Some 10,000 kilometers from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean,
a formidable distance, even in today's world,
and yet over that vast distance,
human beings have pursued one of history's greatest enterprises:
The Silk Road.
A tremendously profitable trade route
and so much more.
For thousands of years,
exotic goods,
new technologies,
conquering armies,
and brilliant ideas
travelled along the Silk Road.
Silk Road trade helped to build empires
and to break them.
It fanned the fires of revolution,
drove great explorations,
and forged powerful bonds between far away peoples.
The Silk Road made human beings realize
that there are other people out there,
and it opened the eyes of the east and the west.
This is the story of how Silk Road trade made so much more than money.
It's the epic tale of how the Silk Road helped create a world,
a world that created us.
2,000 years ago, the Roman Empire seemed unstoppable.
Rome had conquered much of Europe
and was sending its legions beyond the eastern Mediterranean
to the Middle East
-- gateway to the riches of Asia.
But a journey to the east could become a road of blood.
In 53 BC. near the Mesopotamian town of Carrhae,
the Parthians — an empire blending Persian and Greek cultures —
confronted a Roman army.
The outcome of the battle seemed beyond doubt.
Some 40,000 Romans faced only 10,000 Parthians.
And Rome's legions were Europe's finest foot soldiers.
There was just one problem.
The Parthian army didn't fight on foot.
The Parthians, they were cavalry.
They were horse archers.
Versatile. Rode like the wind.
What the Romans did was what the Romans always did.
They took a fixed position.
They were ordered into a hollow square defending all sides.
But that was nothing to the Parthian horse archers
because they could just ride around them, and they did.
They galloped around and around and around and around,
shooting as they went.
Thousands and thousands of arrows loosed into those Romans.
What the Romans eventually did was they were ordered to go into testudo.
That's that Roman formation where they lock their shields together
and put the next layer of shields to make a roof.
Testudo is Latin for tortoise.
But the Parthians had the answer to this tortoise.
They had a hammer to break open its shell.
The Parthian hammer was a cataphract,
a Greek word meaning "clothed in full armor".
Horse and rider wore heavy coats of mail.
The cataphract was the ancient world equivalent of a battle tank.
At Carrhae, charging cataphracts broke open the testudo,
exposing the Romans inside to more arrow attacks.
Some 30,000 Romans were killed or captured.
Parthian losses were minor.
It was one of Rome's worst military defeats.
But it may have been something else as well.
A Roman historian wrote
that the Parthians dazzled the Romans
with banners made of a beautiful fabric:
silk.
That may only be a legend.
But around the time of Carrhae,
Romans began coveting Chinese silk,
and China began selling silk to Rome
in exchange for fine Roman glassware and gold,
inspiring the name we give Eurasian trade today:
the Silk Road.
But long before Romans and Parthians fought at Carrhae,
trade between the peoples of Eurasia were shaping lives,
making new things possible,
and changing the world.
At Carrhae, the Parthians won with a style of warfare
that had evolved centuries earlier
and thousands of kilometers away.
On the steppes of Central Asia,
an ocean of land,
where victory in battle, and life itself,
depended on moving very far, very fast,
thousands of years before the battle of Carrhae,
a transportation revolution took place on these vast plains.
There's good evidence for the existence of domesticated horses
in what is today Kazakhstan and southern Russia by 3500 BC.
And we actually think that probably horses were domesticated
and began to be ridden 500 or maybe 1,000 years before that,
maybe as early as 4500 BC.
The domestication of the horse
was the first step towards cavalry warfare.
But the second step would be a long time coming.
The first use of horses in warfare was with chariot warfare,
and we have that well established Tutankhamun's chariot,
which many people have seen in museum exhibits.
And we know that people were using chariots in warfare
starting in the Near East in about 1600, 1700 BC.
Horses were not used as organized cavalry
until after about 900 BC,
almost 1,000 years after chariot warfare began.
And it's always seemed odd to me that cavalry began after chariotry.
Chariotry is very difficult to manage.
You have to train horses to work together.
They have to pull this clumsy vehicle
that has two people in it: a driver and a warrior.
Training the units to work together, very difficult thing to do,
whereas jumping on the back of a horse is an easy thing.
So, why did cavalry come after chariotry?
I think the real reason that cavalry waited
is that you needed to have really three innovations.
The earliest evidence for the recurved bow is in Shang Dynasty, China,
probably dated between 1300 and 1100 BC.
Shang emperors communicated with their ancestors
by heating animal bones or turtle shells until they cracked
and then interpreting the patterns made by the cracks.
One of these so-called oracle bones
is carved with the Chinese character for bow
— the earliest known image of a recurved bow.
And in the tomb of Lady Fu Hao
— an imperial consort and renowned military commander —
archaeologists found more evidence.
It's a thumb cover for drawing bow string
and there's another piece that went in the middle of a recurved bow,
a handgrip.
The bows themselves are not preserved,
so, it's a difficult thing to identify the origins of the recurved bow.
The different components of it
probably came from different places geographically.
Just how far the recurved bow traveled across Eurasia
was revealed in 2005 at Yanghai, in China's Xinjiang region.
Wooden bows rarely survive burial in the ground,
but Xinjiang's cold, dry climate preserved one
in a 3,000-year-old tomb.
Other grave goods and the human remains
found in the Yanghai tombs
confirmed that the bow was made by the Scythians,
a highly sophisticated culture that originated in southern Russia
and migrated on horseback
across the length and breadth of Eurasia.
The true birthplace of the recurved composite bow
remains an archaeological mystery.
But there is no doubt that 3,000 years ago
anyone who fought on horseback would have found it revolutionary.
A bow is as strong as it is long.
It derives its strength from its length.
And the recurved bow packs the same length
into this very short bow
that can be swung over the horse's rear and over the horse's neck.
And it was much, much easier to use on horseback.
And the recurved bows are technologically quite difficult to make.
It took a long time to develop the craft of bow making to that point.
The recurve all these sinewy bends — reflex and deflex —
that gives it in-built spring.
But that can only be created with composite materials.
What we mean by that is it's made of a number of materials.
The heart of it is wood, usually beech.
And then you have horn, horn from a water buffalo,
and then sinew, the tendons of an animal.
That, when you bash it,
you can tease apart and get these very fine fibers,
fibers with tremendous tensile strength,
that has elasticity and spring,
and it stops the bow bursting apart.
These are all materials that enhance the power, the spring of the bow.
But only if bow makers could solve a very big problem.
How to keep such a powerful bow
made from so many different materials
from breaking up when its own power was pulling it apart?
Somewhere in Eurasia, sometime long ago,
some unknown genius discovered the answer.
This is the swim bladder of a sturgeon — a fish from the Black Sea.
And if you start to break these up then put it in hot water,
and you get this wonderful, viscous glue.
This simple idea of making a glue out of a swim bladder of a fish
was a technological breakthrough of immense consequences.
It is what enabled the composite bow to exist.
And in turn the composite bow was a military revolution
of far-reaching consequences.
The composite recurved bow gave birth to a new kind of warrior
the horse archer.
The horse archer was able to shoot from the saddle
in part because of the new technology of the composite bow.
They were short, compact bows,
and that meant that you can shoot them from horseback.
You see I can cross to the other side of the horse,
I can turn and shoot behind.
It's much more suitable for shooting on horseback.
Everyone who fought with Eurasian nomads,
whether as enemy or friend,
wanted a recurved composite bow.
By the early first millennium BC,
it was in use from east Asia to eastern Europe.
A recurved bow gave a horse archer unprecedented killing power.
But it didn't make him a cavalryman.
Before horse archers could fight as an effective military force,
they needed a large supply of identical arrows.
And that didn't exist.
Arrowheads were a variety of different sizes and weights.
Some were made of bone.
Some were made out of flint.
Some were made out of bronze.
All of them would be individually made
and you had to adjust your shot for the weight of different arrows.
Also, a unit of soldiers who were firing at the same time
would be firing arrows of slightly different weights
and they might go different distances.
One of the features of a stone arrowhead is its flattened rear.
But how did it connect with the arrow shaft?
It can only be tied to the shaft by rope or ox tendons.
But what about the disadvantages?
First, the released arrows tend to change direction easily.
Second, they are likely to fall off.
One of the technological innovations
was the invention of the socketed arrowhead.
They were made of bronze, usually,
and they were made in a mold and cast in a mold,
so that an infinite number of socketed arrowheads of the same weight
could be made from the same mold.
Making socketed projectile points was actually a big deal.
You have to have a mold with a core where the socket is going to be
that you can pour molten metal around
so that it's the same thickness all the way around.
Making arrowheads of the same size and weight
was another Central Asian technological revolution.
For the first time, mounted warriors could unleash
coordinated arrow attacks on their enemies.
With arrowheads of the same weight,
every time you drew the bow to shoot
you knew that you were firing an arrow
that was exactly the same weight as the last arrow that you fired,
so, you could determine the range and the distance well.
And also, all of the archers that were firing,
were firing arrowheads at the same weight at the same time.
So, the distance for all of them would be the same.
With a socketed arrowhead
you can directly insert the head into the shaft.
It looks like this.
So, what are the advantages of this type of arrowhead?
Its improvements greatly enhanced
the lethality and efficiency of ancient arrows.
Even in the chaos of war, the shooter could aim the target easily.
He wouldn't lose the direction by aiming t the target quickly.
This invention is a giant leap in the development of human history.
Archaeologists believe that sometime in the second millennium BC,
socketed bronze arrowheads began spreading east
while the composite recurved bow spread west.
