:48:44,019 --> 00:48:49,721
They turned and fled into the face
of the oncoming French cavalry charge.

619
00:48:50,100 --> 00:48:53,205
The French cavalry were now
coming onto the battlefield

620
00:48:53,204 --> 00:48:55,310
and they were appalled

621
00:48:55,310 --> 00:48:59,000
at these people they'd hired
running away.

622
00:49:01,270 --> 00:49:03,830
And they cursed them
and they rode into them,

623
00:49:03,850 --> 00:49:06,675
and as many Genoese fell to French hooves

624
00:49:06,725 --> 00:49:09,643
as they did to English 
arrows and gunshots.

625
00:49:11,813 --> 00:49:14,220
And the French knights, 
all 12,000 of them,

626
00:49:14,220 --> 00:49:16,099
double the size of the English army,

627
00:49:16,101 --> 00:49:18,531
they came charging down onto the English.

628
00:49:21,911 --> 00:49:26,031
And they, too, fell to the English arrows
and the English gunshot,

629
00:49:27,621 --> 00:49:30,431
and they came again and again and again.

630
00:49:30,501 --> 00:49:32,846
15, 16 times, they came.

631
00:49:34,706 --> 00:49:36,716
And their horses were ripped to shreds

632
00:49:36,716 --> 00:49:39,133
and the men were thrown from their horses.

633
00:49:39,203 --> 00:49:40,633
And those that weren't thrown,

634
00:49:40,653 --> 00:49:43,218
they had the opportunity
that the dagger men rushed in

635
00:49:43,218 --> 00:49:45,517
and they brought these knights down.

636
00:49:50,787 --> 00:49:54,609
This was a moment in History
where the world changed.

637
00:49:54,789 --> 00:49:58,715
It spelled the beginning of the end 
for the medieval knight.

638
00:50:01,772 --> 00:50:04,215
The Battle of Crecy
has gone down in history

639
00:50:04,215 --> 00:50:07,413
as one of the earliest uses 
of gunpowder weapons

640
00:50:07,563 --> 00:50:10,507
on a European battlefield.

641
00:50:17,987 --> 00:50:19,945
Some 500 years after,

642
00:50:19,985 --> 00:50:22,664
it burned down 
a Chinese alchemist's workshop,

643
00:50:22,752 --> 00:50:26,081
gunpowder had become 
destiny's weapon of choice.

644
00:50:28,566 --> 00:50:31,614
After Crécy, it was only a matter of time

645
00:50:31,614 --> 00:50:35,276
until the fates of peoples and nations
were decided by the gun.

646
00:50:40,126 --> 00:50:42,367
Within two centuries,

647
00:50:42,387 --> 00:50:45,307
Europeans would use their powerful 
gunpowder weapons

648
00:50:45,347 --> 00:50:47,907
to dominate the world,

649
00:50:51,747 --> 00:50:55,826
creating empires that would evolve
into today's global trading culture,

650
00:50:59,832 --> 00:51:03,378
which binds people together
by commerce instead of the gun.

651
00:51:10,019 --> 00:51:13,459
But before Europe could embark 
on its empire-building adventure,

652
00:51:14,799 --> 00:51:16,529
its medieval social order

653
00:51:16,529 --> 00:51:19,589
would be shattered
by a catastrophic event.

654
00:51:21,409 --> 00:51:25,184
One that would forge a new Europe
in a crucible of horror.

655
00:51:29,154 --> 00:51:31,631
While guns thundered at Crecy,

656
00:51:31,643 --> 00:51:34,932
something else was spreading
along the Eurasian trade routes.

657
00:51:39,607 --> 00:51:43,749
Something that would kill
tens of millions of Europeans.

658
00:51:48,509 --> 00:51:51,400
An apocalyptic destruction of human life

659
00:51:52,350 --> 00:51:55,585
that would lay the foundations
of the modern world.

660
00:52:18,095 --> 00:52:20,920
At the Battle of Crécy in 1346,

661
00:52:21,261 --> 00:52:24,876
the English won 
an historic victory over France,

662
00:52:27,836 --> 00:52:31,299
helped by a Chinese invention
that had traveled to Europe.

663
00:52:40,339 --> 00:52:42,065
Gunpowder.

664
00:53:18,785 --> 00:53:20,977
And in the same year of 1346,

665
00:53:21,517 --> 00:53:24,741
some 2,000 kilometers east of Crécy,

666
00:53:25,241 --> 00:53:29,367
another battle was taking place 
on the shores of the Black Sea.

667
00:53:33,677 --> 00:53:38,209
A Mongol army had been laying siege
to the Crimean port city of Caffa,

668
00:53:38,729 --> 00:53:42,730
a Silk Road trading post belonging
to the Italian city of Genoa.

669
00:53:45,514 --> 00:53:48,390
The Mongols were masters 
of siege warfare.

670
00:53:51,340 --> 00:53:55,343
But Caffa was still holding out
after more than two years.

671
00:53:58,983 --> 00:54:02,154
Suddenly, the Mongol army was decimated.

672
00:54:02,954 --> 00:54:06,894
Not by Caffa's defenders, 
but by an unknown disease.

673
00:54:10,005 --> 00:54:12,515
The Mongols quickly ended their siege.

674
00:54:13,125 --> 00:54:14,965
But before they left Caffa,

675
00:54:14,995 --> 00:54:18,060
they loaded their siege engines 
with the corpses of their dead

676
00:54:18,330 --> 00:54:21,131
and flung them over the city's walls,

677
00:54:21,481 --> 00:54:25,179
believing that the stench of death
would kill the defenders.

678
00:54:29,959 --> 00:54:31,712
Medieval chronicles say

679
00:54:31,712 --> 00:54:34,724
that Caffa's defenders
did die by the thousands,

680
00:54:35,114 --> 00:54:38,241
but not from the smell of death.

681
00:54:42,311 --> 00:54:44,908
One year later, in 1347,

682
00:54:44,958 --> 00:54:48,957
the same disease that had killed
the Mongols at Caffa

683
00:54:49,142 --> 00:54:51,779
was killing people in Constantinople.

684
00:54:53,429 --> 00:54:58,907
By 1348, it was killing people 
across Western Europe.

685
00:55:02,238 --> 00:55:06,807
By 1350, it was killing people
as far away as Greenland.

686
00:55:11,447 --> 00:55:14,362
And terrified Europeans
had given it a name.

687
00:55:16,982 --> 00:55:19,119
The Black Death.

688
00:55:20,879 --> 00:55:26,485
In just under a decade, 
from 1347 to 1356,

689
00:55:27,175 --> 00:55:31,401
the Black Death killed a
t least 25 million Europeans.,

690
00:55:31,511 --> 00:55:34,649
one third of Europe's population.

691
00:55:38,829 --> 00:55:40,766
Today, most scholars believe

692
00:55:40,766 --> 00:55:43,880
that the Black Death was 
an outbreak of bubonic plague.

693
00:55:44,460 --> 00:55:48,059
that was transmitted to humans
by infected fleas living on rats.

694
00:55:52,006 --> 00:55:54,716
And we believe
that it spread across Eurasia

695
00:55:54,868 --> 00:55:58,348
by hitching a ride with armies,
ships, and caravans

696
00:55:59,228 --> 00:56:02,253
along trade routes 
that were already ancient

697
00:56:02,363 --> 00:56:05,030
by the time of the Black Death.

698
00:56:07,740 --> 00:56:10,460
Micro-organic travelers of all kinds

699
00:56:10,480 --> 00:56:13,610
have moved across Eurasia
for thousands of years.

700
00:56:15,214 --> 00:56:19,032
A bio-migration that has had 
as big an impact on history

701
00:56:19,032 --> 00:56:23,775
as the more famous exchanges
of new technologies and luxury goods.

702
00:56:24,805 --> 00:56:27,352
And as a recent discovery shows,

703
00:56:27,362 --> 00:56:30,400
tiny living things 
moving along the Silk Road

704
00:56:30,440 --> 00:56:33,324
brought life as well as death.

705
00:56:34,584 --> 00:56:36,989
We were putting together some new methods

706
00:56:37,057 --> 00:56:39,221
of looking for early agriculture,

707
00:56:39,251 --> 00:56:42,155
and for that we needed to do a survey

708
00:56:42,262 --> 00:56:45,459
of all the finds of early crops in Europe.

709
00:56:47,163 --> 00:56:49,221
When you looked at a map of all of Europe,

710
00:56:49,231 --> 00:56:52,103
then you could see
there were these Chinese crops

711
00:56:52,135 --> 00:56:55,027
in small numbers very early on in Europe.

712
00:56:57,017 --> 00:57:00,208
"Very early on" was around 2,000 BC,

713
00:57:02,485 --> 00:57:05,244
when a Chinese grain
called broomcorn millet

714
00:57:05,326 --> 00:57:09,011
appears in the Eastern European
archaeological record.

715
00:57:10,061 --> 00:57:13,730
The actual crop itself
will decay or be eaten,

716
00:57:14,169 --> 00:57:16,178
but rather fortunately,

717
00:57:16,218 --> 00:57:19,642
if it's cooked and over-burnt,
it turns to carbon.

718
00:57:19,675 --> 00:57:23,387
That will stay in the archaeological
record for a long time.

719
00:57:27,368 --> 00:57:29,965
In the Chinese province of inner Mongolia,

720
00:57:30,445 --> 00:57:33,923
archaeologists are studying
the origins of broomcorn millet,

721
00:57:34,631 --> 00:57:37,596
one of the world's oldest domestic crops.

722
00:57:40,346 --> 00:57:44,293
We are looking at a broomcorn millet field
of almost 16 acres

723
00:57:44,543 --> 00:57:47,342
The cultivation of broomcorn millet
in this place

724
00:57:47,402 --> 00:57:49,834
dates back to nearly 8000 years ago.

725
00:57:49,949 --> 00:57:53,826
It's the earliest area of human-cultivated
broomcorn millet in the world.

726
00:57:53,896 --> 00:57:56,170
After broomcorn millet's birth
in this place,

727
00:57:56,170 --> 00:57:58,048
it spread to the West from the East.

728
00:57:58,048 --> 00:58:00,049
It spread to Europe.

729
00:58:01,499 --> 00:58:04,308
Since it originated from the East
and then spread to Europe,

730
00:58:04,313 --> 00:58:06,637
it can be regarded 
as an important contribution

731
00:58:06,637 --> 00:58:09,479
of our Eastern civilization
to the Western counterpart.

732
00:58:11,999 --> 00:58:14,966
But it isn't clear just how and why

733
00:58:15,136 --> 00:58:19,275
broomcorn millet travelled thousands
of kilometers across Eurasia,

734
00:58:19,806 --> 00:58:22,845
through some of the world's
harshest environments,

735
00:58:22,925 --> 00:58:25,505
all the way to Europe.

736
00:58:27,185 --> 00:58:31,450
Millet's long journey may have begun
simply because it travelled so well.

737
00:58:35,160 --> 00:58:38,662
Millets are essentially cereals, 
but they're very small.

738
00:58:39,482 --> 00:58:41,618
And because they have very small grains,

739
00:58:41,648 --> 00:58:43,301
they're hardy and they're tough,

740
00:58:43,301 --> 00:58:45,418
and they can grow quite fast.

741
00:58:45,448 --> 00:58:47,586
Broomcorn millet, at a push,

742
00:58:47,906 --> 00:58:50,635
can get from seed to seed in 45 days.

743
00:58:53,225 --> 00:58:55,290
You can plant a seed in the ground

744
00:58:55,300 --> 00:58:58,761
and 45 days later, 
in the right conditions,

745
00:58:58,801 --> 00:59:00,808
you may have plants.

746
00:59:00,865 --> 00:59:02,642
That's incredibly fast.

747
00:59:02,722 --> 00:59:04,996
So, if you're moving around parts of Asia,

748
00:59:05,050 --> 00:59:07,739
where, on the one hand, 
there's a long winter,

749
00:59:07,779 --> 00:59:09,304
a short growing season,

750
00:59:09,374 --> 00:59:12,378
and you can't particularly
rely on rainfall,

751
00:59:12,468 --> 00:59:16,087
then something that gets a move on
in terms of its growth cycle

752
00:59:16,115 --> 00:59:18,220
is very valuable.

753
00:59:21,260 --> 00:59:24,692
There are accounts of communities
that are on horseback

754
00:59:25,172 --> 00:59:28,497
for quite a lot of the time
and herding animals and so forth,

755
00:59:28,497 --> 00:59:32,263
but for that short season of the year

756
00:59:32,313 --> 00:59:33,879
that millet grows in,

757
00:59:33,879 --> 00:59:36,738
they can actually 
sow the millet on horseback,

758
00:59:36,948 --> 00:59:39,287
trample it in with the horse's feet,

759
00:59:39,509 --> 00:59:41,599
and then either leave 
a few teenagers there

760
00:59:41,599 --> 00:59:44,081
to scare the birds off 
for a couple of months,

761
00:59:44,169 --> 00:59:47,539
come back two months later, 
and harvest the crops.

762
00:59:51,369 --> 00:59:53,819
Millet was a highly mobile grain,

763
00:59:53,849 --> 00:59:55,664
but there wasn't any evidence

764
00:59:55,714 --> 00:59:58,941
of how it might have travelled
from its home in northern China.

765
01:00:02,167 --> 01:00:08,610
Until archaeologists found signs 
of millet cultivation around 2500 BC

766
01:00:09,102 --> 01:00:13,224
in the foothills of the Tian Shan
Mountains in central Asia.

767
01:00:16,064 --> 01:00:18,035
At that point we asked ourselves,

768
01:00:18,045 --> 01:00:20,246
"Well, what is it about these foothills?"

769
01:00:20,300 --> 01:00:22,133
You know, "Why the foothills?"

770
01:00:23,333 --> 01:00:25,590
Clearly, it's about water.

771
01:00:26,630 --> 01:00:29,521
If one travels across the center of Asia,

772
01:00:29,605 --> 01:00:32,213
one realizes why water is a key.

773
01:00:32,323 --> 01:00:35,922
And wherever you are in Asia, 
it can be very dry, of course.

774
01:00:36,112 --> 01:00:38,740
But if one goes uphill to those foothills,

775
01:00:38,740 --> 01:00:40,638
then one has somewhere

776
01:00:40,748 --> 01:00:44,440
where there will be streams
running off the mountains and water.

777
01:00:47,165 --> 01:00:50,202
Archaeologists found that around 1,000 BC,

778
01:00:50,212 --> 01:00:53,679
millet farmers left theTian Shan foothills

779
01:00:53,749 --> 01:00:56,271
and their reliable water supply

780
01:00:56,291 --> 01:00:59,367
and began moving
into much harsher environments.

781
01:01:00,017 --> 01:01:03,765
We can see the confidence of farmers

782
01:01:03,905 --> 01:01:06,944
spreading out from where
the water is really safe

783
01:01:07,054 --> 01:01:09,653
to areas where you have to know more

784
01:01:09,653 --> 01:01:13,143
about the water and the landscape 
and the geography,

785
01:01:13,163 --> 01:01:16,882
both into the steppes to the north
and to the desert to the south.

786
01:01:19,573 --> 01:01:23,663
Millet's local migrations
may have linked it with the world.

787
01:01:24,347 --> 01:01:27,057
Migrating millet farmers
in search of water

788
01:01:27,077 --> 01:01:29,227
may have settled near trade routes.

789
01:01:33,067 --> 01:01:35,657
And long-distance travelers
would have chosen routes

790
01:01:35,657 --> 01:01:38,597
near reliable sources of food and water.

791
01:01:43,087 --> 01:01:48,935
I think very much 
those traders are definitely working

792
01:01:49,076 --> 01:01:51,956
through networks
that are already centuries old.

793
01:01:53,502 --> 01:01:58,702
It's at least a millennium
before you see something crystallizing

794
01:01:58,732 --> 01:02:01,327
that you can start calling the Silk Road.

795
01:02:04,717 --> 01:02:08,153
Another discovery has revealed 
that this ancient grain migration

796
01:02:08,163 --> 01:02:11,319
wasn't only from East to West.

797
01:02:14,249 --> 01:02:17,755
Wheat was transmitted from West to East,

798
01:02:17,865 --> 01:02:21,162
arrived in China and was accepted
as our main staple.