Sometime around 900 BC,
socketed arrowheads and recurved bows
met in the Tarim Basin area of Central Asia,
brought together by traders, warriors, and migrating nomads.
After about 700 BC, you begin to see thousands and thousands of arrowheads
and dozens of arrowheads in a single quiver in a grave.
It's like they're being mass produced.
Bronze socketed arrowheads turned central Asia into an arsenal,
but cavalries still couldn't exist
until warriors could become soldiers.
It was really the age of heroic warfare
— individuals going out and doing great deeds by themselves
and attracting glory for their own name.
And this is the kind of warfare that's described
in the "Iliad", in the "Odyssey," or in the "Rigveda,"
a religious text that's at the deep roots of modern Hinduism.
What had to change was a psychological change
in the nature of the warrior.
You had to change from individuals to units
working under the command of a commanding general,
who would attack and retreat upon command.
The psychological change from the heroic warrior to the soldier,
probably is a feature of urban warfare.
The armies that were associated
with the great cities of Mesopotamia and Iran.
That psychology had to spread northward up into the steppes
and be accepted by warriors in the steppes,
in the same area where the recurved bows
and the socketed arrowheads were crossing.
While recurved bows were spreading west
and socketed arrowheads were spreading east,
the concept of military discipline was spreading north.
Sometime around 900 BC,
all three combined in the heart of central Asia.
When those three things came together,
cavalry became a really deadly form of military force.
A force that would severely test the ancient world's most powerful armies.
2,000 years ago,
as the Romans pushed east to expand their empire,
China was pushing west.
And like the Romans,
the Chinese encountered a formidable enemy on horseback.
The Xiongnu were nomads from the Central Asian steppes.
Armed with recurved bows and socketed arrows,
they fought under commanders as a disciplined military force.
They raided Chinese villages
and plundered the growing trade between East and West,
and no one could stop them.
The Xiongnu was the migraine of the ancient world for the Chinese.
They simply just kept coming and they would not stop.
The Xiongnu wanted the finest material goods produced by the Chinese.
That is why they raided.
Imagine you're a villager in China and these men come from nowhere.
They come from over the hill without warning,
tearing into your village.
They shoot the headman, they shoot your husband.
They chase the women out.
There is no hiding place and there's a flurry of dust and arrows.
They're in and they're out and they take the stuff and they go.
China sent its military might against the Xiongnu.
The famed Terracotta Warriors
reveal the size and power of Chinese armies.
But the Chinese fought on foot and from chariots.
Not effective against hit-and-run cavalry.
A Chinese courtier wrote that the Xiongnu moved like a flock of birds over the land,
impossible to control.
Once mounted warfare really became deadly and effective,
it became a real problem.
If you're a farmer, the nomads know where you're going to be all the time.
Your house is in the same place 12 months of the year,
and when your crops become ripe, you have to harvest,
and the nomads know when that season is.
Whereas when you're trying to strike them back,
it's impossible to know where they're going to be
or when they're going to be there.
You have to search to find them.
To beat the Xiongnu, the Chinese needed soldiers who could fight like them.
They needed cavalry.
There are manuals of warfare that were written
to instruct Chinese warriors
on how to counter the tactics and the methods of the Xiongnu.
Those manuals introduced the idea of cavalry
to the Chinese military.
The Chinese military had not really used cavalry
before about probably 350 BC.
Chinese military, at first with some resistance
from the old aristocratic families, said:
"Well, my father fought on a chariot,
"and his father fought on a chariot,
"and I'm gonna fight on a chariot in my long robes like my ancestors."
But it wasn't long before Chinese warriors
traded their traditional long, flowing robes
for shorter tunics that didn't get in the way of fighting on horseback.
Eventually, the practicalities forced them to get rid of their robes,
to put on riding trousers,
to learn to shoot the bow on horseback,
and they, too, became a mighty horse archer force.
Chinese cavalry became experts at shooting the recurved composite bow,
and a lethal Chinese weapon, the crossbow.
While its cavalry trained,
China agreed to Xiongnu demands for payments of money and silk
until the year 133 BC,
when Emperor Han Wudi refused to pay
and sent his army to attack the Xiongnu.
Chinese cavalry defeated the nomads.
And China seized new territories in the steppes,
pacifying trade routes and opening new horizons.
On one hand, we have this perpetual conflict
— in Chinese culture would be the Xiongnu and the Han Chinese
that created incessant warfare.
On the other hand, it is this conflict
that demolished physical boundaries.
Even territory boundaries were constantly being pushed farther,
pushed back between the two forces.
This was a stimulus for exchanges,
for political changes,
for new ideas, for artistic traditions.
It was also a new era for the Silk Road.
A fortune in Roman gold traveled east
in exchange for Chinese silks.
And the Central Asian kingdom of Kushan
made its own fortune selling another luxury to China:
jade.
Silk Road caravans passed through this border station
on China's western frontier.
So many of them carried Kushan jade
that this station became known as the Jade Gate.
Chinese aristocrats coveted jade for its beauty
and something more.
They believed that jade would keep them alive forever.
The ruling elite commissioned jade burial suits
to preserve their bodies in the grave.
They believed that, upon death,
all the orifices should be plugged in
to preserve the spirit inside the person.
And this notion of jade
as a material with protective power in the afterlife,
is further enhanced by the fact
that they built an armor
made of thousands of pieces of jade.
And of course, if you're the emperor,
your jade armor would be made from the finest jade
from the western regions.
During the Roman empire, Silk Road trade flourished
as Chinese, Persian, and Kushan armies
kept the trade routes open across Eurasia.
China had leveled the battlefield
with nomad raiders from the steppes.
But Central Asian horse archers
were about to carve their names on History.
In the 4th century CE, Europe was invaded by a Central Asian people
whose name still evokes barbaric cruelty.
The Huns, who fought their way West, all the way to Rome.
European peoples like the Goths and Visigoths
— the so-called barbarians —
fled before their onslaught,
and sought refuge in Roman territory.
When the Huns withdrew from the Roman world,
those barbarian refugees stayed.
And the rest is History.
The western Roman empire was plunged into chaos
as barbarian tribes, dissatisfied with their lot,
rebelled against Roman authority,
and weak Roman emperors failed to crush them.
As Rome declined, migrating horse archers, called the Avars,
carved their own country out of eastern Europe,
bringing with them another Asian military innovation:
the stirrup.
This Chinese statue from the fourth century CE,
is the earliest known depiction of stirrups.
Some 300 years later,
an Avar horseman was riding with these stirrups
across Hungary.
By the eighth century CE,
the stirrup had spread from one end of Eurasia to the other
and mounted warfare was entering a new era.
The importance of the stirrup
relates to what kinds of weapons can you use from horseback,
and it made it possible to use certain kinds of weapons from horseback
that you couldn't use without stirrups.
Those weapons are the long sabre.
You have to lean over and absorb shock,
if you're going to use a long sabre in battle.
And the stirrups allow the rider to absorb the shock of contact
with a stationary target.
The other big weapon that was possible with stirrups
was a seated lance held under the arm.
You could stab somebody with the lance and then remove it,
riding past them without stirrups.
But if you seated it under your arm and used the lance as a shock weapon,
it would knock you off the back of the horse
if you didn't have stirrups.
So, stirrups made it possible to use long swords and lances
as shock weapons against stationary targets
and keep your seat.
And of course, that made it possible to have really heavy mounted warriors.
Now, the rider becomes a unit with the horse.
He's so anchored with his stirrups, anchored with this,
and then with his long lance
he becomes a single projectile unit.
Man, horse, saddle, lance, all locked together for the impact charge.
This was the age of the medieval knight.
A medieval knight's power
came from combining the Asian stirrup and the ancient shock tactics
of the Persian cataphract with a European invention:
articulated plate armor.
Strong enough to protect the wearer from sword and lance thrusts
while light enough to allow him to move freely on horseback
and on foot.
Heavy cavalry had never been a more potent weapon of war.
Medieval mounted warfare could be warfare
that generated a lot of force on the rider,
a high impact warfare.
In that case, the mounted warrior is being used
really as a shock weapon to strike the enemy.
But even Europe's formidable mounted knights
would be outfought by Central Asian cavalry
that burst out of the steppes and changed the world.
The largest conquest empire that the Earth has ever seen
was created by pastoral nomads from Central Asia.
In the 13th century,
the Mongols conquered as far West as Poland
and as far East as the Sea of Japan.
Mongol armies combined the devastating shock tactics of horse archers
with a highly sophisticated military organization.
They could gather quickly and march to distant battlefields.
Then the cavalry could reach the enemy's battlefield
before they set up defenses
which could deter their enemy psychologically and strategically.
It is said that the cavalry came suddenly
like something falling from the sky
and disappeared quickly
leaving no trace at all.
Western, especially European historians,
wrote that the Mongols appeared far away like several spots
but would suddenly gather before you, like dark clouds.
Unexpected attack was the core.
The Mongols have gone down in History as bloodthirsty killers,
but they were also sophisticated, open-minded,
often generous conquerors.
They pacified the Silk Road.
Trade between West and East
flourished under this Mongol-enforced peace,
the Pax Mongolica.
Before the age of Pax Mongolica,
banditry was a very serious problem for traders,
for caravans, along the Silk Road.
The reputation of Genghis Khan and his descendants
created peace and safe passage along the Silk Road
because bandits were so afraid of the Mongol soldiers.
The Pax Mongolica,
the control of trade and exchange
that was made possible under the Mongols
connected China with Europe and with the Near East
in a really close way for the first time in world History.
And that had a profound effect
on the development of European civilization.
Protected by the Pax Mongolica,
and anxious for good relations with the Mongol empire,
Europeans began traveling East as never before.
Merchants, missionaries, and diplomats
flowed East along the trade routes,
bringing back popular Asian goods like cloth and spices
and tales of the wealth and wonders of the East,
some true, some fabulous, but all fascinating.
From Europe to China,
Silk Road trade spread new knowledge of far-away lands.
The Silk Road made human beings realize
that there are other people out there,
and it opened the eyes of the East and the West.
The Italian cities of Venice and Genoa reaped huge rewards.
Their merchants traveled safely throughout Eurasia
and founded trading posts on the Black Sea
to receive and pass on Silk Road goods.
Their Silk Road profits funded magnificent art and architecture.
But their competition frequently plunged them into war with one another.
In one of these wars, Genoa captured a prosperous Venetian merchant
named Marco Polo.
Imprisoned by the Genoese, Polo dictated the story
of his Silk Road journey to China to a fellow prisoner.
Today, experts debate whether Marco Polo really visited China
or was simply retelling stories
he heard from fellow Silk Road travelers.
But there's no debate that "The Travels of Marco Polo"
was one of the most influential books in all of human History.
It tantalized Europe with tales
of China's immense wealth and advanced civilization.
And years before Marco Polo was telling those tales in a Genoese prison,
a Chinese invention was making its way across Eurasia to the West.
Something created centuries earlier
when an experiment ended very badly.
Ancient Chinese alchemists prepared potions of lead or mercury
for their aristocratic patrons
who believed that drinking these metals would help them live forever.
Instead, those concoctions killed them or made them insane.
Another deadly combination was sulfur
heated with an organic nitrate found in soil throughout China,
known today as saltpeter.
When alchemists experimented with this formula,
it burst into flame,
injuring the alchemists,
(Explosion)
and burning down their laboratory.
From that disaster was born a chemical mixture like none other.
It may have failed as an elixir of immortality,
but it would prove to be a potent agent of death.
This Chinese Buddhist scroll dating from around 950 CE,
depicts demons surrounding a seated Buddha.
One demon holds what the Chinese called a "huo quiang", or fire lance.
It's the earliest known image of a weapon
powered by that deadly mixture of saltpeter and sulfur,
known to history as gunpowder.
In the early 13th century,
the Mongols attacked China's Jin Dynasty.
The Jin Dynasty's army fought back with exploding gunpowder bombs.
But as the Mongols conquered more and more of China,
Han Chinese artillerymen joined their armies
and marched West, bringing their gunpowder weapons with them.
The Mongols attacked Russian and Polish cities
with exploding fire bombs.
And Europeans found out the hard way what gunpowder could do.
By the end of the 13th century,
the formula for gunpowder was known as far West as England,
and Europeans were inventing their own versions of the new weapons.
It wasn't long before this Chinese invention changed European history.
On 26th August, 1346,
near the village of Crécy in northern France,
the armies of France and England prepared to fight.
Mounted on their war steeds, encased in their armor,
the flower of French nobility formed their battle line,
while the English deployed a very different force,
thousands of expert archers.
The French sent their higher Genoese crossbowmen to attack the English
before French knights annihilated them.
But the English king, Edward III,
had spent years training his longbow men.
And all that training was about to pay off.
Nothing like this had been seen on a western battlefield up to this time.
The first time that a volley of arrows was unleashed by the archers at Crecy
would have represented something completely new
to many of those in the French army watching it.
A cloud of arrows descending towards them.
It would have been frightening,
and of course, the effect was almost immediate.
Showered by English arrows, the Genoese turned and ran,
and according to medieval accounts of the battle,
they were also panicked by another English weapon.
Giovanni Villani, writing very soon after the battle,
says in his chronicle that so loud and intimidating
was the noise created by the guns
that they thought God was thundering.
"The English guns cast iron balls by means of fire.
"They made a noise like thunder
"and caused much loss in men and horses."
Noise like that would have been unprecedented
to the soldiers on the battlefield.
Nothing in their lives could have prepared them
for a bang of that size
and accompanied by smoke and acrid sulfur smell,
which would hang in the air.
The impact of which, of course, they couldn't see
until men around them dropped.
Not even professional soldiers like the Genoese
would have experienced anything like this before in their lives.
That would have been terrifying,
and it's no wonder that they scattered and ran.
They turned and fled into the face of the oncoming French cavalry charge.
The French cavalry were now coming onto the battlefield
and they were appalled
at these people they'd hired running away.
And they cursed them and they rode into them,
and as many Genoese fell to French hooves
as they did to English arrows and gunshots.
And the French knights, all 12,000 of them,
double the size of the English army,
they came charging down onto the English.
And they, too, fell to the English arrows and the English gunshot,
and they came again and again and again.
15, 16 times, they came.
And their horses were ripped to shreds
and the men were thrown from their horses.
And those that weren't thrown,
they had the opportunity that the dagger men rushed in
and they brought these knights down.
This was a moment in History where the world changed.
It spelled the beginning of the end for the medieval knight.
The Battle of Crecy has gone down in history
as one of the earliest uses of gunpowder weapons
on a European battlefield.
Some 500 years after,
it burned down a Chinese alchemist's workshop,
gunpowder had become destiny's weapon of choice.
After Crécy, it was only a matter of time
until the fates of peoples and nations were decided by the gun.
Within two centuries,
Europeans would use their powerful gunpowder weapons
to dominate the world,
creating empires that would evolve into today's global trading culture,
which binds people together by commerce instead of the gun.
But before Europe could embark on its empire-building adventure,
its medieval social order
would be shattered by a catastrophic event.
One that would forge a new Europe in a crucible of horror.
While guns thundered at Crecy,
something else was spreading along the Eurasian trade routes.
Something that would kill tens of millions of Europeans.
An apocalyptic destruction of human life
that would lay the foundations of the modern world.
At the Battle of Crécy in 1346,
the English won an historic victory over France,
helped by a Chinese invention that had traveled to Europe.
Gunpowder.
And in the same year of 1346,
some 2,000 kilometers east of Crécy,
another battle was taking place on the shores of the Black Sea.
A Mongol army had been laying siege to the Crimean port city of Caffa,
a Silk Road trading post belonging to the Italian city of Genoa.
The Mongols were masters of siege warfare.
But Caffa was still holding out after more than two years.
Suddenly, the Mongol army was decimated.
Not by Caffa's defenders, but by an unknown disease.
The Mongols quickly ended their siege.
But before they left Caffa,
they loaded their siege engines with the corpses of their dead
and flung them over the city's walls,
believing that the stench of death would kill the defenders.
Medieval chronicles say
that Caffa's defenders did die by the thousands,
but not from the smell of death.
One year later, in 1347,
the same disease that had killed the Mongols at Caffa
was killing people in Constantinople.
By 1348, it was killing people across Western Europe.
By 1350, it was killing people as far away as Greenland.
And terrified Europeans had given it a name.
The Black Death.
In just under a decade, from 1347 to 1356,
the Black Death killed a t least 25 million Europeans.,
one third of Europe's population.
Today, most scholars believe
that the Black Death was an outbreak of bubonic plague.
that was transmitted to humans by infected fleas living on rats.
And we believe that it spread across Eurasia
by hitching a ride with armies, ships, and caravans
along trade routes that were already ancient
by the time of the Black Death.
Micro-organic travelers of all kinds
have moved across Eurasia for thousands of years.
A bio-migration that has had as big an impact on history
as the more famous exchanges of new technologies and luxury goods.
And as a recent discovery shows,
tiny living things moving along the Silk Road
brought life as well as death.
We were putting together some new methods
of looking for early agriculture,
and for that we needed to do a survey
of all the finds of early crops in Europe.
When you looked at a map of all of Europe,
then you could see there were these Chinese crops
in small numbers very early on in Europe.
"Very early on" was around 2,000 BC,
when a Chinese grain called broomcorn millet
appears in the Eastern European archaeological record.
The actual crop itself will decay or be eaten,
but rather fortunately,
if it's cooked and over-burnt, it turns to carbon.
That will stay in the archaeological record for a long time.
In the Chinese province of inner Mongolia,
archaeologists are studying the origins of broomcorn millet,
one of the world's oldest domestic crops.
We are looking at a broomcorn millet field of almost 16 acres
The cultivation of broomcorn millet in this place
dates back to nearly 8000 years ago.
It's the earliest area of human-cultivated broomcorn millet in the world.
After broomcorn millet's birth in this place,
it spread to the West from the East.
It spread to Europe.
Since it originated from the East and then spread to Europe,
it can be regarded as an important contribution
of our Eastern civilization to the Western counterpart.
But it isn't clear just how and why
broomcorn millet travelled thousands of kilometers across Eurasia,
through some of the world's harshest environments,
all the way to Europe.
Millet's long journey may have begun simply because it travelled so well.
Millets are essentially cereals, but they're very small.
And because they have very small grains,
they're hardy and they're tough,
and they can grow quite fast.
Broomcorn millet, at a push,
can get from seed to seed in 45 days.
You can plant a seed in the ground
and 45 days later, in the right conditions,
you may have plants.
That's incredibly fast.
So, if you're moving around parts of Asia,
where, on the one hand, there's a long winter,
a short growing season,
and you can't particularly rely on rainfall,
then something that gets a move on in terms of its growth cycle
is very valuable.