799
01:02:21,322 --> 01:02:26,598
This reflects the transaction
between Eastern and Western cultures.

800
01:02:29,528 --> 01:02:32,439
The Eurasian steppe, acting as a route

801
01:02:32,439 --> 01:02:35,297
for early exchanges between
Eastern and Western cultures.

802
01:02:35,359 --> 01:02:38,686
is the predecessor
of the ancient Silk Road.

803
01:02:38,742 --> 01:02:41,596
Ethnic migration, the fusion of cultures,

804
01:02:41,746 --> 01:02:44,910
and the flow of trade
are all embedded in this road.

805
01:02:46,755 --> 01:02:50,092
Trading millet and wheat
between China and Europe

806
01:02:50,162 --> 01:02:52,840
may have done much more than feed people.

807
01:02:54,590 --> 01:02:58,330
It may also have enabled
profound social change.

808
01:03:02,450 --> 01:03:05,320
Seeds germinate at one time of year

809
01:03:05,410 --> 01:03:08,070
and are harvested another time of year,

810
01:03:08,120 --> 01:03:11,230
and that's kind
of hardwired into their biology.

811
01:03:11,290 --> 01:03:13,900
And so, farming is a one-season activity,

812
01:03:13,970 --> 01:03:16,590
and there are things going on
at other times of year.

813
01:03:16,630 --> 01:03:19,235
And during the second millennium BC,

814
01:03:19,255 --> 01:03:21,262
a number of societies are doing something

815
01:03:21,262 --> 01:03:23,127
which is quite radically different,

816
01:03:23,127 --> 01:03:28,173
and that is putting more
than one season in a single year.

817
01:03:29,486 --> 01:03:31,981
Crops like millet 
are really useful for that,

818
01:03:32,011 --> 01:03:35,218
in that if you are a western farmer,

819
01:03:35,278 --> 01:03:37,624
with wheat and barley fields

820
01:03:37,624 --> 01:03:39,967
reaching maturity during the summer,

821
01:03:39,987 --> 01:03:41,101
and you think

822
01:03:41,228 --> 01:03:44,546
"Right, with the same plot of land,
"I want to increase production.

823
01:03:44,696 --> 01:03:48,851
"And so, I want another crop
after I've harvested the first crop."

824
01:03:49,581 --> 01:03:52,465
You can't do a long season, 
large-grain crop

825
01:03:52,465 --> 01:03:54,449
like wheat and barley again,

826
01:03:54,533 --> 01:03:57,166
so, something that's short and sharp
like millet

827
01:03:57,166 --> 01:03:59,269
you can tag on to the end of it

828
01:03:59,319 --> 01:04:02,237
and catch another season 
before the winter's set in.

829
01:04:05,297 --> 01:04:08,586
Interestingly, when you get to China, 
it's the converse.

830
01:04:08,606 --> 01:04:11,026
You have this short season crop
already there,

831
01:04:11,036 --> 01:04:13,311
and by rearranging your life,

832
01:04:13,321 --> 01:04:17,658
you can bring a long season crop
such as wheat and barley in at that stage.

833
01:04:17,722 --> 01:04:20,789
So, the implications are, 
with the same plot of land,

834
01:04:21,139 --> 01:04:25,285
you could basically get 
two harvests rather than one.

835
01:04:25,372 --> 01:04:28,263
So, two sets of calories rather than one.

836
01:04:31,673 --> 01:04:35,409
It may release some of the community
to not farm at all

837
01:04:36,015 --> 01:04:40,852
and occupy roles within cities,
or as craftspeople, or leaders.

838
01:04:43,152 --> 01:04:45,744
If we look at the second millennium BC,

839
01:04:45,744 --> 01:04:47,345
what we certainly see

840
01:04:47,345 --> 01:04:50,621
is at the same time 
as multi-cropping is there,

841
01:04:51,241 --> 01:04:54,633
then there are a lot of the community,

842
01:04:54,706 --> 01:04:57,462
are not farmers, 
but instead metalworkers,

843
01:04:57,532 --> 01:05:00,165
or kings, or priests, or something else.

844
01:05:00,165 --> 01:05:02,202
And so, what we see evidence of

845
01:05:02,202 --> 01:05:07,767
is multi-cropping allows a non-farming
sector within the community.

846
01:05:09,792 --> 01:05:14,370
So, what we have is a small, 
not very impressive-looking seed,

847
01:05:14,400 --> 01:05:17,812
but because of the way it grows
and because of its biology,

848
01:05:17,812 --> 01:05:20,279
it has a massive impact

849
01:05:20,345 --> 01:05:22,466
in changing the productivity

850
01:05:22,496 --> 01:05:25,287
of the heartlands of western farming.

851
01:05:27,637 --> 01:05:30,319
So, those western farmlands
could, in the same area,

852
01:05:30,387 --> 01:05:32,753
produce two crops rather than one,

853
01:05:32,803 --> 01:05:35,343
and that enabled a whole series of things

854
01:05:35,401 --> 01:05:38,900
that we associate 
with the word "civilization."

855
01:05:43,290 --> 01:05:47,770
Finding Chinese millet in Europe
and European wheat and barley in China

856
01:05:47,960 --> 01:05:51,095
suggests that long before the Silk Road,

857
01:05:51,195 --> 01:05:55,117
East and West were introducing 
one another to new foods,

858
01:05:56,277 --> 01:05:58,665
and that the movement of crops

859
01:05:58,665 --> 01:06:02,239
may have helped create
the earliest East-West trade routes.

860
01:06:05,269 --> 01:06:08,016
And in the deserts of far western China,

861
01:06:08,066 --> 01:06:10,477
archaeologists
have discovered another way

862
01:06:10,477 --> 01:06:12,889
living organisms
could travel the Silk Road.

863
01:06:15,219 --> 01:06:18,156
This is Xuanquanzhi relay station,

864
01:06:18,156 --> 01:06:21,635
an archaeological site 
near the town of Dunhuang,

865
01:06:21,949 --> 01:06:24,591
a major stopping point on the Silk Road.

866
01:06:29,011 --> 01:06:31,967
2,000 years ago, during the Han dynasty,

867
01:06:32,017 --> 01:06:36,815
Xuanquanzhi was a very busy
and very cosmopolitan place.

868
01:06:39,535 --> 01:06:43,272
According to records 
written on bamboo and wood

869
01:06:43,342 --> 01:06:45,661
unearthed from Xuanquanzhi

870
01:06:45,817 --> 01:06:49,312
Xuanquanzhi was not only serving
as a relay station,

871
01:06:49,312 --> 01:06:52,807
but also, as a place to receive 
caravans and government officials.

872
01:06:52,849 --> 01:06:56,008
During the Han Dinasty, 
the major officials received here

873
01:06:56,008 --> 01:06:59,248
included the king of Kholan Kingdom
from the Western Regions,

874
01:06:59,279 --> 01:07:02,331
the king of the Wusun, 
also called the Issedones

875
01:07:02,331 --> 01:07:05,384
and the king of the Kangu, 
also called the Sogdians.

876
01:07:05,564 --> 01:07:08,911
At most, the number of received guests
would be over 1000.

877
01:07:11,921 --> 01:07:16,669
Therefore, this place was filled up
with a mixture of people from all regions.

878
01:07:17,909 --> 01:07:20,118
It would be used for merchants,

879
01:07:20,118 --> 01:07:22,945
and it would also be used
for government business.

880
01:07:22,975 --> 01:07:24,729
People could travel long distances

881
01:07:24,729 --> 01:07:27,004
knowing that there was somewhere
they could stay

882
01:07:27,024 --> 01:07:29,315
be refreshed and recover,
change their horses,

883
01:07:29,335 --> 01:07:32,240
and then move on
to the next relay station.

884
01:07:34,120 --> 01:07:37,648
The wonderful thing about
the Xuanquanzhi trading post

885
01:07:37,658 --> 01:07:43,112
was that it's in a part of the country
that is not built up now,

886
01:07:43,179 --> 01:07:47,095
and the environment, very, very dry
and often very cold in the winter,

887
01:07:47,145 --> 01:07:49,813
means that things
are preserved there very well.

888
01:07:49,823 --> 01:07:52,800
So, a lot of the things
— inside that trading post —

889
01:07:52,890 --> 01:07:55,557
have survived instead of decomposing.

890
01:08:01,119 --> 01:08:04,247
Excavators were especially excited
to find something

891
01:08:04,267 --> 01:08:07,276
that perhaps only
an archaeologist could love:

892
01:08:09,486 --> 01:08:12,921
the 2,000-year-old equivalent 
of toilet paper.

893
01:08:14,081 --> 01:08:16,957
In China, they wrote back,
in the Han dynasty times,

894
01:08:16,997 --> 01:08:19,738
how they would have a stick 
with cloth wrapped on the end

895
01:08:19,738 --> 01:08:21,424
for people to wipe themselves with.

896
01:08:21,424 --> 01:08:24,444
There were quite a few 
of these sticks thrown into the latrine

897
01:08:24,454 --> 01:08:27,209
as if people discarded them
in there when they'd finished.

898
01:08:27,209 --> 01:08:30,566
These sticks have been found
at some other excavations in China as well

899
01:08:30,566 --> 01:08:32,532
but what's great about this relay station

900
01:08:32,532 --> 01:08:34,663
is we still have the cloth
wrapped on the end

901
01:08:34,663 --> 01:08:37,318
and we still have the human feces on.

902
01:08:38,048 --> 01:08:41,782
So, we scraped off 
the dried feces from the cloth

903
01:08:41,851 --> 01:08:43,664
and took them to the lab.

904
01:08:43,754 --> 01:08:45,832
We found four different
species of parasite

905
01:08:45,832 --> 01:08:47,910
in those who used this latrine.

906
01:08:47,989 --> 01:08:51,076
Two of the species are spread by feces

907
01:08:51,076 --> 01:08:54,374
contaminating your food
or your hands or your drink:

908
01:08:54,414 --> 01:08:56,688
roundworm and whipworm.

909
01:08:56,888 --> 01:08:59,802
Another species was a kind of tapeworm

910
01:08:59,812 --> 01:09:03,859
that they probably acquired
by eating raw or undercooked pork.

911
01:09:04,289 --> 01:09:07,477
And then, we found
the really exciting find,

912
01:09:07,477 --> 01:09:09,606
which was the Chinese liver fluke.

913
01:09:11,326 --> 01:09:13,978
This is a small flatworm

914
01:09:13,978 --> 01:09:16,630
that lives in eastern and southern
China and in Korea.

915
01:09:17,326 --> 01:09:20,226
It can only survive in marshy, wet places.

916
01:09:20,306 --> 01:09:25,384
But here, we found it 1500 kilometers away
from anywhere that has it in modern times.

917
01:09:27,002 --> 01:09:29,780
So, it wasn't what we expected to find.

918
01:09:29,820 --> 01:09:33,094
It was brilliant that we could find it
on the Silk Road.

919
01:09:33,164 --> 01:09:35,321
The liver fluke requires a lifecycle

920
01:09:35,321 --> 01:09:37,538
where it passes through freshwater snails,

921
01:09:37,599 --> 01:09:39,918
and through small fish
and then, bigger fish.

922
01:09:39,938 --> 01:09:43,308
If you cook the fish, 
then you don't get the liver fluke.

923
01:09:43,368 --> 01:09:46,498
But if you eat the fish raw, 
then it hatches out in your stomach,

924
01:09:46,508 --> 01:09:49,408
migrates through your body, 
crawls into the liver,

925
01:09:49,438 --> 01:09:50,893
and then develops there.

926
01:09:51,483 --> 01:09:54,910
There was no way that people
in the area of this relay station

927
01:09:54,910 --> 01:09:57,289
could have caught it 
in that particular area

928
01:09:57,289 --> 01:09:59,303
because it was far too dry.

929
01:09:59,323 --> 01:10:00,766
There were no lakes.

930
01:10:00,776 --> 01:10:03,674
There were no freshwater snails
and fish for them to infect.

931
01:10:04,962 --> 01:10:10,296
The discovery of the liver fluke
is of great importance.

932
01:10:12,836 --> 01:10:17,787
It indicates that the caravans 
or government servants

933
01:10:17,944 --> 01:10:21,546
brought their excrement,
as well as diseases, here,

934
01:10:21,597 --> 01:10:25,739
over thousands of kilometres
of travel to this place, Xuanquan station.

935
01:10:30,262 --> 01:10:33,328
With state-of-the-art overseas analysis,

936
01:10:33,410 --> 01:10:36,769
we are comparing it with similar
evidence originating in Europe,

937
01:10:36,839 --> 01:10:39,723
to figure out whether the liver was spread

938
01:10:39,723 --> 01:10:42,584
from China's eastern 
coastal area to Europe

939
01:10:42,614 --> 01:10:45,540
or if it was spread from Europe to China

940
01:10:45,540 --> 01:10:48,058
or if the disease spread 
between these two areas.

941
01:10:48,058 --> 01:10:50,075
We are doing some further research.

942
01:10:51,725 --> 01:10:54,493
The finds at Xuanquanzhi have shown

943
01:10:54,503 --> 01:10:58,582
that humans could carry diseases
long distances along the Silk Road.

944
01:11:03,892 --> 01:11:07,379
Another discovery has revealed
what could happen when they did.

945
01:11:13,354 --> 01:11:18,119
In 2009, German scientists began
investigating a puzzling discovery

946
01:11:18,840 --> 01:11:21,713
in the Bavarian town of Aschheim.

947
01:11:25,684 --> 01:11:31,647
About 20 years ago a graveyard was found 
which contained more than 400 individuals.

948
01:11:32,097 --> 01:11:38,153
We dated it back to a period from 
around the 5th century to the 7th century.

949
01:11:38,443 --> 01:11:41,395
It was exciting for us 
that there were a lot of graves

950
01:11:41,411 --> 01:11:44,365
that contained more than one person

951
01:11:44,385 --> 01:11:51,192
around 20 graves 
where 2 to 5 people were buried.

952
01:11:53,142 --> 01:11:56,971
Aschheim looked like any other cemetery

953
01:11:56,971 --> 01:11:58,885
that we would expect to find here

954
01:11:58,885 --> 01:12:00,892
except for these multiple burials.

955
01:12:00,912 --> 01:12:05,352
These people were buried together
in one grave and that made us curious.

956
01:12:05,366 --> 01:12:07,148
And we asked ourselves why exactly

957
01:12:07,148 --> 01:12:09,380
these people were buried
together in one grave

958
01:12:10,880 --> 01:12:14,609
The Aschheim mass burial 
was an archaeological enigma,

959
01:12:15,128 --> 01:12:17,447
but there was one crucial clue.

960
01:12:19,377 --> 01:12:23,316
The bodies had been buried
during the 6th century CE.

961
01:12:29,736 --> 01:12:34,099
In the 6th century, a terrifying illness
called the Plague of Justinian

962
01:12:34,419 --> 01:12:37,115
ravaged the Eastern Roman Empire.

963
01:12:41,744 --> 01:12:47,786
It killed 30 to 50 million people
in Europe, Asia, and Africa,

964
01:12:49,379 --> 01:12:52,590
nearly half of all the people on Earth.

965
01:12:52,890 --> 01:12:57,075
Historians tell us that thousands
of people were lying on the street

966
01:12:57,175 --> 01:12:59,218
and that tens of thousands

967
01:12:59,218 --> 01:13:01,590
were dying at the peak of the plague,

968
01:13:01,650 --> 01:13:05,118
so many that they could not be buried.

969
01:13:05,189 --> 01:13:09,882
The corpses were thrown 
into watchtowers and sealed inside

970
01:13:09,882 --> 01:13:13,394
because no one knew what to do with them.

971
01:13:13,484 --> 01:13:17,791
So, this epidemic is quite comparable
to the Black Death.

972
01:13:17,888 --> 01:13:21,014
We asked ourselves what
the multiple burials were about

973
01:13:21,014 --> 01:13:24,975
and chose to screen for plague pathogen.

974
01:13:26,511 --> 01:13:30,522
The Justinian plague arrived
in Constantinople on ships from Egypt,

975
01:13:32,533 --> 01:13:34,677
but what the disease was

976
01:13:34,677 --> 01:13:37,543
and where it came from 
remained unknown.