There are accounts of communities that are on horseback
for quite a lot of the time and herding animals and so forth,
but for that short season of the year
that millet grows in,
they can actually sow the millet on horseback,
trample it in with the horse's feet,
and then either leave a few teenagers there
to scare the birds off for a couple of months,
come back two months later, and harvest the crops.
Millet was a highly mobile grain,
but there wasn't any evidence
of how it might have travelled from its home in northern China.
Until archaeologists found signs of millet cultivation around 2500 BC
in the foothills of the Tian Shan Mountains in central Asia.
At that point we asked ourselves,
"Well, what is it about these foothills?"
You know, "Why the foothills?"
Clearly, it's about water.
If one travels across the center of Asia,
one realizes why water is a key.
And wherever you are in Asia, it can be very dry, of course.
But if one goes uphill to those foothills,
then one has somewhere
where there will be streams running off the mountains and water.
Archaeologists found that around 1,000 BC,
millet farmers left theTian Shan foothills
and their reliable water supply
and began moving into much harsher environments.
We can see the confidence of farmers
spreading out from where the water is really safe
to areas where you have to know more
about the water and the landscape and the geography,
both into the steppes to the north and to the desert to the south.
Millet's local migrations may have linked it with the world.
Migrating millet farmers in search of water
may have settled near trade routes.
And long-distance travelers would have chosen routes
near reliable sources of food and water.
I think very much those traders are definitely working
through networks that are already centuries old.
It's at least a millennium before you see something crystallizing
that you can start calling the Silk Road.
Another discovery has revealed that this ancient grain migration
wasn't only from East to West.
Wheat was transmitted from West to East,
arrived in China and was accepted as our main staple.
This reflects the transaction between Eastern and Western cultures.
The Eurasian steppe, acting as a route
for early exchanges between Eastern and Western cultures.
is the predecessor of the ancient Silk Road.
Ethnic migration, the fusion of cultures,
and the flow of trade are all embedded in this road.
Trading millet and wheat between China and Europe
may have done much more than feed people.
It may also have enabled profound social change.
Seeds germinate at one time of year
and are harvested another time of year,
and that's kind of hardwired into their biology.
And so, farming is a one-season activity,
and there are things going on at other times of year.
And during the second millennium BC,
a number of societies are doing something
which is quite radically different,
and that is putting more than one season in a single year.
Crops like millet are really useful for that,
in that if you are a western farmer,
with wheat and barley fields
reaching maturity during the summer,
and you think
"Right, with the same plot of land, "I want to increase production.
"And so, I want another crop after I've harvested the first crop."
You can't do a long season, large-grain crop
like wheat and barley again,
so, something that's short and sharp like millet
you can tag on to the end of it
and catch another season before the winter's set in.
Interestingly, when you get to China, it's the converse.
You have this short season crop already there,
and by rearranging your life,
you can bring a long season crop such as wheat and barley in at that stage.
So, the implications are, with the same plot of land,
you could basically get two harvests rather than one.
So, two sets of calories rather than one.
It may release some of the community to not farm at all
and occupy roles within cities, or as craftspeople, or leaders.
If we look at the second millennium BC,
what we certainly see
is at the same time as multi-cropping is there,
then there are a lot of the community,
are not farmers, but instead metalworkers,
or kings, or priests, or something else.
And so, what we see evidence of
is multi-cropping allows a non-farming sector within the community.
So, what we have is a small, not very impressive-looking seed,
but because of the way it grows and because of its biology,
it has a massive impact
in changing the productivity
of the heartlands of western farming.
So, those western farmlands could, in the same area,
produce two crops rather than one,
and that enabled a whole series of things
that we associate with the word "civilization."
Finding Chinese millet in Europe and European wheat and barley in China
suggests that long before the Silk Road,
East and West were introducing one another to new foods,
and that the movement of crops
may have helped create the earliest East-West trade routes.
And in the deserts of far western China,
archaeologists have discovered another way
living organisms could travel the Silk Road.
This is Xuanquanzhi relay station,
an archaeological site near the town of Dunhuang,
a major stopping point on the Silk Road.
2,000 years ago, during the Han dynasty,
Xuanquanzhi was a very busy and very cosmopolitan place.
According to records written on bamboo and wood
unearthed from Xuanquanzhi
Xuanquanzhi was not only serving as a relay station,
but also, as a place to receive caravans and government officials.
During the Han Dinasty, the major officials received here
included the king of Kholan Kingdom from the Western Regions,
the king of the Wusun, also called the Issedones
and the king of the Kangu, also called the Sogdians.
At most, the number of received guests would be over 1000.
Therefore, this place was filled up with a mixture of people from all regions.
It would be used for merchants,
and it would also be used for government business.
People could travel long distances
knowing that there was somewhere they could stay
be refreshed and recover, change their horses,
and then move on to the next relay station.
The wonderful thing about the Xuanquanzhi trading post
was that it's in a part of the country that is not built up now,
and the environment, very, very dry and often very cold in the winter,
means that things are preserved there very well.
So, a lot of the things — inside that trading post —
have survived instead of decomposing.
Excavators were especially excited to find something
that perhaps only an archaeologist could love:
the 2,000-year-old equivalent of toilet paper.
In China, they wrote back, in the Han dynasty times,
how they would have a stick with cloth wrapped on the end
for people to wipe themselves with.
There were quite a few of these sticks thrown into the latrine
as if people discarded them in there when they'd finished.
These sticks have been found at some other excavations in China as well
but what's great about this relay station
is we still have the cloth wrapped on the end
and we still have the human feces on.
So, we scraped off the dried feces from the cloth
and took them to the lab.
We found four different species of parasite
in those who used this latrine.
Two of the species are spread by feces
contaminating your food or your hands or your drink:
roundworm and whipworm.
Another species was a kind of tapeworm
that they probably acquired by eating raw or undercooked pork.
And then, we found the really exciting find,
which was the Chinese liver fluke.
This is a small flatworm
that lives in eastern and southern China and in Korea.
It can only survive in marshy, wet places.
But here, we found it 1500 kilometers away from anywhere that has it in modern times.
So, it wasn't what we expected to find.
It was brilliant that we could find it on the Silk Road.
The liver fluke requires a lifecycle
where it passes through freshwater snails,
and through small fish and then, bigger fish.
If you cook the fish, then you don't get the liver fluke.
But if you eat the fish raw, then it hatches out in your stomach,
migrates through your body, crawls into the liver,
and then develops there.
There was no way that people in the area of this relay station
could have caught it in that particular area
because it was far too dry.
There were no lakes.
There were no freshwater snails and fish for them to infect.
The discovery of the liver fluke is of great importance.
It indicates that the caravans or government servants
brought their excrement, as well as diseases, here,
over thousands of kilometres of travel to this place, Xuanquan station.
With state-of-the-art overseas analysis,
we are comparing it with similar evidence originating in Europe,
to figure out whether the liver was spread
from China's eastern coastal area to Europe
or if it was spread from Europe to China
or if the disease spread between these two areas.
We are doing some further research.
The finds at Xuanquanzhi have shown
that humans could carry diseases long distances along the Silk Road.
Another discovery has revealed what could happen when they did.
In 2009, German scientists began investigating a puzzling discovery
in the Bavarian town of Aschheim.
About 20 years ago a graveyard was found which contained more than 400 individuals.
We dated it back to a period from around the 5th century to the 7th century.
It was exciting for us that there were a lot of graves
that contained more than one person
around 20 graves where 2 to 5 people were buried.
Aschheim looked like any other cemetery
that we would expect to find here
except for these multiple burials.
These people were buried together in one grave and that made us curious.
And we asked ourselves why exactly
these people were buried together in one grave
The Aschheim mass burial was an archaeological enigma,
but there was one crucial clue.
The bodies had been buried during the 6th century CE.
In the 6th century, a terrifying illness called the Plague of Justinian
ravaged the Eastern Roman Empire.
It killed 30 to 50 million people in Europe, Asia, and Africa,
nearly half of all the people on Earth.
Historians tell us that thousands of people were lying on the street
and that tens of thousands
were dying at the peak of the plague,
so many that they could not be buried.
The corpses were thrown into watchtowers and sealed inside
because no one knew what to do with them.
So, this epidemic is quite comparable to the Black Death.
We asked ourselves what the multiple burials were about
and chose to screen for plague pathogen.
The Justinian plague arrived in Constantinople on ships from Egypt,
but what the disease was
and where it came from remained unknown.
The team investigating Aschheim's mass burial
hoped its bones might reveal the answer.
We tested more than 20 individuals, analyzing their DNA
and found small fragments of plague DNA in four individuals,
Just on this young woman, on one young woman,
there was enough DNA to be able to analyze it really well.
And that is this individual.
This woman has quite open skull sutures.
This is how we know that she died quite young.
We would estimate this individual's age at approximately early 20s.
In this case, we would see
if we could find the plague pathogen
and to do that we prefer to use teeth
like these teeth here.
Teeth with a lot of root
because the root contains DNA
and because it is embedded in the jaw.
It is well protected there, and the DNA is preserved there best.
And then we took this tooth to the laboratory
to extract and examine the DNA with chemical methods.
And when we had looked at the DNA of this individual
we determined that we had actually found Yersini pestis,
the plague pathogen, the Black Death's.
What we could also determine
is that this pathogen did not develop in Europe but evolved in Asia
Studies like the Aschheim DNA project
have concluded that 800 years before the Black Death,
a plague travelled the Silk Road
and that centuries later, the Black Death followed it in its path.
Most scholars now agree
that the Black Death originated in central Asia
and that it first reached Europe
on Italian merchant ships returning from the East.