977
01:13:39,674 --> 01:13:42,304
The team investigating
Aschheim's mass burial

978
01:13:42,334 --> 01:13:45,366
hoped its bones might reveal the answer.

979
01:13:45,473 --> 01:13:50,290
We tested more than 20 individuals,
analyzing their DNA

980
01:13:50,300 --> 01:13:55,116
and found small fragments 
of plague DNA in four individuals,

981
01:13:55,517 --> 01:13:58,770
Just on this young woman, 
on one young woman,

982
01:13:58,780 --> 01:14:01,573
there was enough DNA
to be able to analyze it really well.

983
01:14:01,613 --> 01:14:03,418
And that is this individual.

984
01:14:03,438 --> 01:14:06,207
This woman has quite open skull sutures.

985
01:14:06,227 --> 01:14:09,996
This is how we know 
that she died quite young.

986
01:14:10,096 --> 01:14:14,770
We would estimate this individual's age 
at approximately early 20s.

987
01:14:14,915 --> 01:14:17,543
In this case, we would see

988
01:14:17,543 --> 01:14:20,957
if we could find the plague pathogen

989
01:14:21,007 --> 01:14:24,962
and to do that we prefer to use teeth

990
01:14:25,013 --> 01:14:28,109
like these teeth here.

991
01:14:28,429 --> 01:14:30,578
Teeth with a lot of root

992
01:14:30,848 --> 01:14:34,332
because the root contains DNA

993
01:14:34,342 --> 01:14:37,006
and because it is embedded in the jaw.

994
01:14:37,065 --> 01:14:42,035
It is well protected there, 
and the DNA is preserved there best.

995
01:14:42,152 --> 01:14:46,234
And then we took this tooth 
to the laboratory

996
01:14:46,364 --> 01:14:50,186
to extract and examine the DNA
with chemical methods.

997
01:14:51,118 --> 01:14:54,040
And when we had looked at the DNA 
of this individual

998
01:14:54,107 --> 01:14:57,357
we determined that
we had actually found Yersini pestis,

999
01:14:57,377 --> 01:15:01,577
the plague pathogen, the Black Death's.

1000
01:15:01,721 --> 01:15:04,415
What we could also determine

1001
01:15:04,465 --> 01:15:09,785
is that this pathogen did not develop
in Europe but evolved in Asia

1002
01:15:11,259 --> 01:15:14,201
Studies like the Aschheim DNA project

1003
01:15:14,211 --> 01:15:17,804
have concluded that 800 years
before the Black Death,

1004
01:15:17,917 --> 01:15:21,149
a plague travelled the Silk Road

1005
01:15:21,149 --> 01:15:25,455
and that centuries later,
the Black Death followed it in its path.

1006
01:15:29,358 --> 01:15:30,892
Most scholars now agree

1007
01:15:30,892 --> 01:15:34,256
that the Black Death
originated in central Asia

1008
01:15:35,785 --> 01:15:37,727
and that it first reached Europe

1009
01:15:37,727 --> 01:15:40,983
on Italian merchant ships 
returning from the East.

1010
01:15:51,933 --> 01:15:55,106
The Black Death killed 
with incredible speed.

1011
01:16:00,026 --> 01:16:03,942
Victims had only 
a week to a few hours to live.

1012
01:16:07,372 --> 01:16:10,330
Entire towns and monasteries 
were wiped out,

1013
01:16:11,230 --> 01:16:13,794
and no one knew what to do.

1014
01:16:16,554 --> 01:16:19,119
It may have spread about five miles a day,

1015
01:16:19,189 --> 01:16:24,097
which is a lot faster than a lot 
of modern bubonic plague outbreaks.

1016
01:16:25,703 --> 01:16:29,950
Whether it was because of the rate
at which people fled from it

1017
01:16:29,990 --> 01:16:33,138
that spread it faster than it might 
otherwise have been.

1018
01:16:34,038 --> 01:16:35,620
And it certainly was something

1019
01:16:35,640 --> 01:16:38,302
that had a dramatic effect
on people in Europe.

1020
01:16:38,322 --> 01:16:40,864
They all wrote about it,
they were all scared of it.

1021
01:17:17,804 --> 01:17:19,921
So, they had some concept of contagion

1022
01:17:19,991 --> 01:17:21,515
and the idea that the disease

1023
01:17:21,545 --> 01:17:23,616
could be spread
from one person to another,

1024
01:17:23,616 --> 01:17:25,426
but they didn't know how.

1025
01:17:27,476 --> 01:17:30,060
They had no idea about bacteria

1026
01:17:30,060 --> 01:17:32,762
or the spread of microorganisms
at that stage,

1027
01:17:32,792 --> 01:17:35,613
so, they hadn't worked out 
how a disease was spread.

1028
01:17:35,633 --> 01:17:38,255
But they just realized that one person
seemed to be able

1029
01:17:38,255 --> 01:17:40,267
to spread it to the rest of their family,

1030
01:17:40,277 --> 01:17:43,565
so, they realized something
must be happening there.

1031
01:17:58,566 --> 01:18:00,742
Baffled physicians consulted the works

1032
01:18:00,742 --> 01:18:03,209
of ancient authorities like Hippocrates,

1033
01:18:03,220 --> 01:18:06,654
who lived four centuries
before the birth of Jesus,

1034
01:18:08,904 --> 01:18:12,786
and Galen, who lived 
two centuries after Jesus' death.

1035
01:18:16,696 --> 01:18:20,317
Hippocrates and Galen believed
that illness was a result

1036
01:18:20,377 --> 01:18:23,733
of an imbalance among
four so-called humors:

1037
01:18:24,783 --> 01:18:28,646
blood, phlegm, 
yellow bile, and black bile.

1038
01:18:31,886 --> 01:18:35,821
The theory was that if you had
your four humors in balance

1039
01:18:35,891 --> 01:18:39,045
— your blood, your phlegm, 
your black bile and your yellow bile —

1040
01:18:39,045 --> 01:18:40,410
then you'd be healthy.

1041
01:18:40,416 --> 01:18:41,892
If they came out of balance

1042
01:18:41,892 --> 01:18:44,850
or if you had corruption 
of one of your humors,

1043
01:18:44,850 --> 01:18:47,439
then that would make you unwell.

1044
01:18:47,569 --> 01:18:49,571
So, the treatments that doctors used

1045
01:18:49,579 --> 01:18:52,660
were largely based on their understanding
of humoral theory.

1046
01:18:52,840 --> 01:18:56,237
So, at the beginning, they tried
the normal treatments

1047
01:18:56,247 --> 01:19:00,367
of dietary modification
and bloodletting and baths and so on,

1048
01:19:00,476 --> 01:19:02,125
but they had no effect.

1049
01:19:04,860 --> 01:19:08,661
They believed that bad vapors 
were coming up from the ground,

1050
01:19:08,757 --> 01:19:11,766
making people ill, 
affecting their humors.

1051
01:19:11,786 --> 01:19:15,882
They believed that a strong 
southerly wind was a bad thing

1052
01:19:15,984 --> 01:19:18,308
that made a lot of people ill,

1053
01:19:19,148 --> 01:19:22,305
that it was a combination 
of the alignments of the planets,

1054
01:19:22,365 --> 01:19:26,396
because they believed in astrology 
and its effect on your risk of disease.

1055
01:19:27,766 --> 01:19:31,883
They really didn't have a structured 
medical approach to how to deal with it.

1056
01:19:31,973 --> 01:19:33,781
It took everyone off guard.

1057
01:19:33,801 --> 01:19:36,311
No one knew how to deal with it.

1058
01:19:38,426 --> 01:19:40,638
The doctors were effectively powerless.

1059
01:19:49,048 --> 01:19:52,129
Some citizens attempted another cure.

1060
01:20:02,419 --> 01:20:05,445
Jews in Europe suffered 
fewer deaths from plague.

1061
01:20:07,105 --> 01:20:09,908
That may have been because
they were socially isolated

1062
01:20:09,948 --> 01:20:13,269
and practiced better hygiene 
than the general population.

1063
01:20:15,479 --> 01:20:17,950
But surviving the Black Death

1064
01:20:17,950 --> 01:20:21,025
cost thousands 
of European Jews their lives.

1065
01:20:22,835 --> 01:20:25,088
All across plague-stricken Europe,

1066
01:20:25,108 --> 01:20:28,559
the already age-old Christian
prejudice against Jews

1067
01:20:28,899 --> 01:20:31,729
exploded into murderous hatred.

1068
01:20:32,239 --> 01:20:35,400
They believed that people 
with leprosy or Jewish people

1069
01:20:35,640 --> 01:20:38,980
may have actually exacerbated the plague
by poisoning people.

1070
01:20:44,820 --> 01:20:48,525
So, this is a sign of how panicked
and how worried everybody was,

1071
01:20:48,575 --> 01:20:52,371
that they were thinking of really 
quite bizarre kind of interpretations

1072
01:20:52,431 --> 01:20:55,414
as to why everybody was becoming sick.

1073
01:21:05,474 --> 01:21:07,477
While mobs murdered Jews,

1074
01:21:07,737 --> 01:21:10,483
physicians tried to stop the Black Death.

1075
01:21:10,743 --> 01:21:13,983
When traditional theories
of disease failed,

1076
01:21:14,008 --> 01:21:17,194
they resorted to studying
the disease itself.

1077
01:21:26,806 --> 01:21:30,745
They were desperate to understand
what was causing the Black Death,

1078
01:21:32,295 --> 01:21:35,905
how it spread, and how to treat it.

1079
01:21:40,031 --> 01:21:42,997
Slowly, they found answers.

1080
01:21:44,727 --> 01:21:48,354
They tried various treatments, 
but no medicines had any effect.

1081
01:21:48,674 --> 01:21:50,721
But that's why they moved over time

1082
01:21:50,721 --> 01:21:53,028
to trying to restrict
the contact of people,

1083
01:21:53,028 --> 01:21:55,120
burning the clothes 
of people that had died

1084
01:21:55,150 --> 01:21:57,771
rather than giving them to other people.

1085
01:21:57,801 --> 01:22:00,556
And they realized that the clothes 
and spread of people

1086
01:22:00,556 --> 01:22:03,829
was an important way 
they could stop the spread of disease.

1087
01:22:07,009 --> 01:22:10,517
So, we have the introduction
of concept of quarantine,

1088
01:22:10,627 --> 01:22:13,779
where people weren't allowed
to move from one area to another

1089
01:22:13,829 --> 01:22:16,090
if there was a plague outbreak

1090
01:22:16,130 --> 01:22:19,565
and also, that when sailors
in ships arrived in a port,

1091
01:22:19,565 --> 01:22:22,019
they may have to stay
in a quarantined area

1092
01:22:22,049 --> 01:22:23,753
for a certain number of days

1093
01:22:23,763 --> 01:22:26,192
until they were found
to be clear of the disease,

1094
01:22:26,192 --> 01:22:29,166
and then they could move inland 
and actually go into town.

1095
01:22:32,466 --> 01:22:35,698
Over time, this new 
trial and error approach

1096
01:22:35,768 --> 01:22:38,824
would spawn a medical revolution.

1097
01:22:40,914 --> 01:22:43,742
Some 200 years after the Black Death,

1098
01:22:43,822 --> 01:22:46,821
the brilliant physician Andreas Vesalius

1099
01:22:46,821 --> 01:22:50,396
published meticulous studies
of the human body

1100
01:22:50,396 --> 01:22:53,674
that exploded ancient 
and medieval theories

1101
01:22:53,724 --> 01:22:56,466
and gave birth to modern anatomy.

1102
01:22:58,078 --> 01:23:00,710
Europe's battle against the Black Death

1103
01:23:00,720 --> 01:23:03,771
taught lessons that helped 
create modern medicine.

1104
01:23:04,801 --> 01:23:06,991
And even centuries later,

1105
01:23:07,001 --> 01:23:09,651
the Black Death still has much to teach.

1106
01:23:10,461 --> 01:23:14,451
So, this is a skull of a man
who survived the Black Death

1107
01:23:14,521 --> 01:23:18,526
and died in Cambridge
in the later part of the 1300s.

1108
01:23:18,932 --> 01:23:20,997
We know he survived the Black Death

1109
01:23:21,085 --> 01:23:24,147
because we have a radiocarbon date
that's shown when he died,

1110
01:23:24,147 --> 01:23:27,382
and we know he was 
a fairly old individual.

1111
01:23:29,252 --> 01:23:31,434
One of the things we're doing here

1112
01:23:31,434 --> 01:23:34,475
is a project looking at the effect
of the bubonic plague

1113
01:23:34,475 --> 01:23:37,176
upon the British population,
specifically in Cambridge.

1114
01:23:37,292 --> 01:23:39,126
And what we're trying to find out

1115
01:23:39,126 --> 01:23:41,439
is what are different 
about people who survived

1116
01:23:41,439 --> 01:23:43,720
compared with people who died.

1117
01:23:43,830 --> 01:23:45,365
That way, we can work out

1118
01:23:45,365 --> 01:23:48,503
how the Black Death really changed 
the population of Britain

1119
01:23:48,553 --> 01:23:51,087
and what our population
might have been like

1120
01:23:51,117 --> 01:23:55,039
had half of us not died
in the mid-1300s.

1121
01:23:55,899 --> 01:23:58,300
And to do that, 
we're looking at the genetics,

1122
01:23:58,360 --> 01:24:03,200
the height, the health,
and many other aspects of the skeletons

1123
01:24:03,256 --> 01:24:06,159
that we find who died 
before the Black Death

1124
01:24:06,169 --> 01:24:08,071
and the ones who died afterwards

1125
01:24:08,175 --> 01:24:11,433
so, we can see the effect 
of this epidemic upon people in Britain.

1126
01:24:11,463 --> 01:24:14,165
So, what we're hoping to find out
is what is different

1127
01:24:14,197 --> 01:24:16,294
about the genes
of the people that survived.

1128
01:24:16,294 --> 01:24:18,657
Did they somehow have a better resistance

1129
01:24:18,657 --> 01:24:20,577
to bubonic plague than other people,

1130
01:24:20,577 --> 01:24:22,106
or was it just mere chance

1131
01:24:22,106 --> 01:24:24,256
as to who survived and who died?

1132
01:24:30,516 --> 01:24:33,851
Those who did survive led better lives

1133
01:24:33,851 --> 01:24:38,550
as the greatest horror of their age
gave way to a new era.

1134
01:24:46,992 --> 01:24:50,221
The Black Death had decimated
Europe's workforce.

1135
01:24:52,951 --> 01:24:57,654
Desperate for labor, the nobility
had to compete for surviving workers

1136
01:24:57,994 --> 01:24:59,980
by offering higher wages.

1137
01:25:13,860 --> 01:25:16,105
Over the next few centuries,

1138
01:25:16,185 --> 01:25:19,330
we see a complete rebalancing 
in the population.

1139
01:25:19,400 --> 01:25:22,410
So, the poor hungry farmers
who didn't have enough land

1140
01:25:22,410 --> 01:25:24,504
were suddenly in a different position.

1141
01:25:24,504 --> 01:25:26,521
The farmers around them had died.
1:25:25

1142
01:25:26,531 --> 01:25:29,624
Their income could go up because
they could farm much more land.

1143
01:25:29,624 --> 01:25:33,511
And so, there was less poverty
and famine among the farmers.

1144
01:25:37,911 --> 01:25:41,467
Opportunities increased
due to the shortage of workers.

1145
01:25:44,917 --> 01:25:46,985
Women could now be scribes

1146
01:25:47,005 --> 01:25:50,054
and hold other jobs
formerly reserved for men.

1147
01:25:52,884 --> 01:25:56,118
The European middle class was born.

1148
01:25:59,461 --> 01:26:03,513
The fact that we then had 
fewer people able to do manual labor

1149
01:26:03,643 --> 01:26:07,083
means that not only
did the price of their labor go up

1150
01:26:07,134 --> 01:26:09,525
so, then they had better income.

1151
01:26:10,365 --> 01:26:13,872
It also means that there seems
to have been a number of inventions

1152
01:26:13,872 --> 01:26:17,281
made specifically 
for labor-saving devices.

1153
01:26:17,886 --> 01:26:20,853
We find the introduction
of the spinning wheel.

1154
01:26:21,333 --> 01:26:23,238
We find horizontal looms.

1155
01:26:23,268 --> 01:26:25,065
We find fulling mills.