The Black Death killed with incredible speed.
Victims had only a week to a few hours to live.
Entire towns and monasteries were wiped out,
and no one knew what to do.
It may have spread about five miles a day,
which is a lot faster than a lot of modern bubonic plague outbreaks.
Whether it was because of the rate at which people fled from it
that spread it faster than it might otherwise have been.
And it certainly was something
that had a dramatic effect on people in Europe.
They all wrote about it, they were all scared of it.
So, they had some concept of contagion
and the idea that the disease
could be spread from one person to another,
but they didn't know how.
They had no idea about bacteria
or the spread of microorganisms at that stage,
so, they hadn't worked out how a disease was spread.
But they just realized that one person seemed to be able
to spread it to the rest of their family,
so, they realized something must be happening there.
Baffled physicians consulted the works
of ancient authorities like Hippocrates,
who lived four centuries before the birth of Jesus,
and Galen, who lived two centuries after Jesus' death.
Hippocrates and Galen believed that illness was a result
of an imbalance among four so-called humors:
blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.
The theory was that if you had your four humors in balance
— your blood, your phlegm, your black bile and your yellow bile —
then you'd be healthy.
If they came out of balance
or if you had corruption of one of your humors,
then that would make you unwell.
So, the treatments that doctors used
were largely based on their understanding of humoral theory.
So, at the beginning, they tried the normal treatments
of dietary modification and bloodletting and baths and so on,
but they had no effect.
They believed that bad vapors were coming up from the ground,
making people ill, affecting their humors.
They believed that a strong southerly wind was a bad thing
that made a lot of people ill,
that it was a combination of the alignments of the planets,
because they believed in astrology and its effect on your risk of disease.
They really didn't have a structured medical approach to how to deal with it.
It took everyone off guard.
No one knew how to deal with it.
The doctors were effectively powerless.
Some citizens attempted another cure.
Jews in Europe suffered fewer deaths from plague.
That may have been because they were socially isolated
and practiced better hygiene than the general population.
But surviving the Black Death
cost thousands of European Jews their lives.
All across plague-stricken Europe,
the already age-old Christian prejudice against Jews
exploded into murderous hatred.
They believed that people with leprosy or Jewish people
may have actually exacerbated the plague by poisoning people.
So, this is a sign of how panicked and how worried everybody was,
that they were thinking of really quite bizarre kind of interpretations
as to why everybody was becoming sick.
While mobs murdered Jews,
physicians tried to stop the Black Death.
When traditional theories of disease failed,
they resorted to studying the disease itself.
They were desperate to understand what was causing the Black Death,
how it spread, and how to treat it.
Slowly, they found answers.
They tried various treatments, but no medicines had any effect.
But that's why they moved over time
to trying to restrict the contact of people,
burning the clothes of people that had died
rather than giving them to other people.
And they realized that the clothes and spread of people
was an important way they could stop the spread of disease.
So, we have the introduction of concept of quarantine,
where people weren't allowed to move from one area to another
if there was a plague outbreak
and also, that when sailors in ships arrived in a port,
they may have to stay in a quarantined area
for a certain number of days
until they were found to be clear of the disease,
and then they could move inland and actually go into town.
Over time, this new trial and error approach
would spawn a medical revolution.
Some 200 years after the Black Death,
the brilliant physician Andreas Vesalius
published meticulous studies of the human body
that exploded ancient and medieval theories
and gave birth to modern anatomy.
Europe's battle against the Black Death
taught lessons that helped create modern medicine.
And even centuries later,
the Black Death still has much to teach.
So, this is a skull of a man who survived the Black Death
and died in Cambridge in the later part of the 1300s.
We know he survived the Black Death
because we have a radiocarbon date that's shown when he died,
and we know he was a fairly old individual.
One of the things we're doing here
is a project looking at the effect of the bubonic plague
upon the British population, specifically in Cambridge.
And what we're trying to find out
is what are different about people who survived
compared with people who died.
That way, we can work out
how the Black Death really changed the population of Britain
and what our population might have been like
had half of us not died in the mid-1300s.
And to do that, we're looking at the genetics,
the height, the health, and many other aspects of the skeletons
that we find who died before the Black Death
and the ones who died afterwards
so, we can see the effect of this epidemic upon people in Britain.
So, what we're hoping to find out is what is different
about the genes of the people that survived.
Did they somehow have a better resistance
to bubonic plague than other people,
or was it just mere chance
as to who survived and who died?
Those who did survive led better lives
as the greatest horror of their age gave way to a new era.
The Black Death had decimated Europe's workforce.
Desperate for labor, the nobility had to compete for surviving workers
by offering higher wages.
Over the next few centuries,
we see a complete rebalancing in the population.
So, the poor hungry farmers who didn't have enough land
were suddenly in a different position.
The farmers around them had died. 1:25:25
Their income could go up because they could farm much more land.
And so, there was less poverty and famine among the farmers.
Opportunities increased due to the shortage of workers.
Women could now be scribes
and hold other jobs formerly reserved for men.
The European middle class was born.
The fact that we then had fewer people able to do manual labor
means that not only did the price of their labor go up
so, then they had better income.
It also means that there seems to have been a number of inventions
made specifically for labor-saving devices.
We find the introduction of the spinning wheel.
We find horizontal looms.
We find fulling mills.
We had blast furnaces, mechanized tools,
we have three-masted ships
that could hold a lot more cargo with only a small number of more sailors,
so, it's a much more efficient way of trade.
So, over the next 200 years or so,
we see big improvements in mechanization.
And the fact that fewer people around
meant that these things may have been invented
because of the shortage of people following the Black Death.
Newly affluent Europeans
created a bigger market for exotic imported goods.
Especially for one faraway luxury
traded since ancient times along the Silk Road:
Spices.
In the late Middle Ages,
Asian spices like pepper, cinnamon, and cloves
were highly valuable commodities.
In London, dockworkers' bonuses were paid with Indonesian cloves.
In Venice, people bought houses with pepper.
Anyone brave enough to seek out spices
could get very, very rich.
And trading in spices meant travelling the trade routes between East and West.
Venetian merchants traveled those routes
and dominated the spice trade.
Europe had to pay whatever Venice demanded.
Venice became a fabulously wealthy city,
while the rest of Europe grumbled and paid.
Meanwhile, China was also making epic voyages to the spice lands
and developing some of the world's most advanced maritime technology.
During the 13th and 14th centuries,
foreign visitors to China were awed
by the size and sophistication of Chinese vessels.
In the year 1345, the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta
wrote of seeing massive ships that could carry a thousand men,
the only ships big enough
to make the long journey from China to India.
And Marco Polo told of sailing on a Chinese spice trading vessel
in the year 1292 CE.
The experience deeply impressed him.
He claimed the Chinese ship he sailed on
was capable of holding 5,000 to 6,000 baskets of pepper,
a much bigger cargo than the spice ships of his native Venice could hold.
And that his vessel was escorted by smaller ships
that could carry a thousand pepper baskets.
Polo embarked on his journey from the Chinese port of Quanzhou,
a place he described as teeming with hundreds of vessels
from China and from distant lands.
But he didn't report his vessel's exact dimensions,
leaving historians to wonder if he'd exaggerated the ship's size
or even if he'd actually sailed on it.
And then, in 1973,
Chinese archaeologists found a shipwreck in Quanzhou Harbor.
The ship had a capacity of 200 tons
and displacement of over 400 tons.
The collection of excavated relics
revealed that the wrecked ship was carrying a lot of spices
more than 2,000 kilograms of spice,
along with some other things
such as Chinese chess and some exotic goods.
Based on these findings, archaeologists concluded
that this ship was returning from Southeast Asia
The Quanzhou Ship was carrying rare woods from Java and Cambodia,
frankincense from Arabia,
even ambergris from Somalia.
It sank in the year 1277,
just 15 years before Marco Polo visited Quanzhou.
And its design and construction were remarkably advanced for their time,
featuring watertight compartments and other innovations
centuries before Western vessels had them.
The hull was easily damaged
In case of hull damage, if the ship was built
with watertight bulkhead compartments and water channels in its lower hull
the ship would be able to survive the damage.
If the opening was quite small and the water came into the ship
you only needed to close the water channels
near the forward-most and at-most bulkheads
to keep the leak inside one compartment.
It gave the crew enough time
to move the cargo to other cabins and repair the leakage
in the damaged compartment immediately.
In addition, in the stern part of the ship,
we found a rudder hole.
Back in the Five Dynasties, before the Song Dinasty,
our shipbuilders had invented an elevating rudder,
By raising or lowering this rudder,
one could control the swing fluctuation and direction
while operating the ship.
Several hundred years later,
many foreign sailing ships started using this technology.
35 meters long and 10 meters wide,
the Quanzhou ship could have been
one of the smaller vessels that escorted Marco Polo's bigger ship.
And there's also evidence
that very large Chinese trading vessels did exist.
This park in the Chinese city of Nanjing
is built on the remains of a shipyard dating from the 14th century.
When they excavated that shipyard,
archaeologists found two giant rudder posts,
each of them over 10 meters long.
Chinese records speak of giant treasure ships
carrying trade goods on epic journeys to faraway lands.
Commanded by the distinguished admiral Zheng He,
a Chinese armada called the Great Fleet
made seven voyages between the years 1405 and 1433.
From Liujiagang in China's Jiangsu Province,
the fleet sailed on diplomatic missions to southeast Asia,
the great Indian seaport of Calicut, Arabia,
and along Africa's east coast,
forging relationships that linked seaborne and overland trade.
Over 300 ships carrying nearly 30,000 men
sailed on the first of those expeditions.
Chronicles of those voyages claim
that the largest of Zheng He's ships.
were over 130 meters long and over 50 meters wide.
But marine engineers doubt
ships that big would have been seaworthy.
The American clipper ship "Great Republic" launched in 1853,
was 102 meters long and 16 meters wide.
In 1872, her leaking hull sank her in a hurricane.
The "Wyoming," built in 1909, was 110 meters long.
Its extreme length made it structurally unstable in heavy seas.
In 1924, the "Wyoming" sank during a storm.
If Zheng He's treasure ships were as big as Chinese chronicles claim,
they would have been as long and wide as the "Wyoming"
and longer than the "Great Republic."
When we consulted some shipbuilders
they tell that the size of the Treasure Ship
was beyond the maximum capability
that we could possibly make even today.
Therefore, more archaeological discoveries
and stronger evidence are needed to verify the truth
about Zhen He's Treasure Ship
and prove what was written in the ancient literature.
Whatever the size of its ships,
the Great Fleet deeply impressed maritime trading nations
from Indochina to Africa,
China seemed poised to dominate the coveted spice trade.
But in 1433, Admiral Zheng He died.
About the same time,
the Chinese court began losing interest in long-distance voyaging,
and Chinese seafaring entered a long decline.
Scarcely more than 100 years after the Great Fleet's last voyage,
the emperor declared overseas voyaging a crime,
and it wasn't long before east-west trade suffered another blow.
By the middle of the 15th century,
the once-mighty Byzantine Empire was in deep decline.
The Ottoman Turks, descendants of central Asian nomads,
had conquered most of its territory.
The Byzantine emperor ruled only his capital of Constantinople.
In the Spring of 1453,
the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II laid siege to Constantinople.
The city was defended by a mere 7,000 troops.
Mehmed had an army of some 80,000 men,
but Mehmed wasn't sure he would win.
The city's massive walls had withstood sieges for a thousand years.
Protected by those walls,
Constantinople's defenders held out for weeks.
But Mehmed didn't just have an army.
He had a mega-weapon:
a bronze cannon nearly 10 meters long
with a barrel nearly a meter in diameter and 20 centimeters thick.
It's said it could hurl a 450-kilogramstone cannonball
more than 1 1/2 kilometers.
This behemoth and nearly 70 smaller cannon
bombarded Constantinople's walls day and night,
damaging them so badly
that the Turks succeeded in taking the city.
The fall of Constantinople was a devastating blow to Europe.
Constantinople had been one of Christendom's oldest and holiest cities.
Now it was the capital of a powerful Muslim empire,
renamed Istanbul from a Turkish word meaning "find Islam."
From their new capital of Istanbul,
the Ottomans now controlled access to the Black Sea
and the eastern Mediterranean.
European merchants were cut off from the Silk Road.
For nearly 100 years, Europeans had been growing wealthier
and more and more eager to buy Asia's luxury goods.
Europe needed to find new routes to the East.
And within 50 years of Constantinople's fall, it would.
At the Battle of Crécy and the siege of Constantinople,
an ancient Chinese invention, gunpowder,
had helped transform medieval Europe.
Now, another Chinese invention and European innovation
would help transform the future.
Sometime in China's ancient past,
some unknown person invented something new.
By pounding plants until they fell apart...
then boiling them in water...
and then collecting the boiled plants on a screen and letting them dry...
making what the ancient Chinese called "refuse fiber"...
and what we know today as paper,
an invention so influential
that some believe the Silk Road should have been named for it.
"I would call it the Paper Road,
because I think paper was far more important than silk,
and that, you know silk is a very nice fabric.
It's very strong; it's beautiful, lustrous, and stuff like that.
But it didn't have the impact on world history,
I would argue, that paper did.
The Chinese believe that the court eunuch Cai Lun
invented paper around the year 100 of the Common Era
and started using it for writing then.
Chinese archaeologists, however,
have discovered examples of paper in the deserts of western China
that pre-date this by several centuries,
perhaps three centuries or even more.
The Chinese probably first used the new invention as a wrapping material,
while they kept writing the old-fashioned way,
on strips of bamboo.
You can write so many characters on a strip of bamboo
that's maybe 40 centimeters long, or you know, 12 inches.
The problem is, if you want to write a novel, for example,
or a long historical text,
you need to have a whole pile of those bamboo strips
and keep them together in order.
So, that becomes heavy.
Paper, which is made from plant materials, from the cellulose in plants,
can be made anywhere that plants grow.
So, you can make it virtually anywhere in the world,
out of virtually anything.
By the early centuries of the Common Era,
China was using paper in all the ways we do now,
even as facial tissue and toilet paper.
And it wasn't long before it traveled West along the Silk Road.
A journey that began as a pilgrimage.
The transformation of paper into a writing material
came just at the time that Buddhism was introduced to China.
Buddhists of China were interested
in finding the original writings about the Buddha
and would travel to India to collect them.
And so, it's thought
that the Chinese Buddhist monks and missionaries
brought knowledge of paper and papermaking
with them to India
to collect these Buddhist scriptures
and brought them back to China.
Chinese Buddhists travelled to India along the Silk Road,
detouring around the Himalayas through China's western desert
and turning the Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang
into a magnificent Buddhist library.
In a desert without plants,
Dunhuang monks made paper from rope and rags
and copied thousands of Buddhist texts they'd brought from India.
Thanks to Chinese Buddhism
and to paper's obvious usefulness for keeping commercial accounts,
papermaking began to spread throughout Asia.
As the Chinese then disseminated Buddhism throughout East Asia,
they took knowledge of paper and papermaking
to such places as Korea, Japan, Vietnam.
We know that this is certainly
before the time of the Muslim conquest of Central Asia,
which occurred around the year 700.
In the eighth century CE,
Arab armies fighting in the name of a new religion, Islam,
thrust deep into Central Asia and clashed with Chinese forces.
During the same century,
the Arab world began making its own paper,
something that's traditionally been explained
with a story about an iconic victory of Arabs over Chinese.
The Battle of Talas was a battle that took place
between Muslim forces and Chinese forces,
in central Asia in 751.
According to the historian Atha Al Abi
who lived something like 250 years after the event,
he says that at this battle,
Chinese papermakers were captured
and that is how Muslims learned about papermaking.
It seems to me that this is a sort of nice
but not terribly believable story.
Why would papermakers have been in the Chinese army?
It's not as if, when you needed a sheet of paper, then you said,
"Please, make me a sheet of paper."
It's more likely that Arabs learned about paper
by trading along the Silk Road
and recognized its immense practical value.
Middle Easterners could write on Egyptian papyrus,
but they had to buy papyrus from Egypt.
Paper they could make themselves.
By the end of the eighth century,
Arab papermaking was well underway.
The break-out moment for paper was when Muslim bureaucracy encountered it.
Those bureaucrats ran the Abbasid Caliphate,
founded around 750 CE.
From their capital in Baghdad,
the Abbasids ruled the greatest empire of its day.
The administrators of the empire had responsibility to keep records
about who was paid what, who owed what,
who owned what, who had to do what.
Less than a century of Muslims first encountering it in central Asia,
they were already making it in the capital of the empire.
And they quickly began using paper for more than keeping records.
In eighth-century Baghdad and across the Arab world,
the availability of cheap paper
made possible one of humanity's greatest literary eras.
Baghdad becomes a center of learning
where books are written,
books are translated from other languages.
People wrote books on every possible subject,
not only on words in the traditions of the Prophet,
but also, cookbooks, popular literature, science, astronomy, geography,
translations of Greek books on mathematics, all sorts of subjects.
And this explosion of learning has long been known,
but it's never been appreciated
that it was based on the availability of paper.
During the Middle Ages,
an intellectual Golden Age flowered in Arab Spain.
Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars
collaborated to translate, teach, and preserve
great works of science, mathematics, and philosophy.
One story about the library of the Cordovan Caliphate in Spain
in the year 960 or 970 or something like that
says that there were 400,000 books in the royal library.
Now, that probably is an exaggeration.
So, let's take a zero off it and say that there were 40,000 books,
but that is still more than ten times the number of books
that was in the largest university library in Europe,
several centuries later.
Because libraries in Europe were all on parchment
and the libraries in the Muslim world were on paper.
Spain was probably where Europeans first encountered paper.
But Italian merchants were also discovering it
through long-distance trade.
This is a time when Christian merchants from Europe,
from such cities as Pisa and Genoa, Venice,
are travelling to the cities of the Muslim world
such as Cairo and Damascus
in search of exotic items,
goods like spices and silks,
and they undoubtedly encountered paper.
Our first European use of paper would've been by merchants
who had seen Muslims using this stuff
and must have brought it back.
But at first, many Europeans were suspicious of paper.
It seemed so flimsy compared with parchments made from animal skins.
The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, for example, was familiar with paper
but didn't think much of its qualities for preservation
or didn't know how long it would last,
so, he ordered all documents that had previously been copied on paper
to be recopied onto parchment.
Similarly, the Abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable,
knew about paper but said,
"Oh, it was really disgusting that they made this stuff
"from vile materials rather than the pure reeds of the riverbed,"
— meaning papyrus —
"or the skins of pure animals."
And he was worried that paper could be made
from dirty or unclean things.
But Europe's growing middle class
was not concerned with paper's cleanliness.
A single parchment book needed 200 animal skins and cost a fortune.
And as it happened, geography had given Europeans the edge
in mass-producing paper.