1156
01:26:25,225 --> 01:26:28,713
We had blast furnaces, 
mechanized tools,

1157
01:26:29,993 --> 01:26:32,003
we have three-masted ships

1158
01:26:32,089 --> 01:26:35,860
that could hold a lot more cargo
with only a small number of more sailors,

1159
01:26:35,860 --> 01:26:38,634
so, it's a much more efficient
way of trade.

1160
01:26:38,734 --> 01:26:40,949
So, over the next 200 years or so,

1161
01:26:41,025 --> 01:26:43,920
we see big improvements in mechanization.

1162
01:26:43,950 --> 01:26:46,433
And the fact that fewer people around

1163
01:26:46,553 --> 01:26:49,687
meant that these things
may have been invented

1164
01:26:49,717 --> 01:26:53,229
because of the shortage of people 
following the Black Death.

1165
01:27:06,329 --> 01:27:08,255
Newly affluent Europeans

1166
01:27:08,275 --> 01:27:12,261
created a bigger market 
for exotic imported goods.

1167
01:27:19,643 --> 01:27:22,397
Especially for one faraway luxury

1168
01:27:22,407 --> 01:27:25,553
traded since ancient times 
along the Silk Road:

1169
01:27:28,749 --> 01:27:30,120
Spices.

1170
01:27:38,980 --> 01:27:40,665
In the late Middle Ages,

1171
01:27:40,725 --> 01:27:44,175
Asian spices like pepper, 
cinnamon, and cloves

1172
01:27:44,379 --> 01:27:47,553
were highly valuable commodities.

1173
01:28:03,823 --> 01:28:08,410
In London, dockworkers' bonuses
were paid with Indonesian cloves.

1174
01:28:09,980 --> 01:28:13,222
In Venice, people
bought houses with pepper.

1175
01:28:26,422 --> 01:28:29,036
Anyone brave enough to seek out spices

1176
01:28:29,056 --> 01:28:31,600
could get very, very rich.

1177
01:28:34,549 --> 01:28:39,630
And trading in spices meant travelling 
the trade routes between East and West.

1178
01:28:54,075 --> 01:28:56,911
Venetian merchants traveled those routes

1179
01:28:56,951 --> 01:28:59,305
and dominated the spice trade.

1180
01:29:01,154 --> 01:29:04,550
Europe had to pay 
whatever Venice demanded.

1181
01:29:10,090 --> 01:29:13,303
Venice became 
a fabulously wealthy city,

1182
01:29:15,103 --> 01:29:18,398
while the rest of Europe
grumbled and paid.

1183
01:29:21,528 --> 01:29:26,146
Meanwhile, China was also making 
epic voyages to the spice lands

1184
01:29:26,759 --> 01:29:31,394
and developing some of the world's 
most advanced maritime technology.

1185
01:29:32,634 --> 01:29:35,152
During the 13th and 14th centuries,

1186
01:29:35,192 --> 01:29:37,926
foreign visitors to China were awed

1187
01:29:37,956 --> 01:29:42,032
by the size and sophistication 
of Chinese vessels.

1188
01:29:42,743 --> 01:29:47,581
In the year 1345, 
the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta

1189
01:29:47,601 --> 01:29:51,430
wrote of seeing massive ships 
that could carry a thousand men,

1190
01:29:51,660 --> 01:29:53,848
the only ships big enough

1191
01:29:53,868 --> 01:29:56,807
to make the long journey
from China to India.

1192
01:30:03,620 --> 01:30:08,295
And Marco Polo told of sailing
on a Chinese spice trading vessel

1193
01:30:08,335 --> 01:30:11,032
in the year 1292 CE.

1194
01:30:17,369 --> 01:30:19,948
The experience deeply impressed him.

1195
01:30:24,978 --> 01:30:27,812
He claimed the Chinese ship he sailed on

1196
01:30:27,812 --> 01:30:32,359
was capable of holding 
5,000 to 6,000 baskets of pepper,

1197
01:30:32,549 --> 01:30:37,168
a much bigger cargo than the spice ships 
of his native Venice could hold.

1198
01:30:42,188 --> 01:30:45,554
And that his vessel 
was escorted by smaller ships

1199
01:30:45,637 --> 01:30:48,857
that could carry 
a thousand pepper baskets.

1200
01:30:51,397 --> 01:30:55,297
Polo embarked on his journey 
from the Chinese port of Quanzhou,

1201
01:30:55,587 --> 01:30:59,197
a place he described as teeming
with hundreds of vessels

1202
01:30:59,217 --> 01:31:02,287
from China and from distant lands.

1203
01:31:03,134 --> 01:31:06,549
But he didn't report his vessel's
exact dimensions,

1204
01:31:06,679 --> 01:31:10,751
leaving historians to wonder
if he'd exaggerated the ship's size

1205
01:31:11,251 --> 01:31:14,688
or even if he'd actually sailed on it.

1206
01:31:17,895 --> 01:31:20,629
And then, in 1973,

1207
01:31:20,699 --> 01:31:25,385
Chinese archaeologists
found a shipwreck in Quanzhou Harbor.

1208
01:31:27,324 --> 01:31:31,008
The ship had a capacity of 200 tons

1209
01:31:31,068 --> 01:31:34,122
and displacement of over 400 tons.

1210
01:31:34,632 --> 01:31:37,361
The collection of excavated relics

1211
01:31:37,381 --> 01:31:41,831
revealed that the wrecked ship
was carrying a lot of spices

1212
01:31:42,941 --> 01:31:45,945
more than 2,000 kilograms of spice,

1213
01:31:45,995 --> 01:31:47,842
along with some other things

1214
01:31:47,862 --> 01:31:50,049
such as Chinese chess 
and some exotic goods.

1215
01:31:50,137 --> 01:31:52,992
Based on these findings, 
archaeologists concluded

1216
01:31:52,992 --> 01:31:55,847
that this ship was returning
from Southeast Asia

1217
01:31:56,860 --> 01:32:01,541
The Quanzhou Ship was carrying rare woods
from Java and Cambodia,

1218
01:32:02,540 --> 01:32:04,661
frankincense from Arabia,

1219
01:32:04,681 --> 01:32:07,166
even ambergris from Somalia.

1220
01:32:16,686 --> 01:32:19,378
It sank in the year 1277,

1221
01:32:19,468 --> 01:32:24,077
just 15 years before 
Marco Polo visited Quanzhou.

1222
01:32:26,047 --> 01:32:30,096
And its design and construction
were remarkably advanced for their time,

1223
01:32:32,116 --> 01:32:34,990
featuring watertight compartments
and other innovations

1224
01:32:34,990 --> 01:32:38,431
centuries before 
Western vessels had them.

1225
01:32:40,103 --> 01:32:41,777
The hull was easily damaged

1226
01:32:41,777 --> 01:32:44,043
In case of hull damage, 
if the ship was built

1227
01:32:44,043 --> 01:32:47,617
with watertight bulkhead compartments
and water channels in its lower hull

1228
01:32:47,637 --> 01:32:49,841
the ship would be able
to survive the damage.

1229
01:32:49,917 --> 01:32:52,929
If the opening was quite small
and the water came into the ship

1230
01:32:52,929 --> 01:32:55,114
you only needed to close
the water channels

1231
01:32:55,142 --> 01:32:57,912
near the forward-most
and at-most bulkheads

1232
01:32:57,912 --> 01:33:00,198
to keep the leak inside one compartment.

1233
01:33:00,209 --> 01:33:02,942
It gave the crew enough time

1234
01:33:02,992 --> 01:33:05,833
to move the cargo to other cabins 
and repair the leakage

1235
01:33:05,973 --> 01:33:08,732
in the damaged compartment immediately.

1236
01:33:09,282 --> 01:33:11,451
In addition,
in the stern part of the ship,

1237
01:33:11,453 --> 01:33:14,499
we found a rudder hole.

1238
01:33:14,529 --> 01:33:17,079
Back in the Five Dynasties,
before the Song Dinasty,

1239
01:33:17,079 --> 01:33:21,665
our shipbuilders had invented
an elevating rudder,

1240
01:33:21,821 --> 01:33:24,563
By raising or lowering this rudder,

1241
01:33:24,563 --> 01:33:27,105
one could control 
the swing fluctuation and direction

1242
01:33:27,124 --> 01:33:29,213
while operating the ship.

1243
01:33:29,586 --> 01:33:33,309
Several hundred years later,

1244
01:33:33,349 --> 01:33:37,891
many foreign sailing ships
started using this technology.

1245
01:33:39,633 --> 01:33:42,419
35 meters long and 10 meters wide,

1246
01:33:42,499 --> 01:33:45,032
the Quanzhou ship could have been

1247
01:33:45,032 --> 01:33:48,832
one of the smaller vessels
that escorted Marco Polo's bigger ship.

1248
01:33:52,564 --> 01:33:54,571
And there's also evidence

1249
01:33:54,571 --> 01:33:57,058
that very large Chinese
trading vessels did exist.

1250
01:34:00,010 --> 01:34:02,397
This park in the Chinese city of Nanjing

1251
01:34:02,707 --> 01:34:07,595
is built on the remains of a shipyard
dating from the 14th century.

1252
01:34:14,625 --> 01:34:17,124
When they excavated that shipyard,

1253
01:34:17,278 --> 01:34:20,403
archaeologists found 
two giant rudder posts,

1254
01:34:20,633 --> 01:34:23,305
each of them over 10 meters long.

1255
01:34:32,945 --> 01:34:36,301
Chinese records speak 
of giant treasure ships

1256
01:34:36,331 --> 01:34:40,249
carrying trade goods
on epic journeys to faraway lands.

1257
01:34:44,089 --> 01:34:47,383
Commanded by the distinguished 
admiral Zheng He,

1258
01:34:47,393 --> 01:34:50,140
a Chinese armada called the Great Fleet

1259
01:34:50,230 --> 01:34:54,981
made seven voyages
between the years 1405 and 1433.

1260
01:34:57,474 --> 01:35:00,887
From Liujiagang
in China's Jiangsu Province,

1261
01:35:01,017 --> 01:35:04,628
the fleet sailed on diplomatic missions
to southeast Asia,

1262
01:35:04,748 --> 01:35:08,063
the great Indian seaport 
of Calicut, Arabia,

1263
01:35:08,063 --> 01:35:10,691
and along Africa's east coast,

1264
01:35:10,741 --> 01:35:15,605
forging relationships that linked
seaborne and overland trade.

1265
01:35:16,535 --> 01:35:20,133
Over 300 ships carrying nearly 30,000 men

1266
01:35:20,173 --> 01:35:23,202
sailed on the first of those expeditions.

1267
01:35:25,282 --> 01:35:27,217
Chronicles of those voyages claim

1268
01:35:27,217 --> 01:35:29,305
that the largest of Zheng He's ships.

1269
01:35:29,314 --> 01:35:34,268
were over 130 meters long
and over 50 meters wide.

1270
01:35:36,743 --> 01:35:38,816
But marine engineers doubt

1271
01:35:38,816 --> 01:35:41,410
ships that big 
would have been seaworthy.

1272
01:35:46,300 --> 01:35:51,094
The American clipper ship
"Great Republic" launched in 1853,

1273
01:35:51,434 --> 01:35:55,431
was 102 meters long and 16 meters wide.

1274
01:35:58,849 --> 01:36:02,955
In 1872, her leaking hull 
sank her in a hurricane.

1275
01:36:07,245 --> 01:36:12,049
The "Wyoming," built in 1909, 
was 110 meters long.

1276
01:36:16,942 --> 01:36:21,180
Its extreme length made it
structurally unstable in heavy seas.

1277
01:36:25,890 --> 01:36:29,869
In 1924, the "Wyoming" sank 
during a storm.

1278
01:36:33,409 --> 01:36:37,633
If Zheng He's treasure ships were as big
as Chinese chronicles claim,

1279
01:36:39,133 --> 01:36:42,627
they would have been
as long and wide as the "Wyoming"

1280
01:36:42,647 --> 01:36:44,978
and longer than the "Great Republic."

1281
01:36:46,578 --> 01:36:49,874
When we consulted some shipbuilders

1282
01:36:49,884 --> 01:36:52,791
they tell that the size 
of the Treasure Ship

1283
01:36:52,861 --> 01:36:56,394
was beyond the maximum capability

1284
01:36:56,431 --> 01:37:00,690
that we could possibly make even today.

1285
01:37:00,791 --> 01:37:04,133
Therefore, more archaeological discoveries

1286
01:37:04,133 --> 01:37:07,476
and stronger evidence 
are needed to verify the truth

1287
01:37:07,555 --> 01:37:10,922
about Zhen He's Treasure Ship

1288
01:37:10,922 --> 01:37:14,290
and prove what was written 
in the ancient literature.

1289
01:37:17,301 --> 01:37:19,443
Whatever the size of its ships,

1290
01:37:19,443 --> 01:37:22,821
the Great Fleet deeply impressed
maritime trading nations

1291
01:37:22,851 --> 01:37:25,509
from Indochina to Africa,

1292
01:37:27,969 --> 01:37:32,143
China seemed poised to dominate
the coveted spice trade.

1293
01:37:33,863 --> 01:37:38,185
But in 1433, Admiral Zheng He died.

1294
01:37:39,380 --> 01:37:41,149
About the same time,

1295
01:37:41,169 --> 01:37:44,543
the Chinese court began losing interest
in long-distance voyaging,

1296
01:37:44,803 --> 01:37:48,210
and Chinese seafaring 
entered a long decline.

1297
01:37:50,850 --> 01:37:54,804
Scarcely more than 100 years
after the Great Fleet's last voyage,

1298
01:37:55,164 --> 01:37:58,897
the emperor declared overseas
voyaging a crime,

1299
01:38:00,706 --> 01:38:05,106
and it wasn't long before east-west trade
suffered another blow.

1300
01:38:08,109 --> 01:38:10,226
By the middle of the 15th century,

1301
01:38:10,256 --> 01:38:13,679
the once-mighty Byzantine Empire
was in deep decline.

1302
01:38:15,139 --> 01:38:18,791
The Ottoman Turks, descendants
of central Asian nomads,

1303
01:38:18,851 --> 01:38:22,047
had conquered most of its territory.

1304
01:38:22,057 --> 01:38:26,625
The Byzantine emperor ruled only
his capital of Constantinople.

1305
01:38:33,816 --> 01:38:36,185
In the Spring of 1453,

1306
01:38:36,185 --> 01:38:40,595
the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II
laid siege to Constantinople.

1307
01:38:49,904 --> 01:38:53,329
The city was defended
by a mere 7,000 troops.

1308
01:38:55,939 --> 01:38:59,396
Mehmed had an army of some 80,000 men,

1309
01:39:00,306 --> 01:39:03,565
but Mehmed wasn't sure he would win.

1310
01:39:06,155 --> 01:39:10,741
The city's massive walls 
had withstood sieges for a thousand years.

1311
01:39:13,751 --> 01:39:15,855
Protected by those walls,

1312
01:39:15,855 --> 01:39:19,290
Constantinople's defenders
held out for weeks.

1313
01:39:23,150 --> 01:39:26,155
But Mehmed didn't just have an army.

1314
01:39:26,355 --> 01:39:29,202
He had a mega-weapon:

1315
01:39:30,082 --> 01:39:33,021
a bronze cannon nearly 10 meters long

1316
01:39:33,041 --> 01:39:37,764
with a barrel nearly a meter in diameter 
and 20 centimeters thick.

1317
01:39:38,145 --> 01:39:42,567
It's said it could hurl
a 450-kilogramstone cannonball

1318
01:39:42,947 --> 01:39:45,663
more than 1 1/2 kilometers.

1319
01:39:45,803 --> 01:39:49,296
This behemoth and nearly 70 smaller cannon

1320
01:39:49,336 --> 01:39:52,593
bombarded Constantinople's walls
day and night,

1321
01:39:54,713 --> 01:39:56,562
damaging them so badly

1322
01:39:56,627 --> 01:39:59,492
that the Turks succeeded
in taking the city.

1323
01:40:10,971 --> 01:40:14,909
The fall of Constantinople
was a devastating blow to Europe.

1324
01:40:19,060 --> 01:40:23,704
Constantinople had been one of 
Christendom's oldest and holiest cities.

1325
01:40:26,614 --> 01:40:29,902
Now it was the capital 
of a powerful Muslim empire,

1326
01:40:30,028 --> 01:40:35,415
renamed Istanbul from a Turkish word
meaning "find Islam."

1327
01:40:40,351 --> 01:40:42,683
From their new capital of Istanbul,

1328
01:40:42,793 --> 01:40:45,884
the Ottomans now controlled 
access to the Black Sea

1329
01:40:46,144 --> 01:40:48,724
and the eastern Mediterranean.

1330
01:40:48,724 --> 01:40:52,354
European merchants 
were cut off from the Silk Road.

1331
01:40:55,564 --> 01:40:59,044
For nearly 100 years, 
Europeans had been growing wealthier

1332
01:40:59,124 --> 01:41:03,204
and more and more eager 
to buy Asia's luxury goods.

1333
01:41:04,214 --> 01:41:07,982
Europe needed to find 
new routes to the East.

1334
01:41:09,699 --> 01:41:13,862
And within 50 years 
of Constantinople's fall, it would.

1335
01:41:16,332 --> 01:41:19,828
At the Battle of Crécy 
and the siege of Constantinople,

1336
01:41:22,268 --> 01:41:25,149
an ancient Chinese invention, gunpowder,

1337
01:41:25,271 --> 01:41:28,148
had helped transform medieval Europe.

1338
01:41:40,648 --> 01:41:45,580
Now, another Chinese invention
and European innovation

1339
01:41:46,156 --> 01:41:49,455
would help transform the future.

1340
01:42:03,092 --> 01:42:06,041
Sometime in China's ancient past,

1341
01:42:06,401 --> 01:42:10,168
some unknown person
invented something new.

1342
01:42:14,958 --> 01:42:18,067
By pounding plants 
until they fell apart...

1343
01:42:21,657 --> 01:42:24,116
then boiling them in water...

1344
01:42:31,566 --> 01:42:35,751
and then collecting the boiled plants
on a screen and letting them dry...

1345
01:42:38,081 --> 01:42:41,792
making what the ancient Chinese
called "refuse fiber"...

1346
01:42:45,401 --> 01:42:48,694
and what we know today as paper,

1347
01:42:51,404 --> 01:42:53,899
an invention so influential

1348
01:42:53,899 --> 01:42:57,570
that some believe the Silk Road 
should have been named for it.

1349
01:42:58,690 --> 01:43:00,418
"I would call it the Paper Road,

1350
01:43:00,428 --> 01:43:03,702
because I think paper 
was far more important than silk,

1351
01:43:03,842 --> 01:43:06,572
and that, you know silk 
is a very nice fabric.

1352
01:43:06,632 --> 01:43:09,727
It's very strong; it's beautiful,
lustrous, and stuff like that.

1353
01:43:09,847 --> 01:43:12,589
But it didn't have the impact 
on world history,

1354
01:43:12,589 --> 01:43:15,025
I would argue, that paper did.

1355
01:43:18,225 --> 01:43:23,338
The Chinese believe
that the court eunuch Cai Lun

1356
01:43:23,408 --> 01:43:28,281
invented paper around the year 100
of the Common Era

1357
01:43:29,214 --> 01:43:31,729
and started using it for writing then.

1358
01:43:32,349 --> 01:43:34,242
Chinese archaeologists, however,

1359
01:43:34,242 --> 01:43:39,531
have discovered examples of paper
in the deserts of western China

1360
01:43:39,561 --> 01:43:41,738
that pre-date this by several centuries,

1361
01:43:41,738 --> 01:43:44,525
perhaps three centuries or even more.

1362
01:43:44,675 --> 01:43:48,823
The Chinese probably first used
the new invention as a wrapping material,

1363
01:43:49,083 --> 01:43:51,677
while they kept writing
the old-fashioned way,

1364
01:43:52,447 --> 01:43:54,919
on strips of bamboo.

1365
01:43:56,499 --> 01:43:59,814
You can write so many characters
on a strip of bamboo

1366
01:43:59,864 --> 01:44:03,549
that's maybe 40 centimeters long, 
or you know, 12 inches.

1367
01:44:03,590 --> 01:44:06,831
The problem is, if you want 
to write a novel, for example,

1368
01:44:06,871 --> 01:44:09,076
or a long historical text,

1369
01:44:09,096 --> 01:44:11,632
you need to have a whole pile
of those bamboo strips

1370
01:44:11,672 --> 01:44:13,698
and keep them together in order.

1371
01:44:13,819 --> 01:44:15,630
So, that becomes heavy.

1372
01:44:17,610 --> 01:44:22,041
Paper, which is made from plant materials,
from the cellulose in plants,

1373
01:44:22,731 --> 01:44:25,546
can be made anywhere that plants grow.

1374
01:44:27,659 --> 01:44:30,407
So, you can make it virtually
anywhere in the world,

1375
01:44:30,527 --> 01:44:32,801
out of virtually anything.

1376
01:44:36,641 --> 01:44:39,038
By the early centuries of the Common Era,

1377
01:44:39,278 --> 01:44:42,876
China was using paper
in all the ways we do now,

1378
01:44:42,916 --> 01:44:46,575
even as facial tissue and toilet paper.

1379
01:44:49,005 --> 01:44:53,025
And it wasn't long before
it traveled West along the Silk Road.

1380
01:44:54,995 --> 01:44:57,840
A journey that began as a pilgrimage.

1381
01:44:58,880 --> 01:45:01,522
The transformation of paper
into a writing material

1382
01:45:01,542 --> 01:45:04,978
came just at the time that Buddhism
was introduced to China.

1383
01:45:07,638 --> 01:45:10,224
Buddhists of China were interested

1384
01:45:10,226 --> 01:45:13,833
in finding the original writings
about the Buddha

1385
01:45:13,873 --> 01:45:17,620
and would travel to India to collect them.

1386
01:45:18,441 --> 01:45:20,134
And so, it's thought

1387
01:45:20,134 --> 01:45:23,418
that the Chinese Buddhist 
monks and missionaries

1388
01:45:23,478 --> 01:45:26,551
brought knowledge 
of paper and papermaking

1389
01:45:26,641 --> 01:45:28,588
with them to India

1390
01:45:28,588 --> 01:45:31,301
to collect these Buddhist scriptures

1391
01:45:31,381 --> 01:45:34,448
and brought them back to China.

1392
01:45:37,678 --> 01:45:41,666
Chinese Buddhists travelled
to India along the Silk Road,

1393
01:45:42,096 --> 01:45:45,961
detouring around the Himalayas
through China's western desert

1394
01:45:46,831 --> 01:45:49,753
and turning the Silk Road oasis
of Dunhuang

1395
01:45:49,833 --> 01:45:52,544
into a magnificent Buddhist library.

1396
01:45:57,324 --> 01:45:59,394
In a desert without plants,

1397
01:45:59,404 --> 01:46:02,564
Dunhuang monks made paper
from rope and rags

1398
01:46:03,718 --> 01:46:08,119
and copied thousands of Buddhist texts
they'd brought from India.

1399
01:46:13,869 --> 01:46:15,876
Thanks to Chinese Buddhism

1400
01:46:15,876 --> 01:46:19,816
and to paper's obvious usefulness 
for keeping commercial accounts,

1401
01:46:19,906 --> 01:46:23,461
papermaking began to spread 
throughout Asia.

1402
01:46:26,341 --> 01:46:31,433
As the Chinese then disseminated 
Buddhism throughout East Asia,

1403
01:46:31,818 --> 01:46:34,711
they took knowledge 
of paper and papermaking

1404
01:46:34,731 --> 01:46:38,722
to such places as Korea, Japan, Vietnam.

1405
01:46:40,412 --> 01:46:44,093
We know that this is certainly

1406
01:46:44,093 --> 01:46:47,138
before the time of the Muslim 
conquest of Central Asia,

1407
01:46:47,178 --> 01:46:49,416
which occurred
around the year 700.

1408
01:46:50,466 --> 01:46:52,064
In the eighth century CE,

1409
01:46:52,154 --> 01:46:56,158
Arab armies fighting in the name 
of a new religion, Islam,

1410
01:46:56,628 --> 01:47:01,035
thrust deep into Central Asia
and clashed with Chinese forces.

1411
01:47:04,155 --> 01:47:06,058
During the same century,

1412
01:47:06,138 --> 01:47:08,745
the Arab world began making its own paper,

1413
01:47:09,457 --> 01:47:11,999
something that's traditionally 
been explained

1414
01:47:11,999 --> 01:47:16,570
with a story about an iconic victory
of Arabs over Chinese.

1415
01:47:18,180 --> 01:47:20,496
The Battle of Talas was a battle
that took place

1416
01:47:20,496 --> 01:47:23,434
between Muslim forces and Chinese forces,

1417
01:47:23,454 --> 01:47:26,676
in central Asia in 751.

1418
01:47:27,556 --> 01:47:31,122
According to the historian Atha Al Abi

1419
01:47:31,199 --> 01:47:35,015
who lived something
like 250 years after the event,

1420
01:47:35,465 --> 01:47:38,013
he says that at this battle,

1421
01:47:38,043 --> 01:47:40,602
Chinese papermakers were captured

1422
01:47:40,622 --> 01:47:43,987
and that is how Muslims
learned about papermaking.

1423
01:47:49,097 --> 01:47:52,743
It seems to me that this is a sort of nice

1424
01:47:52,793 --> 01:47:55,696
but not terribly believable story.

1425
01:47:55,796 --> 01:47:59,092
Why would papermakers 
have been in the Chinese army?

1426
01:47:59,142 --> 01:48:02,175
It's not as if, when you needed
a sheet of paper, then you said,

1427
01:48:02,175 --> 01:48:04,584
"Please, make me a sheet of paper."

1428
01:48:11,092 --> 01:48:14,075
It's more likely that Arabs 
learned about paper

1429
01:48:14,125 --> 01:48:16,247
by trading along the Silk Road

1430
01:48:16,327 --> 01:48:19,923
and recognized
its immense practical value.

1431
01:48:21,663 --> 01:48:24,816
Middle Easterners could write 
on Egyptian papyrus,

1432
01:48:26,336 --> 01:48:29,037
but they had to buy papyrus from Egypt.

1433
01:48:29,227 --> 01:48:31,958
Paper they could make themselves.

1434
01:48:33,418 --> 01:48:35,632
By the end of the eighth century,

1435
01:48:35,652 --> 01:48:38,681
Arab papermaking was well underway.

1436
01:48:41,151 --> 01:48:45,990
The break-out moment for paper was 
when Muslim bureaucracy encountered it.

1437
01:48:49,450 --> 01:48:52,611
Those bureaucrats ran
the Abbasid Caliphate,

1438
01:48:52,641 --> 01:48:55,102
founded around 750 CE.

1439
01:48:55,672 --> 01:48:57,850
From their capital in Baghdad,

1440
01:48:57,850 --> 01:49:01,293
the Abbasids ruled
the greatest empire of its day.

1441
01:49:02,443 --> 01:49:06,768
The administrators of the empire
had responsibility to keep records

1442
01:49:07,465 --> 01:49:10,461
about who was paid what, 
who owed what,

1443
01:49:10,491 --> 01:49:14,722
who owned what, who had to do what.

1444
01:49:18,284 --> 01:49:23,455
Less than a century of Muslims
first encountering it in central Asia,

1445
01:49:23,815 --> 01:49:27,352
they were already making it
in the capital of the empire.

1446
01:49:27,952 --> 01:49:31,574
And they quickly began using paper
for more than keeping records.

1447
01:49:32,424 --> 01:49:35,925
In eighth-century Baghdad
and across the Arab world,

1448
01:49:37,225 --> 01:49:39,091
the availability of cheap paper

1449
01:49:39,141 --> 01:49:43,204
made possible one of humanity's
greatest literary eras.

1450
01:49:45,494 --> 01:49:48,100
Baghdad becomes a center of learning

1451
01:49:48,108 --> 01:49:49,662
where books are written,

1452
01:49:49,692 --> 01:49:52,941
books are translated from other languages.

1453
01:49:54,571 --> 01:49:57,486
People wrote books
on every possible subject,

1454
01:49:57,486 --> 01:50:00,171
not only on words 
in the traditions of the Prophet,

1455
01:50:00,174 --> 01:50:06,404
but also, cookbooks, popular literature, 
science, astronomy, geography,

1456
01:50:07,134 --> 01:50:11,804
translations of Greek books 
on mathematics, all sorts of subjects.

1457
01:50:12,454 --> 01:50:16,059
And this explosion of learning 
has long been known,

1458
01:50:16,109 --> 01:50:17,626
but it's never been appreciated

1459
01:50:17,626 --> 01:50:20,585
that it was based 
on the availability of paper.

1460
01:50:23,075 --> 01:50:24,899
During the Middle Ages,

1461
01:50:24,939 --> 01:50:28,361
an intellectual Golden Age
flowered in Arab Spain.

1462
01:50:30,804 --> 01:50:33,325
Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars

1463
01:50:33,335 --> 01:50:36,686
collaborated to translate, 
teach, and preserve

1464
01:50:37,156 --> 01:50:40,901
great works of science,
mathematics, and philosophy.

1465
01:50:43,071 --> 01:50:48,022
One story about the library 
of the Cordovan Caliphate in Spain

1466
01:50:48,054 --> 01:50:52,325
in the year 960 or 970
or something like that

1467
01:50:52,465 --> 01:50:57,749
says that there were 400,000 books
in the royal library.

1468
01:50:59,883 --> 01:51:02,950
Now, that probably is an exaggeration.

1469
01:51:03,390 --> 01:51:07,649
So, let's take a zero off it and say
that there were 40,000 books,

1470
01:51:07,709 --> 01:51:11,903
but that is still more than ten times
the number of books

1471
01:51:12,023 --> 01:51:15,500
that was in the largest
university library in Europe,

1472
01:51:15,530 --> 01:51:17,394
several centuries later.

1473
01:51:17,474 --> 01:51:20,689
Because libraries in Europe 
were all on parchment

1474
01:51:20,764 --> 01:51:23,884
and the libraries in the Muslim world
were on paper.

1475
01:51:26,944 --> 01:51:30,559
Spain was probably where 
Europeans first encountered paper.

1476
01:51:31,699 --> 01:51:34,677
But Italian merchants
were also discovering it

1477
01:51:34,697 --> 01:51:37,132
through long-distance trade.

1478
01:51:40,379 --> 01:51:43,162
This is a time when 
Christian merchants from Europe,

1479
01:51:43,202 --> 01:51:46,128
from such cities 
as Pisa and Genoa, Venice,

1480
01:51:46,178 --> 01:51:50,353
are travelling to the cities 
of the Muslim world

1481
01:51:50,433 --> 01:51:53,060
such as Cairo and Damascus

1482
01:51:53,070 --> 01:51:55,563
in search of exotic items,

1483
01:51:55,713 --> 01:51:58,569
goods like spices and silks,

1484
01:51:58,619 --> 01:52:01,992
and they undoubtedly encountered paper.

1485
01:52:04,702 --> 01:52:09,091
Our first European use of paper 
would've been by merchants

1486
01:52:09,137 --> 01:52:11,988
who had seen Muslims
using this stuff

1487
01:52:12,078 --> 01:52:14,161
and must have brought it back.

1488
01:52:16,741 --> 01:52:19,972
But at first, many Europeans
were suspicious of paper.

1489
01:52:20,362 --> 01:52:24,348
It seemed so flimsy compared 
with parchments made from animal skins.

1490
01:52:27,228 --> 01:52:31,606
The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II,
for example, was familiar with paper

1491
01:52:31,676 --> 01:52:35,690
but didn't think much 
of its qualities for preservation

1492
01:52:35,700 --> 01:52:37,677
or didn't know how long it would last,

1493
01:52:37,707 --> 01:52:41,329
so, he ordered all documents 
that had previously been copied on paper

1494
01:52:41,359 --> 01:52:44,285
to be recopied onto parchment.

1495
01:52:48,432 --> 01:52:52,133
Similarly, the Abbot of Cluny,
Peter the Venerable,

1496
01:52:53,040 --> 01:52:55,164
knew about paper but said,

1497
01:52:55,224 --> 01:52:58,165
"Oh, it was really disgusting 
that they made this stuff

1498
01:52:58,266 --> 01:53:04,032
"from vile materials rather than 
the pure reeds of the riverbed,"

1499
01:53:04,602 --> 01:53:06,030
— meaning papyrus —

1500
01:53:06,030 --> 01:53:09,311
"or the skins of pure animals."