The rivers in the Middle East tended not to flow fast enough
to create enough water power,
whereas the greater variability in European terrain
meant that you could harness the water power more efficiently
to make more pulp more quickly.
Europeans also had a ready supply of linen rags.
In the late Middle Ages,
a new way of processing linen had been developed
using something called the flax breaker,
which meant that there was a lot more linen being made from flax
and made into people's underwear.
Linen underwear was lot more comfortable than woolen underwear
because it didn't scratch,
and so, linen became very, very popular
and became the source of rags for papermaking.
By the late Middle Ages, Italian hill towns
like Fabriano and Amalfi
had become Europe's leading paper manufacturers
shipping tons of paper to businessmen throughout Europe.
And this mass production of cheap paper
was changing Europe in other profound ways.
One of the most interesting documents that I've seen,
or seen photographs of,
is a poem by Petrarch, the Italian poet.
It's on paper and it is crossed out.
He wrote out the poem and then he changed his mind
and he put in a better word.
So, he was able to compose, in effect, on paper,
as opposed to composing it in his mind,
repeating it over and over again until he got it perfect
and then putting down a fair copy on the final expensive material.
This is something you wouldn't do on parchment
because it was too expensive.
You'd have to scrape it off.
Paper allowed all sorts of new ways of doing things.
It seems to me that it's no accident
that the art of drawing really develops in the 15th century in Italy.
Paper allowed an artist to actually do a drawing
and work out an idea in front of his eyes
and preserve it for later use, or to look at it and say,
"I'll change this; I'll change that."
And save it and make a copy of the drawing.
And we know that Michelangelo, for example,
did drawings of his drawings
or did drawings of other people's drawings.
This wouldn't have been possible with parchment
because it was too expensive to waste in this way.
Meanwhile, in Asia, the country that had given paper to the world
had developed a technology that had turned book production
from a laborious job for scribes into a standardized process:
Printing.
In the ninth century CE, the time of the Tang Dynasty,
Chinese printers were printing book pages carved from a single block of wood.
The world's oldest printed book
is this Chinese copy of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra
printed in the year 868 CE
Some 400 years later, around 1300,
Asian woodblock printing had traveled the Silk Road to the West.
But by then, China had invented a more efficient way of printing.
Instead of carving a single wooden block into a book page,
printers engraved pieces of clay with individual Chinese characters,
baked the clay letters to harden them,
and then arranged them in a frame to create a book page.
The earliest known use of moveable type.
And then, in the year 1440,
Johannes Gutenberg,
a goldsmith in the German city of Mainz,
came up with a new way of printing.
Gutenberg began with a screw press,
a wooden screw that pushed a plate down on a flat surface
invented by the Romans to make wine
and used in Gutenberg's time to make woodblock prints.
He made his own moveable type
by punching letters out of metal
and casting them using a hand mold he'd invented himself.
He devised a system to quickly composing lines of type in trays.
And he invented a new oil-based printing ink
that transferred easily to metal type.
Gutenberg's new printing process
was much faster and more efficient than Asian printing techniques.
But its biggest advantage may simply have been this:
The Latin alphabet.
In Chinese you have many characters,
and so, you have to have like 6,000 individual characters
in order to print something.
In Europe, where you have the Latin alphabet
with individual letters that are not connected to each other
and you only have 26 of them
and you have upper case and lower case, capital letters and small letters,
you don't really need that many to write out a text.
If ever a new technology re-wrote human History,
it was Gutenberg's printing press.
Within a few years of Gutenberg's first printing run,
millions of Europeans were reading the Bible
and other best-selling books translated into their own languages,
something we take for granted,
but in 15th-century Europe, it was revolutionary.
Working together, paper and the printing press
had achieved something never done before.
They had democratized knowledge.
I have to say that if Gutenberg had not invented the letterpress,
then someone else would have presumably invented it.
because at that time, there was an enormous demand for written texts.
For thousands of years, it had been enough
for monks to copy manuscripts in monasteries by hand.
But this system was so to speak a one-way road.
The pope could distribute his information
but those that were on the bottom
could not distribute their information to the top
In all of Europe, a new class had established itself
which were the merchants, bourgeoisie that was newly arising
They created a whole new market
where the written word was in very high demand
Europe's new demand for books
and its new ability to mass-produce books to meet that demand
would soon have enormous consequences.
In Germany, a firebrand monk named Martin Luther
wrote a list of 95 proposals
for reforming what Luther denounced
as the corrupt practices of the Catholic Church.
Thanks to paper and the printing press,
his ideas spread like wildfire across Germany and Switzerland.
And so, began the Protestant Reformation,
a spiritual revolt that ended Catholicism's thousand-year monopoly
of the European soul.
And some other best-selling books
helped an Italian living in Spain realize his dream.
His name was Cristobal Colon,
and he was deeply disturbed that the holy cities of Christendom
had fallen under the rule of the Ottoman Turks.
Colon drew up plans for a new Crusade to liberate Jerusalem.
To fund it, he decided to travel to Asia
to trade for spices and other luxury goods
he could sell for a large profit back home.
But the Ottoman Empire had blocked Europeans from the Silk Road.
Colon needed to find a new route to Asia.
His deep study of two books,
"The Travels of Marco Polo"
and the ancient Greek author Ptolemy's "Geography,"
convinced him that he could find Asia
by sailing West across the Atlantic.
And when he landed in the Americas in 1492,
Colon, known to history as Christopher Columbus,
was sure he'd found it.
In fact, it wouldn't be until 1498 that the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama
rounded Africa's Cape of Good Hope and sailed east to India,
discovering the true sea route to Asia.
But the new world Columbus had given Spain proved to have riches of its own.
By the middle of the 16th century,
the Portuguese had established good trading relations
with China in Guangzhou and Macau.
And Spain's American colonies were sending so much silver home
that there was hardly any room to store it.
Spain was sending it on to northern Europe,
especially the Netherlands, as payment for trade goods.
Their pockets bursting with American silver,
Europeans became addicted to two Asian luxuries.
One was porcelain, an extraordinary ceramic
made by firing a soft white clay called kaolin
at very high temperatures, well over 1,000 degrees Celsius.
China had been making porcelain for export
and trading it throughout Asia and the Middle East
since at least the ninth century CE
In the 17th century, the Dutch captured two Portuguese ships filled with porcelain
and held a giant porcelain auction.
It was the beginning of Europe's 300-year obsession with Chinese ceramics
or, as they became known in Europe and America, "fine China."
It was a status symbol for the West,
and they had never seen anything like that before.
But also, they certainly didn't know how it was made.
Porcelain imports were indispensable
to consuming another Chinese trade good craved by Europeans:
Tea.
Like porcelain, tea had been a profitable Chinese export
since at least the ninth century
to the Middle East but not to Europe.
The Portuguese began trading for it in the 16th century.
In 1657, a London merchant sold the first tea in Britain.
By the year 1700, tea-drinking had become a British obsession
heavily promoted by the British East India Company,
which traded British textiles to China
and needed a profitable luxury good to bring back to Britain.
And as Chinese tea began moving West to Europe,
Europeans began trading exotic new foods to China.
In the 17th century, dozens of never-before seen food crops
from the Americas
— potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn,
peanuts, pineapples, chilies, and tomatoes —
began appearing in Chinese markets.
Some of these new foods offered more than just the appeal of the exotic.
Corn, potatoes, and sweet potatoes
grew in harsh New World environments
like the South American Andes.
Chinese farmers soon discovered these hardy crops
would survive the frequent droughts that wiped out many native crops
starving large numbers of Chinese.
It's no coincidence that in the 17th century,
after the introduction of drought-resistant crops,
China's population began to grow
and kept growing until China became the world's most populous nation.
And the new sea routes brought even more to China from the West.
An Italian named Matteo Ricci arrived in China in 1582
and spent the rest of his life there.
Ricci was a Catholic missionary,
and his mission to China produced
one of history's most enlightened meetings of minds.
Ricci learned to speak, read, and write Chinese,
and formed deep friendships with Chinese scholars.
One of Matteo Ricci's closest collaborators
and first converts to Catholicism
was the mathematician Xu Guangqi.
My ancestor Xu Guangqi,
who is known in Vatican history as Paul Hsu,
met him around the time when he first came to China.
And in 1603, my ancestor converted to Roman Catholicism.
Working together, Matteo Ricci and Xu Guangqi
translated works from the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid
and other classics of Western science and mathematics into Chinese.
They also translated Confucian writings into Latin.
Ricci wrote to his superiors in Europe,
asking them to send more missionaries to China,
but only their smartest men.
In China, he wrote,
"We are dealing with a people both intelligent and learned."
Xu Guangqi himself was an astronomer,
a highly accomplished astronomer and a mathematician.
But the introduction of Western science
opened his eyes to a different way of thinking,
a different way of approaching natural phenomena.
Matteo Ricci was a Jesuit, a member of the Society of Jesus,
a new Catholic order
founded on the principles of the European Renaissance.
Jesuit priests were trained in science and mathematics
as well as in theology.
As missionaries, they respected other cultures
and worked to integrate Christianity with non-Christian beliefs.
From the 16th until the 19th century, nearly a thousand Jesuits worked in China
teaching everything from engineering to mathematics, to geography
and sending back translated classics of Chinese learning to Europe,
giving Europe its first in-depth knowledge of Chinese civilization
and China its first in-depth knowledge of the West.
Chinese and Europeans became more and more fascinated
with each other's civilizations.
King Louis XIV of France sent French Jesuits to the mission in China.