1501
01:53:09,401 --> 01:53:11,834
And he was worried that paper
could be made

1502
01:53:11,834 --> 01:53:14,357
from dirty or unclean things.

1503
01:53:15,096 --> 01:53:17,379
But Europe's growing middle class

1504
01:53:17,399 --> 01:53:20,070
was not concerned
with paper's cleanliness.

1505
01:53:23,060 --> 01:53:27,882
A single parchment book needed 
200 animal skins and cost a fortune.

1506
01:53:30,974 --> 01:53:35,157
And as it happened, geography
had given Europeans the edge

1507
01:53:35,217 --> 01:53:37,535
in mass-producing paper.

1508
01:53:43,165 --> 01:53:46,964
The rivers in the Middle East 
tended not to flow fast enough

1509
01:53:46,995 --> 01:53:49,809
to create enough water power,

1510
01:53:49,859 --> 01:53:53,301
whereas the greater variability 
in European terrain

1511
01:53:53,321 --> 01:53:56,567
meant that you could harness
the water power more efficiently

1512
01:53:56,567 --> 01:53:59,931
to make more pulp more quickly.

1513
01:54:12,440 --> 01:54:16,859
Europeans also had 
a ready supply of linen rags.

1514
01:54:19,467 --> 01:54:21,718
In the late Middle Ages,

1515
01:54:21,718 --> 01:54:26,116
a new way of processing linen
had been developed

1516
01:54:26,126 --> 01:54:28,995
using something called the flax breaker,

1517
01:54:29,065 --> 01:54:32,604
which meant that there was
a lot more linen being made from flax

1518
01:54:32,824 --> 01:54:36,089
and made into people's underwear.

1519
01:54:42,949 --> 01:54:46,576
Linen underwear was lot more comfortable
than woolen underwear

1520
01:54:46,586 --> 01:54:48,280
because it didn't scratch,

1521
01:54:48,280 --> 01:54:50,672
and so, linen became very, very popular

1522
01:54:50,702 --> 01:54:53,943
and became the source 
of rags for papermaking.

1523
01:55:00,193 --> 01:55:03,138
By the late Middle Ages,
Italian hill towns

1524
01:55:03,188 --> 01:55:05,146
like Fabriano and Amalfi

1525
01:55:05,206 --> 01:55:08,440
had become Europe's
leading paper manufacturers

1526
01:55:08,470 --> 01:55:12,186
shipping tons of paper
to businessmen throughout Europe.

1527
01:55:14,672 --> 01:55:17,093
And this mass production of cheap paper

1528
01:55:17,143 --> 01:55:20,628
was changing Europe
in other profound ways.

1529
01:55:22,598 --> 01:55:26,651
One of the most interesting
documents that I've seen,

1530
01:55:26,721 --> 01:55:28,477
or seen photographs of,

1531
01:55:28,507 --> 01:55:32,715
is a poem by Petrarch, the Italian poet.

1532
01:55:35,185 --> 01:55:39,902
It's on paper and it is crossed out.

1533
01:55:42,293 --> 01:55:45,363
He wrote out the poem 
and then he changed his mind

1534
01:55:45,442 --> 01:55:48,607
and he put in a better word.

1535
01:55:49,357 --> 01:55:54,001
So, he was able to compose, 
in effect, on paper,

1536
01:55:54,521 --> 01:55:57,228
as opposed to composing it in his mind,

1537
01:55:57,298 --> 01:56:00,252
repeating it over and over again 
until he got it perfect

1538
01:56:00,322 --> 01:56:04,219
and then putting down a fair copy 
on the final expensive material.

1539
01:56:05,100 --> 01:56:07,387
This is something
you wouldn't do on parchment

1540
01:56:07,397 --> 01:56:09,494
because it was too expensive.

1541
01:56:09,524 --> 01:56:11,836
You'd have to scrape it off.

1542
01:56:12,766 --> 01:56:16,552
Paper allowed all sorts
of new ways of doing things.

1543
01:56:26,832 --> 01:56:28,790
It seems to me that it's no accident

1544
01:56:28,820 --> 01:56:33,665
that the art of drawing really develops
in the 15th century in Italy.

1545
01:56:38,285 --> 01:56:41,755
Paper allowed an artist
to actually do a drawing

1546
01:56:42,261 --> 01:56:45,533
and work out an idea in front of his eyes

1547
01:56:46,119 --> 01:56:50,607
and preserve it for later use, 
or to look at it and say,

1548
01:56:50,684 --> 01:56:53,423
"I'll change this; I'll change that."

1549
01:56:53,553 --> 01:56:56,278
And save it and make
a copy of the drawing.

1550
01:56:56,308 --> 01:56:58,440
And we know 
that Michelangelo, for example,

1551
01:56:58,440 --> 01:57:00,101
did drawings of his drawings

1552
01:57:00,111 --> 01:57:02,752
or did drawings
of other people's drawings.

1553
01:57:05,102 --> 01:57:07,932
This wouldn't have been possible
with parchment

1554
01:57:07,992 --> 01:57:11,562
because it was too expensive
to waste in this way.

1555
01:57:13,192 --> 01:57:16,887
Meanwhile, in Asia, the country
that had given paper to the world

1556
01:57:16,917 --> 01:57:19,901
had developed a technology
that had turned book production

1557
01:57:20,011 --> 01:57:24,755
from a laborious job for scribes
into a standardized process:

1558
01:57:25,683 --> 01:57:27,069
Printing.

1559
01:57:28,699 --> 01:57:32,897
In the ninth century CE, 
the time of the Tang Dynasty,

1560
01:57:32,977 --> 01:57:37,166
Chinese printers were printing book pages
carved from a single block of wood.

1561
01:57:40,216 --> 01:57:42,107
The world's oldest printed book

1562
01:57:42,127 --> 01:57:45,628
is this Chinese copy
of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra

1563
01:57:46,048 --> 01:57:49,394
printed in the year 868 CE

1564
01:57:51,124 --> 01:57:54,161
Some 400 years later, around 1300,

1565
01:57:54,241 --> 01:57:58,631
Asian woodblock printing 
had traveled the Silk Road to the West.

1566
01:58:00,481 --> 01:58:04,896
But by then, China had invented
a more efficient way of printing.

1567
01:58:10,219 --> 01:58:13,792
Instead of carving a single wooden block
into a book page,

1568
01:58:13,832 --> 01:58:18,413
printers engraved pieces of clay
with individual Chinese characters,

1569
01:58:20,838 --> 01:58:23,343
baked the clay letters to harden them,

1570
01:58:26,180 --> 01:58:29,598
and then arranged them in a frame
to create a book page.

1571
01:58:37,608 --> 01:58:40,777
The earliest known use of moveable type.

1572
01:58:45,607 --> 01:58:48,136
And then, in the year 1440,

1573
01:58:48,156 --> 01:58:50,156
Johannes Gutenberg,

1574
01:58:50,156 --> 01:58:52,606
a goldsmith in the German city of Mainz,

1575
01:58:52,616 --> 01:58:55,591
came up with a new way of printing.

1576
01:58:57,311 --> 01:59:00,198
Gutenberg began with a screw press,

1577
01:59:03,158 --> 01:59:06,657
a wooden screw that pushed 
a plate down on a flat surface

1578
01:59:08,327 --> 01:59:11,201
invented by the Romans to make wine

1579
01:59:11,491 --> 01:59:15,103
and used in Gutenberg's time
to make woodblock prints.

1580
01:59:17,163 --> 01:59:19,229
He made his own moveable type

1581
01:59:19,229 --> 01:59:22,072
by punching letters out of metal

1582
01:59:22,999 --> 01:59:26,587
and casting them using a hand mold
he'd invented himself.

1583
01:59:30,479 --> 01:59:34,737
He devised a system to quickly
composing lines of type in trays.

1584
01:59:38,027 --> 01:59:41,001
And he invented 
a new oil-based printing ink

1585
01:59:41,041 --> 01:59:43,748
that transferred easily to metal type.

1586
01:59:49,018 --> 01:59:51,062
Gutenberg's new printing process

1587
01:59:51,062 --> 01:59:55,145
was much faster and more efficient 
than Asian printing techniques.

1588
01:59:58,267 --> 02:00:01,933
But its biggest advantage 
may simply have been this:

1589
02:00:03,153 --> 02:00:05,489
The Latin alphabet.

1590
02:00:09,811 --> 02:00:12,846
In Chinese you have many characters,

1591
02:00:12,906 --> 02:00:17,628
and so, you have to have 
like 6,000 individual characters

1592
02:00:17,878 --> 02:00:20,829
in order to print something.

1593
02:00:23,185 --> 02:00:26,681
In Europe, where you have
the Latin alphabet

1594
02:00:26,681 --> 02:00:30,419
with individual letters
that are not connected to each other

1595
02:00:30,629 --> 02:00:32,988
and you only have 26 of them

1596
02:00:33,068 --> 02:00:36,947
and you have upper case and lower case,
capital letters and small letters,

1597
02:00:37,497 --> 02:00:41,232
you don't really need that many
to write out a text.

1598
02:00:47,939 --> 02:00:51,516
If ever a new technology
re-wrote human History,

1599
02:00:51,516 --> 02:00:54,710
it was Gutenberg's printing press.

1600
02:00:54,880 --> 02:00:58,477
Within a few years of Gutenberg's
first printing run,

1601
02:00:58,537 --> 02:01:02,183
millions of Europeans
were reading the Bible

1602
02:01:02,243 --> 02:01:06,291
and other best-selling books 
translated into their own languages,

1603
02:01:10,041 --> 02:01:12,175
something we take for granted,

1604
02:01:12,565 --> 02:01:16,182
but in 15th-century Europe,
it was revolutionary.

1605
02:01:16,592 --> 02:01:19,502
Working together,
paper and the printing press

1606
02:01:19,502 --> 02:01:22,789
had achieved something
never done before.

1607
02:01:23,751 --> 02:01:26,364
They had democratized knowledge.

1608
02:01:27,604 --> 02:01:32,450
I have to say that if Gutenberg
had not invented the letterpress,

1609
02:01:32,640 --> 02:01:37,556
then someone else
would have presumably invented it.

1610
02:01:38,106 --> 02:01:43,932
because at that time, there was 
an enormous demand for written texts.

1611
02:01:46,376 --> 02:01:49,265
For thousands of years, it had been enough

1612
02:01:49,300 --> 02:01:55,504
for monks to copy manuscripts
in monasteries by hand.

1613
02:01:55,864 --> 02:01:59,111
But this system was 
so to speak a one-way road.

1614
02:01:59,151 --> 02:02:02,137
The pope could distribute his information

1615
02:02:02,147 --> 02:02:04,235
but those that were on the bottom

1616
02:02:04,235 --> 02:02:07,114
could not distribute
their information to the top

1617
02:02:08,274 --> 02:02:12,771
In all of Europe, a new class
had established itself

1618
02:02:12,859 --> 02:02:16,944
which were the merchants, 
bourgeoisie that was newly arising

1619
02:02:18,032 --> 02:02:20,814
They created a whole new market

1620
02:02:20,814 --> 02:02:23,526
where the written word
was in very high demand

1621
02:02:25,026 --> 02:02:27,106
Europe's new demand for books

1622
02:02:27,126 --> 02:02:31,411
and its new ability to mass-produce books
to meet that demand

1623
02:02:31,821 --> 02:02:35,003
would soon have enormous consequences.

1624
02:02:37,163 --> 02:02:41,119
In Germany, a firebrand monk
named Martin Luther

1625
02:02:41,489 --> 02:02:43,737
wrote a list of 95 proposals

1626
02:02:43,757 --> 02:02:46,115
for reforming what Luther denounced

1627
02:02:46,181 --> 02:02:49,733
as the corrupt practices
of the Catholic Church.

1628
02:02:52,083 --> 02:02:54,772
Thanks to paper and the printing press,

1629
02:02:54,872 --> 02:02:59,048
his ideas spread like wildfire
across Germany and Switzerland.

1630
02:03:00,618 --> 02:03:03,851
And so, began the Protestant Reformation,

1631
02:03:03,911 --> 02:03:08,810
a spiritual revolt that ended 
Catholicism's thousand-year monopoly

1632
02:03:08,860 --> 02:03:11,049
of the European soul.

1633
02:03:16,149 --> 02:03:18,134
And some other best-selling books

1634
02:03:18,154 --> 02:03:21,896
helped an Italian
living in Spain realize his dream.

1635
02:03:25,736 --> 02:03:28,362
His name was Cristobal Colon,

1636
02:03:28,382 --> 02:03:31,715
and he was deeply disturbed
that the holy cities of Christendom

1637
02:03:31,765 --> 02:03:35,572
had fallen under the rule 
of the Ottoman Turks.

1638
02:03:38,725 --> 02:03:42,948
Colon drew up plans for a new Crusade
to liberate Jerusalem.

1639
02:03:44,638 --> 02:03:47,520
To fund it, he decided to travel to Asia

1640
02:03:47,520 --> 02:03:50,636
to trade for spices and other luxury goods

1641
02:03:50,656 --> 02:03:53,014
he could sell 
for a large profit back home.

1642
02:04:00,033 --> 02:04:03,642
But the Ottoman Empire
had blocked Europeans from the Silk Road.

1643
02:04:06,982 --> 02:04:10,496
Colon needed to find a new route to Asia.

1644
02:04:14,876 --> 02:04:17,423
His deep study of two books,

1645
02:04:17,983 --> 02:04:20,542
"The Travels of Marco Polo"

1646
02:04:21,362 --> 02:04:25,006
and the ancient Greek 
author Ptolemy's "Geography,"

1647
02:04:25,006 --> 02:04:27,208
convinced him that he could find Asia

1648
02:04:27,228 --> 02:04:30,439
by sailing West across the Atlantic.

1649
02:04:32,118 --> 02:04:35,394
And when he landed
in the Americas in 1492,

1650
02:04:35,434 --> 02:04:39,537
Colon, known to history 
as Christopher Columbus,

1651
02:04:39,657 --> 02:04:42,533
was sure he'd found it.

1652
02:04:47,929 --> 02:04:53,352
In fact, it wouldn't be until 1498
that the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama

1653
02:04:53,678 --> 02:04:57,958
rounded Africa's Cape of Good Hope 
and sailed east to India,

1654
02:05:01,220 --> 02:05:04,666
discovering the true sea route to Asia.

1655
02:05:06,566 --> 02:05:11,427
But the new world Columbus had given Spain
proved to have riches of its own.

1656
02:05:14,769 --> 02:05:17,348
By the middle of the 16th century,

1657
02:05:17,348 --> 02:05:20,098
the Portuguese had established
good trading relations

1658
02:05:20,182 --> 02:05:23,629
with China in Guangzhou and Macau.

1659
02:05:25,339 --> 02:05:29,553
And Spain's American colonies
were sending so much silver home

1660
02:05:29,583 --> 02:05:32,795
that there was hardly 
any room to store it.

1661
02:05:34,945 --> 02:05:37,366
Spain was sending it
on to northern Europe,

1662
02:05:37,476 --> 02:05:41,031
especially the Netherlands,
as payment for trade goods.

1663
02:05:43,511 --> 02:05:46,414
Their pockets bursting 
with American silver,

1664
02:05:46,414 --> 02:05:50,645
Europeans became addicted
to two Asian luxuries.

1665
02:05:52,955 --> 02:05:57,123
One was porcelain, 
an extraordinary ceramic

1666
02:05:58,629 --> 02:06:01,781
made by firing a soft white clay
called kaolin

1667
02:06:01,821 --> 02:06:06,437
at very high temperatures,
well over 1,000 degrees Celsius.

1668
02:06:09,097 --> 02:06:11,825
China had been making porcelain for export

1669
02:06:11,825 --> 02:06:15,009
and trading it throughout 
Asia and the Middle East

1670
02:06:15,339 --> 02:06:18,176
since at least the ninth century CE

1671
02:06:20,666 --> 02:06:26,039
In the 17th century, the Dutch captured
two Portuguese ships filled with porcelain

1672
02:06:28,790 --> 02:06:31,862
and held a giant porcelain auction.

1673
02:06:33,702 --> 02:06:39,008
It was the beginning of Europe's 
300-year obsession with Chinese ceramics

1674
02:06:39,711 --> 02:06:44,022
or, as they became known 
in Europe and America, "fine China."

1675
02:06:45,392 --> 02:06:49,305
It was a status symbol for the West,

1676
02:06:50,765 --> 02:06:54,227
and they had never seen
anything like that before.

1677
02:06:54,367 --> 02:06:58,263
But also, they certainly 
didn't know how it was made.

1678
02:06:59,662 --> 02:07:01,929
Porcelain imports were indispensable

1679
02:07:01,929 --> 02:07:05,606
to consuming another Chinese 
trade good craved by Europeans:

1680
02:07:05,766 --> 02:07:06,967
Tea.

1681
02:07:09,137 --> 02:07:12,548
Like porcelain, tea had been
a profitable Chinese export

1682
02:07:12,559 --> 02:07:15,085
since at least the ninth century

1683
02:07:17,215 --> 02:07:20,272
to the Middle East but not to Europe.

1684
02:07:21,562 --> 02:07:25,516
The Portuguese began
trading for it in the 16th century.

1685
02:07:31,076 --> 02:07:36,186
In 1657, a London merchant 
sold the first tea in Britain.

1686
02:07:38,198 --> 02:07:43,343
By the year 1700, tea-drinking 
had become a British obsession

1687
02:07:45,168 --> 02:07:48,371
heavily promoted 
by the British East India Company,

1688
02:07:48,381 --> 02:07:51,517
which traded British textiles to China

1689
02:07:51,587 --> 02:07:55,555
and needed a profitable luxury good
to bring back to Britain.

1690
02:07:59,095 --> 02:08:02,719
And as Chinese tea began
moving West to Europe,

1691
02:08:02,769 --> 02:08:06,771
Europeans began trading
exotic new foods to China.

1692
02:08:09,991 --> 02:08:14,375
In the 17th century, dozens 
of never-before seen food crops

1693
02:08:14,405 --> 02:08:16,287
from the Americas

1694
02:08:16,297 --> 02:08:18,926
— potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn,

1695
02:08:19,025 --> 02:08:22,453
peanuts, pineapples, 
chilies, and tomatoes —

1696
02:08:22,703 --> 02:08:25,771
began appearing in Chinese markets.

1697
02:08:27,291 --> 02:08:31,397
Some of these new foods offered more
than just the appeal of the exotic.

1698
02:08:35,447 --> 02:08:38,090
Corn, potatoes, and sweet potatoes

1699
02:08:38,090 --> 02:08:40,571
grew in harsh New World environments

1700
02:08:40,611 --> 02:08:43,312
like the South American Andes.

1701
02:08:43,982 --> 02:08:47,172
Chinese farmers soon discovered
these hardy crops

1702
02:08:47,192 --> 02:08:51,177
would survive the frequent droughts 
that wiped out many native crops

1703
02:08:51,992 --> 02:08:55,514
starving large numbers of Chinese.

1704
02:08:58,077 --> 02:09:00,958
It's no coincidence
that in the 17th century,

1705
02:09:00,998 --> 02:09:03,964
after the introduction 
of drought-resistant crops,

1706
02:09:03,984 --> 02:09:06,972
China's population began to grow

1707
02:09:09,892 --> 02:09:14,456
and kept growing until China
became the world's most populous nation.

1708
02:09:16,376 --> 02:09:20,113
And the new sea routes brought 
even more to China from the West.

1709
02:09:26,443 --> 02:09:31,538
An Italian named Matteo Ricci
arrived in China in 1582

1710
02:09:32,999 --> 02:09:36,232
and spent the rest of his life there.

1711
02:09:36,802 --> 02:09:39,263
Ricci was a Catholic missionary,

1712
02:09:40,569 --> 02:09:43,102
and his mission to China produced

1713
02:09:43,154 --> 02:09:46,812
one of history's most enlightened
meetings of minds.

1714
02:09:48,062 --> 02:09:51,411
Ricci learned to speak, 
read, and write Chinese,

1715
02:09:51,471 --> 02:09:55,070
and formed deep friendships 
with Chinese scholars.

1716
02:09:57,406 --> 02:10:00,559
One of Matteo Ricci's 
closest collaborators

1717
02:10:00,619 --> 02:10:03,702
and first converts to Catholicism

1718
02:10:03,712 --> 02:10:06,824
was the mathematician Xu Guangqi.

1719
02:10:08,334 --> 02:10:11,475
My ancestor Xu Guangqi,

1720
02:10:11,525 --> 02:10:15,680
who is known in Vatican history
as Paul Hsu,

1721
02:10:16,426 --> 02:10:20,476
met him around the time
when he first came to China.

1722
02:10:20,666 --> 02:10:26,064
And in 1603, my ancestor 
converted to Roman Catholicism.

1723
02:10:28,831 --> 02:10:31,982
Working together,
Matteo Ricci and Xu Guangqi

1724
02:10:32,634 --> 02:10:36,455
translated works from the ancient 
Greek mathematician Euclid

1725
02:10:36,485 --> 02:10:40,963
and other classics of Western science 
and mathematics into Chinese.

1726
02:10:42,273 --> 02:10:46,287
They also translated 
Confucian writings into Latin.

1727
02:10:48,157 --> 02:10:51,079
Ricci wrote to his superiors in Europe,

1728
02:10:51,089 --> 02:10:54,360
asking them to send 
more missionaries to China,

1729
02:10:54,380 --> 02:10:57,435
but only their smartest men.

1730
02:10:57,455 --> 02:10:59,314
In China, he wrote,

1731
02:10:59,364 --> 02:11:02,988
"We are dealing with a people 
both intelligent and learned."

1732
02:11:03,618 --> 02:11:06,984
Xu Guangqi himself was an astronomer,

1733
02:11:06,984 --> 02:11:10,857
a highly accomplished astronomer 
and a mathematician.

1734
02:11:12,857 --> 02:11:15,384
But the introduction of Western science

1735
02:11:15,384 --> 02:11:21,142
opened his eyes
to a different way of thinking,

1736
02:11:21,192 --> 02:11:25,151
a different way of approaching 
natural phenomena.

1737
02:11:26,681 --> 02:11:30,650
Matteo Ricci was a Jesuit, 
a member of the Society of Jesus,

1738
02:11:31,030 --> 02:11:33,062
a new Catholic order

1739
02:11:33,062 --> 02:11:35,873
founded on the principles
of the European Renaissance.

1740
02:11:37,699 --> 02:11:40,770
Jesuit priests were trained 
in science and mathematics

1741
02:11:41,130 --> 02:11:43,120
as well as in theology.

1742
02:11:43,950 --> 02:11:46,805
As missionaries, 
they respected other cultures

1743
02:11:46,835 --> 02:11:51,323
and worked to integrate Christianity
with non-Christian beliefs.

1744
02:11:56,073 --> 02:12:01,767
From the 16th until the 19th century,
nearly a thousand Jesuits worked in China

1745
02:12:02,280 --> 02:12:06,077
teaching everything from engineering
to mathematics, to geography

1746
02:12:06,568 --> 02:12:10,822
and sending back translated classics
of Chinese learning to Europe,

1747
02:12:12,152 --> 02:12:16,234
giving Europe its first in-depth
knowledge of Chinese civilization

1748
02:12:16,552 --> 02:12:20,851
and China its first in-depth 
knowledge of the West.

1749
02:12:25,054 --> 02:12:28,506
Chinese and Europeans became
more and more fascinated

1750
02:12:28,606 --> 02:12:31,222
with each other's civilizations.

1751
02:12:31,222 --> 02:12:35,386
King Louis XIV of France sent French
Jesuits to the mission in China.

1752
02:12:37,796 --> 02:12:42,213
And Chinese emperors appointed Jesuits
to important government positions.

1753
02:12:45,213 --> 02:12:47,292
For more than 100 years,

1754
02:12:47,312 --> 02:12:51,261
Jesuit astronomers directed 
the Imperial Astronomical Bureau.

1755
02:12:53,424 --> 02:12:57,452
One of them, the German
Johann Adam Schall von Bell,

1756
02:12:57,504 --> 02:13:00,213
helped create a new Chinese calendar

1757
02:13:00,213 --> 02:13:04,122
that predicted solar and lunar eclipses 
with more accuracy.

1758
02:13:07,122 --> 02:13:09,741
He also introduced his Chinese colleagues

1759
02:13:09,741 --> 02:13:12,817
to a new European invention,
the telescope.

1760
02:13:17,365 --> 02:13:21,273
The Belgian priest Ferdinand Verbiest
built an aqueduct,

1761
02:13:21,663 --> 02:13:24,480
made European-style cannons for the army,

1762
02:13:24,550 --> 02:13:27,873
and built a steam-powered vehicle 
for the emperor

1763
02:13:27,883 --> 02:13:31,383
considered by some to be
the world's earliest automobile.

1764
02:13:33,513 --> 02:13:38,717
In 1674, Verbiest presented the emperor
with a new map of the world.

1765
02:13:40,889 --> 02:13:44,396
The collaborative product
of European and Chinese knowledge,

1766
02:13:44,450 --> 02:13:47,021
it was more than just a map.

1767
02:13:47,341 --> 02:13:50,541
It was an expression of a new worldview.

1768
02:13:51,471 --> 02:13:57,044
A worldview based on science, exploration,
and confidence in the human ability

1769
02:13:57,301 --> 02:14:01,981
to discover, to invent, 
and to create a better world.

1770
02:14:03,274 --> 02:14:06,754
A worldview that saw the world as one.

1771
02:14:07,894 --> 02:14:12,461
Arguably the most famous scholar
of that age is Voltaire.

1772
02:14:13,657 --> 02:14:17,056
And in his essay "Sur le Moeurs"

1773
02:14:17,086 --> 02:14:21,255
which was first published in 1756,

1774
02:14:22,333 --> 02:14:28,867
he argued that China was the paragon

1775
02:14:28,927 --> 02:14:36,081
of Enlighted monarchy
ruled by intellectuals.

1776
02:14:38,744 --> 02:14:41,233
It challenges the fundamental notion

1777
02:14:41,643 --> 02:14:45,506
that the Christian European world

1778
02:14:45,592 --> 02:14:49,061
was the beginning 
and the center of civilization.

1779
02:15:00,161 --> 02:15:02,322
China, in Voltaire's mind,

1780
02:15:02,375 --> 02:15:06,297
was a civilization ruled by reason

1781
02:15:07,657 --> 02:15:12,153
and ruled by men promoted
through education.,

1782
02:15:15,347 --> 02:15:17,837
through virtue,

1783
02:15:17,937 --> 02:15:22,043
and through
their scholarly accomplishments,

1784
02:15:22,870 --> 02:15:27,031
their merits, not by hereditary rights.

1785
02:15:30,291 --> 02:15:34,487
In Voltaire's time, Europeans 
were fighting their hereditary kings

1786
02:15:34,597 --> 02:15:37,295
for the right to rule themselves.

1787
02:15:38,285 --> 02:15:43,389
By 1800, political revolutions 
in Britain, America, and France

1788
02:15:44,019 --> 02:15:47,296
had ended centuries of absolute monarchy.

1789
02:15:49,906 --> 02:15:53,103
New technologies like the mechanical loom 
and the steam engine

1790
02:15:53,303 --> 02:15:56,337
and the rise of industrial capitalism

1791
02:15:56,357 --> 02:15:58,038
were connecting

1792
02:15:58,038 --> 02:15:59,719
the far corners of the world.

1793
02:16:00,629 --> 02:16:05,285
And an ancient Chinese invention
that had spread westward centuries earlier

1794
02:16:05,335 --> 02:16:08,088
was playing a critical role.

1795
02:16:15,558 --> 02:16:19,135
Gunpowder had made
modern warfare possible.

1796
02:16:28,255 --> 02:16:32,273
And in mineral-rich areas 
like France's Vosges Mountains,

1797
02:16:32,513 --> 02:16:36,677
it was helping in a different way
to create the modern world.

1798
02:16:39,748 --> 02:16:42,243
At the beginning of the 17th century,

1799
02:16:42,243 --> 02:16:44,791
these mountains 
were honeycombed with mines

1800
02:16:44,831 --> 02:16:47,765
and crowded with miners 
from all over Europe

1801
02:16:47,795 --> 02:16:51,002
chasing rumors of riches underground.

1802
02:16:58,732 --> 02:17:01,571
If they heard that money
can be made in a place

1803
02:17:01,571 --> 02:17:03,823
they would go there and have a look.

1804
02:17:03,873 --> 02:17:07,219
And in the Vosges, we talked 
about "silver rush" in the 16th century.

1805
02:17:07,279 --> 02:17:11,506
The gold rush happened in the US 
during the 19th century

1806
02:17:11,506 --> 02:17:16,270
and in Europe was the "silver rush"
in the Vosges in the 16th century

1807
02:17:24,397 --> 02:17:27,329
In the accounting books 
of the Thillot Mine,

1808
02:17:27,409 --> 02:17:30,875
archaeologists discovered 
an entry from the year 1617

1809
02:17:32,595 --> 02:17:36,813
recording the purchase of gunpowder
to do something revolutionary

1810
02:17:38,383 --> 02:17:41,707
— blast a mine tunnel from the living rock

1811
02:17:45,027 --> 02:17:48,665
So, this section is quite extraordinary

1812
02:17:48,685 --> 02:17:53,503
because this is where we can see 
the first use of the black power in mines.

1813
02:17:53,894 --> 02:17:56,827
with these large holes here on the wall

1814
02:17:56,847 --> 02:18:02,104
that have been shaped,
at an interval of about 30-40 cm,

1815
02:18:02,181 --> 02:18:06,597
with the use of explosives.

1816
02:18:07,047 --> 02:18:10,288
We are probably in the 1620's

1817
02:18:10,382 --> 02:18:16,059
and this is a new technique
which used new tools,

1818
02:18:16,119 --> 02:18:20,029
obviously, a process 
that had to be invented

1819
02:18:20,069 --> 02:18:22,434
since there was none prior to this.

1820
02:18:22,494 --> 02:18:28,299
This technique has imprinted the rock,
and the marks from the tools are distinct,

1821
02:18:28,400 --> 02:18:31,557
This is a tool that has just been found
during excavations

1822
02:18:31,577 --> 02:18:33,314
over the past few weeks.

1823
02:18:33,648 --> 02:18:40,802
It is this one, a curette, a specific tool
with a spoon-like shape on one side,

1824
02:18:40,802 --> 02:18:44,909
and open on the other side 
like the eye of a needle,

1825
02:18:44,909 --> 02:18:49,847
inside which 
we can insert a cloth, a rag.

1826
02:18:49,987 --> 02:18:54,802
After the hole is drilled 
with a drill bit,

1827
02:18:54,967 --> 02:19:00,124
the role of this tool is to progressively 
evacuate the dirt from the hole

1828
02:19:00,384 --> 02:19:02,817
and to clean the hole

1829
02:19:03,760 --> 02:19:09,030
Then, the other end is used
to dry the hole

1830
02:19:09,030 --> 02:19:11,665
before the powder is introduced,

1831
02:19:11,804 --> 02:19:14,530
since the powder
doesn't go well with humidity.

1832
02:19:15,650 --> 02:19:21,679
This tool was still being used
in the same way

1833
02:19:21,778 --> 02:19:27,441
during the 18th and 19th centuries

1834
02:19:31,489 --> 02:19:36,531
Another iron tool
found recently is this piece

1835
02:19:36,541 --> 02:19:39,647
from a steel shaft called a pin,

1836
02:19:39,667 --> 02:19:42,464
a device which guides the fuse

1837
02:19:42,744 --> 02:19:46,940
by taking one end of the fuse

1838
02:19:47,000 --> 02:19:50,883
and sliding it along a dowel

1839
02:19:50,957 --> 02:19:54,737
all the way to the gunpowder

1840
02:19:55,437 --> 02:20:00,482
Since we cannot slide a limp fuse

1841
02:20:00,532 --> 02:20:04,394
over such a length on a piece of wood,
inside a hole,

1842
02:20:04,444 --> 02:20:07,447
we have to guide it.

1843
02:20:07,597 --> 02:20:09,950
So, to guide the fuse

1844
02:20:09,950 --> 02:20:12,562
we use this tool, like this.

1845
02:20:13,942 --> 02:20:18,264
So, here we have the essential tools

1846
02:20:18,264 --> 02:20:22,005
that demonstrate 
the utilization of gunpowder

1847
02:20:22,151 --> 02:20:24,412
in the early 17th century.

1848
02:20:26,201 --> 02:20:29,410
By the beginning of the 19th century,

1849
02:20:29,561 --> 02:20:32,731
gunpowder was helping
European mining evolve

1850
02:20:33,011 --> 02:20:35,300
from laborious hand digging

1851
02:20:35,300 --> 02:20:37,121
to a modern enterprise,

1852
02:20:37,181 --> 02:20:40,381
supplying Europe's
growing industrial economy.

1853
02:20:42,001 --> 02:20:43,676
And across the Atlantic,

1854
02:20:43,696 --> 02:20:48,594
it was about to help a new nation
unlock its vast economic potential.

1855
02:20:51,593 --> 02:20:53,926
On July 4, 1817,

1856
02:20:53,933 --> 02:20:57,243
the United States of America's
41st birthday,

1857
02:20:57,783 --> 02:21:01,058
crews in New York State 
began digging the Erie Canal,

1858
02:21:02,600 --> 02:21:05,548
a nearly 600-kilometre shipping channel

1859
02:21:05,568 --> 02:21:07,816
designed to connect the Great Lakes

1860
02:21:07,816 --> 02:21:10,960
with the Hudson River 
and the Atlantic Ocean,

1861
02:21:11,520 --> 02:21:14,341
so, towns and farms on America's frontier

1862
02:21:14,411 --> 02:21:17,902
could ship and sell 
their products worldwide.

1863
02:21:18,597 --> 02:21:21,339
Most of the canal route 
lay in flat country,

1864
02:21:21,633 --> 02:21:25,484
and the canal builders had little trouble 
digging through soft soil.

1865
02:21:27,194 --> 02:21:29,369
But 50 kilometers from Lake Erie,

1866
02:21:29,369 --> 02:21:31,817
the landscape suddenly changed.

1867
02:21:35,077 --> 02:21:38,886
By 1824, they got here, to Lockport.

1868
02:21:39,356 --> 02:21:43,070
And what they encountered 
was a solid rock ledge

1869
02:21:43,110 --> 02:21:46,497
of a very hard rock 
called Lockport Dolomite.

1870
02:21:47,947 --> 02:21:51,696
10 or 12 miles from here,
there was more hard rock excavation

1871
02:21:51,726 --> 02:21:55,095
than anywhere else
in the canal system put together.

1872
02:21:56,375 --> 02:21:59,736
This is the same rock 
that forms the lip of Niagara Falls.

1873
02:22:01,725 --> 02:22:04,530
It's as if they were climbing 
the face of Niagara Falls

1874
02:22:04,550 --> 02:22:07,507
in order to get canal boats past here

1875
02:22:07,517 --> 02:22:10,561
and onto Lake Erie 
and the upper Great Lakes.

1876
02:22:11,831 --> 02:22:15,631
Lifting canal boats from Lockport
to the level of Lake Erie

1877
02:22:15,672 --> 02:22:19,034
meant raising them 15 meters high.

1878
02:22:19,804 --> 02:22:21,492
The only way to do that

1879
02:22:21,542 --> 02:22:24,420
was by building a series of locks.

1880
02:22:25,740 --> 02:22:29,579
But cutting those locks through dolomite
with picks and shovels

1881
02:22:29,719 --> 02:22:32,490
would have been next to impossible.

1882
02:22:32,874 --> 02:22:35,586
You can chip away with chisels and picks,

1883
02:22:35,606 --> 02:22:38,832
but it would've taken years
and years and years to whittle down,

1884
02:22:38,922 --> 02:22:41,640
to hew your way down through this rock.

1885
02:22:42,200 --> 02:22:45,090
Without explosives, 
they weren't going any further.

1886
02:22:45,149 --> 02:22:48,355
They weren't going toreach
their ultimate goal of Lake Erie;

1887
02:22:48,365 --> 02:22:50,495
they weren't going to be able

1888
02:22:50,515 --> 02:22:53,005
to open the Great Lakes
to maritime commerce.

1889
02:22:54,365 --> 02:22:58,247
They needed some way 
to move massive quantities of rock.

1890
02:23:02,797 --> 02:23:05,314
Using gunpowder 
instead of pick and shovel,

1891
02:23:05,314 --> 02:23:09,417
the canal builders excavated 
the lock chambers in two years.

1892
02:23:10,907 --> 02:23:14,404
But gunpowder's work 
was just the beginning.

1893
02:23:16,964 --> 02:23:20,287
As soon as the canal diggers 
reached the height of Lake Erie,

1894
02:23:20,674 --> 02:23:23,662
they had to lower the channel below it

1895
02:23:23,782 --> 02:23:27,496
so, the lake would flow into the canal 
and keep it full of water.

1896
02:23:37,616 --> 02:23:40,079
Behind me you're looking
at the final challenge

1897
02:23:40,079 --> 02:23:41,803
in Erie Canal construction.

1898
02:23:42,153 --> 02:23:44,682
It's not terribly exciting looking.

1899
02:23:44,682 --> 02:23:46,435
It's not like the locks.

1900
02:23:46,435 --> 02:23:47,784
But this, cutting this slot,

1901
02:23:47,784 --> 02:23:50,968
the Deep Cut through four miles of rock

1902
02:23:50,978 --> 02:23:52,870
was the last major challenge

1903
02:23:52,870 --> 02:23:55,541
before the canal builders
could get to Lake Erie

1904
02:23:55,611 --> 02:23:59,787
and the one that took them
more than a year to accomplish.

1905
02:24:02,017 --> 02:24:05,760
The Deep Cut required them
to cut a vertical slot through rock,

1906
02:24:05,800 --> 02:24:08,063
something they hadn't encountered
anywhere else

1907
02:24:08,083 --> 02:24:10,036
on the entire canal construction project.

1908
02:24:10,036 --> 02:24:12,870
They probably used more gunpowder,
more explosives

1909
02:24:12,870 --> 02:24:14,674
in these four or five miles

1910
02:24:14,714 --> 02:24:17,633
than they used in the rest 
of the canal put together.

1911
02:24:19,443 --> 02:24:21,328
Rock went all over the place.

1912
02:24:21,378 --> 02:24:23,749
There are lots of stories about anything

1913
02:24:23,759 --> 02:24:27,213
from a pebble to a boulder 
raining down on the construction camp,

1914
02:24:28,903 --> 02:24:33,078
this hail of rock every time
they set off a charge.

1915
02:24:33,255 --> 02:24:35,896
And the blasting went on day and night.

1916
02:24:36,786 --> 02:24:39,411
Construction workers
were killed in blasting.

1917
02:24:39,451 --> 02:24:42,264
There were residents of the city
who were killed,

1918
02:24:42,274 --> 02:24:45,466
There are newspaper accounts
of women being killed by falling rock

1919
02:24:45,466 --> 02:24:47,950
while they were simply 
minding their business

1920
02:24:48,000 --> 02:24:50,356
walking from one house to another.

1921
02:24:51,156 --> 02:24:55,054
By the end of 1825,
the Deep Cut was finished

1922
02:24:55,114 --> 02:24:59,498
and the Erie Canal 
was officially open for business.

1923
02:25:01,574 --> 02:25:05,929
Before roads and railroads had penetrated 
the North American wilderness,

1924
02:25:06,131 --> 02:25:08,365
the Erie Canal made possible

1925
02:25:08,365 --> 02:25:12,514
the westward economic expansion
of the young United States.

1926
02:25:15,842 --> 02:25:19,896
And the digging of the Erie Canal
had another enormous consequence.

1927
02:25:24,074 --> 02:25:28,036
It would play a key role
in transforming the American seaport

1928
02:25:28,076 --> 02:25:31,992
at its eastern end
into the modern world's greatest city.

1929
02:25:32,373 --> 02:25:35,396
The Erie Canal vaulted New York City

1930
02:25:35,396 --> 02:25:37,871
from being one of several Atlantic ports

1931
02:25:37,941 --> 02:25:39,576
competing with Philadelphia,

1932
02:25:39,576 --> 02:25:41,212
Baltimore, and Boston

1933
02:25:41,352 --> 02:25:43,777
to the head of the pack.

1934
02:25:44,537 --> 02:25:48,188
New York became a world leader 
in maritime commerce,

1935
02:25:48,248 --> 02:25:52,002
and all the other business activities
that go along with maritime commerce,

1936
02:25:52,002 --> 02:25:56,170
things like insurance and financing
and the grain exchange,

1937
02:25:57,450 --> 02:25:59,799
that all happened in New York

1938
02:25:59,839 --> 02:26:02,468
because the Erie Canal brought the produce

1939
02:26:02,468 --> 02:26:05,763
of the interior of a continent
to the Atlantic

1940
02:26:05,833 --> 02:26:07,873
in New York harbor.

1941
02:26:08,273 --> 02:26:13,133
By the 20th century, New York had become
the prototype of the megacity.

1942
02:26:19,873 --> 02:26:23,323
Spawned and sustained by global trade,

1943
02:26:23,363 --> 02:26:25,362
the megacity transcends its national roots

1944
02:26:25,462 --> 02:26:27,797
and becomes a world city,

1945
02:26:27,797 --> 02:26:30,614
encompassing human diversity.

1946
02:26:33,014 --> 02:26:36,723
New York's evolution
was the ultimate expression of forces

1947
02:26:36,723 --> 02:26:40,117
that have been at work
for thousands of years,

1948
02:26:42,197 --> 02:26:44,766
set in motion and sustained

1949
02:26:44,766 --> 02:26:47,848
by the East-West commerce 
of the Silk Road.

1950
02:26:50,748 --> 02:26:52,492
A path through history

1951
02:26:52,492 --> 02:26:54,970
that didn't just link
human beings together

1952
02:26:54,970 --> 02:26:58,079
but shaped their fates.

1953
02:26:59,879 --> 02:27:04,292
The Silk Road was like a ray of light.

1954
02:27:08,196 --> 02:27:11,763
It opened our eyes, 
East and West,

1955
02:27:11,773 --> 02:27:14,830
to intangible ideas,

1956
02:27:15,376 --> 02:27:19,938
to beautiful things, to beautiful thoughts

1957
02:27:22,455 --> 02:27:25,424
Today, the ancient tale of the Silk Road

1958
02:27:25,424 --> 02:27:28,534
seems like the story of an exotic past.

1959
02:27:29,184 --> 02:27:33,444
But in fact, it's just as much
a story of the future.

1960
02:27:36,204 --> 02:27:37,869
Two or three times a week,

1961
02:27:37,919 --> 02:27:40,812
a train departs 
from the Chinese city of Yiwu.

1962
02:27:44,572 --> 02:27:48,018
It's loaded with Chinese 
manufactured consumer goods,

1963
02:27:48,676 --> 02:27:51,482
and its route takes it
across six countries

1964
02:27:51,552 --> 02:27:53,799
in Central Asia 
and Eastern Europe.

1965
02:27:59,139 --> 02:28:01,610
It takes 18 to 20 days to reach

1966
02:28:01,630 --> 02:28:05,471
one of several destinations
in Western Europe,

1967
02:28:06,621 --> 02:28:11,367
over distances of some
12,000 to 13,000 kilometers.

1968
02:28:14,897 --> 02:28:17,915
Loaded up with European
manufactured goods,

1969
02:28:17,935 --> 02:28:20,059
it returns to China.

1970
02:28:20,719 --> 02:28:25,121
The Yiwu Railway is pioneering
the return of the Silk Road.

1971
02:28:27,736 --> 02:28:30,164
On 14 May 2017,

1972
02:28:30,194 --> 02:28:32,504
China hosted a conference in Beijing

1973
02:28:32,504 --> 02:28:36,254
to promote its 
"One Belt, One Road" initiative.

1974
02:28:36,294 --> 02:28:38,644
Attending were delegates
from around the world,

1975
02:28:38,644 --> 02:28:41,294
including the heads 
of the International Monetary Fund,

1976
02:28:41,294 --> 02:28:43,899
the World Bank, and the United Nations

1977
02:28:43,899 --> 02:28:46,856
and nearly 30 heads of state.

1978
02:28:47,716 --> 02:28:50,346
Known as OBOR 
— One Belt, One Road —

1979
02:28:50,456 --> 02:28:54,413
plans to build a $1 trillion U.S. dollar
transport network

1980
02:28:54,423 --> 02:28:56,996
that will connect some 60 countries,

1981
02:28:56,996 --> 02:28:59,211
2/3 of the world's population

1982
02:28:59,211 --> 02:29:02,202
and 1/3 of the world's GDP.

1983
02:29:03,452 --> 02:29:06,853
Inspired by the Old Silk Road,
it will re-establish

1984
02:29:06,863 --> 02:29:10,266
the ancient trade routes
overland and by sea.

1985
02:29:12,498 --> 02:29:16,695
And it will also create 
a New Silk Road in space.

1986
02:29:18,065 --> 02:29:23,238
On August 1, 2017, 
China's Tianzhou-1 cargo spacecraft

1987
02:29:23,838 --> 02:29:29,707
released the nano-satellite 
SilkRoad-1 01 CubeSat into orbit.

1988
02:29:30,977 --> 02:29:33,276
SilkRoad-1 is a pathfinder

1989
02:29:33,316 --> 02:29:36,851
for a constellation
of around 30 satellites

1990
02:29:36,861 --> 02:29:39,883
operating across a variety of wavelengths.

1991
02:29:41,877 --> 02:29:44,238
These satellites will help build

1992
02:29:44,238 --> 02:29:46,999
an efficient and reliable 
satellite navigation system

1993
02:29:47,099 --> 02:29:50,214
that will provide mapping 
and navigation services

1994
02:29:50,214 --> 02:29:52,377
and remote sensing technology

1995
02:29:52,397 --> 02:29:55,069
to all the cities of Western China

1996
02:29:55,089 --> 02:29:58,085
and to other countries
along the new Silk Road.

1997
02:29:58,675 --> 02:30:08,233
Going into space can offer a superior way
of connection for global communication.

1998
02:30:08,297 --> 02:30:12,357
The communication's 
satellite and Earth observation

1999
02:30:12,437 --> 02:30:14,676
are both typical examples.

2000
02:30:14,676 --> 02:30:19,665
In 2020 we will complete 
basic construction of the space station.

2001
02:30:19,915 --> 02:30:23,077
After that we will start 
to operate the space station

2002
02:30:27,232 --> 02:30:37,913
And we will constantly extend 
its application as needed.

2003
02:30:39,831 --> 02:30:42,991
We hope through our space station

2004
02:30:43,111 --> 02:30:46,746
we will be able to promote 
the development of space for humankind.

2005
02:30:46,766 --> 02:30:51,620
And to be a responsible nation in space.

2006
02:30:51,683 --> 02:30:54,901
After the space station is launched

2007
02:30:54,901 --> 02:30:58,349
I believe more countries
will participate in this development

2008
02:30:58,564 --> 02:31:02,701
as well as experiments
and scientific achievement

2009
02:31:04,001 --> 02:31:06,355
All countries can share

2010
02:31:06,435 --> 02:31:09,290
in the achievements 
through this initiative.

2011
02:31:09,438 --> 02:31:13,988
advancing the building 
of a human community

2012
02:31:13,998 --> 02:31:17,128
with a shared civilization.

2013
02:31:17,372 --> 02:31:20,084
The unique advantage of space

2014
02:31:20,164 --> 02:31:22,630
will definitely play a part

2015
02:31:22,650 --> 02:31:25,316
in the construction
of the Belt and Road Initiative.

2016
02:31:27,026 --> 02:31:28,818
For thousands of years,

2017
02:31:28,891 --> 02:31:33,111
the movement of goods, people,
and inventions across Eurasia

2018
02:31:33,111 --> 02:31:36,741
has played a critical role 
in shaping human destiny.

2019
02:31:37,981 --> 02:31:42,341
And it may soon be helping 
to shape humanity's future.

2020
02:31:43,601 --> 02:31:45,761
Transcript by Margarida Mariz (2025)