And Chinese emperors appointed Jesuits to important government positions.
For more than 100 years,
Jesuit astronomers directed the Imperial Astronomical Bureau.
One of them, the German Johann Adam Schall von Bell,
helped create a new Chinese calendar
that predicted solar and lunar eclipses with more accuracy.
He also introduced his Chinese colleagues
to a new European invention, the telescope.
The Belgian priest Ferdinand Verbiest built an aqueduct,
made European-style cannons for the army,
and built a steam-powered vehicle for the emperor
considered by some to be the world's earliest automobile.
In 1674, Verbiest presented the emperor with a new map of the world.
The collaborative product of European and Chinese knowledge,
it was more than just a map.
It was an expression of a new worldview.
A worldview based on science, exploration, and confidence in the human ability
to discover, to invent, and to create a better world.
A worldview that saw the world as one.
Arguably the most famous scholar of that age is Voltaire.
And in his essay "Sur le Moeurs"
which was first published in 1756,
he argued that China was the paragon
of Enlighted monarchy ruled by intellectuals.
It challenges the fundamental notion
that the Christian European world
was the beginning and the center of civilization.
China, in Voltaire's mind,
was a civilization ruled by reason
and ruled by men promoted through education.,
through virtue,
and through their scholarly accomplishments,
their merits, not by hereditary rights.
In Voltaire's time, Europeans were fighting their hereditary kings
for the right to rule themselves.
By 1800, political revolutions in Britain, America, and France
had ended centuries of absolute monarchy.
New technologies like the mechanical loom and the steam engine
and the rise of industrial capitalism
were connecting
the far corners of the world.
And an ancient Chinese invention that had spread westward centuries earlier
was playing a critical role.
Gunpowder had made modern warfare possible.
And in mineral-rich areas like France's Vosges Mountains,
it was helping in a different way to create the modern world.
At the beginning of the 17th century,
these mountains were honeycombed with mines
and crowded with miners from all over Europe
chasing rumors of riches underground.
If they heard that money can be made in a place
they would go there and have a look.
And in the Vosges, we talked about "silver rush" in the 16th century.
The gold rush happened in the US during the 19th century
and in Europe was the "silver rush" in the Vosges in the 16th century
In the accounting books of the Thillot Mine,
archaeologists discovered an entry from the year 1617
recording the purchase of gunpowder to do something revolutionary
— blast a mine tunnel from the living rock
So, this section is quite extraordinary
because this is where we can see the first use of the black power in mines.
with these large holes here on the wall
that have been shaped, at an interval of about 30-40 cm,
with the use of explosives.
We are probably in the 1620's
and this is a new technique which used new tools,
obviously, a process that had to be invented
since there was none prior to this.
This technique has imprinted the rock, and the marks from the tools are distinct,
This is a tool that has just been found during excavations
over the past few weeks.
It is this one, a curette, a specific tool with a spoon-like shape on one side,
and open on the other side like the eye of a needle,
inside which we can insert a cloth, a rag.
After the hole is drilled with a drill bit,
the role of this tool is to progressively evacuate the dirt from the hole
and to clean the hole
Then, the other end is used to dry the hole
before the powder is introduced,
since the powder doesn't go well with humidity.
This tool was still being used in the same way
during the 18th and 19th centuries
Another iron tool found recently is this piece
from a steel shaft called a pin,
a device which guides the fuse
by taking one end of the fuse
and sliding it along a dowel
all the way to the gunpowder
Since we cannot slide a limp fuse
over such a length on a piece of wood, inside a hole,
we have to guide it.
So, to guide the fuse
we use this tool, like this.
So, here we have the essential tools
that demonstrate the utilization of gunpowder
in the early 17th century.
By the beginning of the 19th century,
gunpowder was helping European mining evolve
from laborious hand digging
to a modern enterprise,
supplying Europe's growing industrial economy.
And across the Atlantic,
it was about to help a new nation unlock its vast economic potential.
On July 4, 1817,
the United States of America's 41st birthday,
crews in New York State began digging the Erie Canal,
a nearly 600-kilometre shipping channel
designed to connect the Great Lakes
with the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean,
so, towns and farms on America's frontier
could ship and sell their products worldwide.
Most of the canal route lay in flat country,
and the canal builders had little trouble digging through soft soil.
But 50 kilometers from Lake Erie,
the landscape suddenly changed.
By 1824, they got here, to Lockport.
And what they encountered was a solid rock ledge
of a very hard rock called Lockport Dolomite.
10 or 12 miles from here, there was more hard rock excavation
than anywhere else in the canal system put together.
This is the same rock that forms the lip of Niagara Falls.
It's as if they were climbing the face of Niagara Falls
in order to get canal boats past here
and onto Lake Erie and the upper Great Lakes.
Lifting canal boats from Lockport to the level of Lake Erie
meant raising them 15 meters high.
The only way to do that
was by building a series of locks.
But cutting those locks through dolomite with picks and shovels
would have been next to impossible.
You can chip away with chisels and picks,
but it would've taken years and years and years to whittle down,
to hew your way down through this rock.
Without explosives, they weren't going any further.
They weren't going toreach their ultimate goal of Lake Erie;
they weren't going to be able
to open the Great Lakes to maritime commerce.
They needed some way to move massive quantities of rock.
Using gunpowder instead of pick and shovel,
the canal builders excavated the lock chambers in two years.
But gunpowder's work was just the beginning.
As soon as the canal diggers reached the height of Lake Erie,
they had to lower the channel below it
so, the lake would flow into the canal and keep it full of water.
Behind me you're looking at the final challenge
in Erie Canal construction.
It's not terribly exciting looking.
It's not like the locks.
But this, cutting this slot,
the Deep Cut through four miles of rock
was the last major challenge
before the canal builders could get to Lake Erie
and the one that took them more than a year to accomplish.
The Deep Cut required them to cut a vertical slot through rock,
something they hadn't encountered anywhere else
on the entire canal construction project.
They probably used more gunpowder, more explosives
in these four or five miles
than they used in the rest of the canal put together.
Rock went all over the place.
There are lots of stories about anything
from a pebble to a boulder raining down on the construction camp,
this hail of rock every time they set off a charge.
And the blasting went on day and night.
Construction workers were killed in blasting.
There were residents of the city who were killed,
There are newspaper accounts of women being killed by falling rock
while they were simply minding their business
walking from one house to another.
By the end of 1825, the Deep Cut was finished
and the Erie Canal was officially open for business.
Before roads and railroads had penetrated the North American wilderness,
the Erie Canal made possible
the westward economic expansion of the young United States.
And the digging of the Erie Canal had another enormous consequence.
It would play a key role in transforming the American seaport
at its eastern end into the modern world's greatest city.
The Erie Canal vaulted New York City
from being one of several Atlantic ports
competing with Philadelphia,
Baltimore, and Boston
to the head of the pack.
New York became a world leader in maritime commerce,
and all the other business activities that go along with maritime commerce,
things like insurance and financing and the grain exchange,
that all happened in New York
because the Erie Canal brought the produce
of the interior of a continent to the Atlantic
in New York harbor.
By the 20th century, New York had become the prototype of the megacity.
Spawned and sustained by global trade,
the megacity transcends its national roots
and becomes a world city,
encompassing human diversity.
New York's evolution was the ultimate expression of forces
that have been at work for thousands of years,
set in motion and sustained
by the East-West commerce of the Silk Road.
A path through history
that didn't just link human beings together
but shaped their fates.
The Silk Road was like a ray of light.
It opened our eyes, East and West,
to intangible ideas,
to beautiful things, to beautiful thoughts
Today, the ancient tale of the Silk Road
seems like the story of an exotic past.
But in fact, it's just as much a story of the future.
Two or three times a week,
a train departs from the Chinese city of Yiwu.
It's loaded with Chinese manufactured consumer goods,
and its route takes it across six countries
in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
It takes 18 to 20 days to reach
one of several destinations in Western Europe,
over distances of some 12,000 to 13,000 kilometers.
Loaded up with European manufactured goods,
it returns to China.
The Yiwu Railway is pioneering the return of the Silk Road.
On 14 May 2017,
China hosted a conference in Beijing
to promote its "One Belt, One Road" initiative.
Attending were delegates from around the world,
including the heads of the International Monetary Fund,
the World Bank, and the United Nations
and nearly 30 heads of state.
Known as OBOR — One Belt, One Road —
plans to build a $1 trillion U.S. dollar transport network
that will connect some 60 countries,
2/3 of the world's population
and 1/3 of the world's GDP.
Inspired by the Old Silk Road, it will re-establish
the ancient trade routes overland and by sea.
And it will also create a New Silk Road in space.
On August 1, 2017, China's Tianzhou-1 cargo spacecraft
released the nano-satellite SilkRoad-1 01 CubeSat into orbit.
SilkRoad-1 is a pathfinder
for a constellation of around 30 satellites
operating across a variety of wavelengths.
These satellites will help build
an efficient and reliable satellite navigation system
that will provide mapping and navigation services
and remote sensing technology
to all the cities of Western China
and to other countries along the new Silk Road.
Going into space can offer a superior way of connection for global communication.
The communication's satellite and Earth observation
are both typical examples.
In 2020 we will complete basic construction of the space station.
After that we will start to operate the space station
And we will constantly extend its application as needed.
We hope through our space station
we will be able to promote the development of space for humankind.
And to be a responsible nation in space.
After the space station is launched
I believe more countries will participate in this development
as well as experiments and scientific achievement
All countries can share
in the achievements through this initiative.
advancing the building of a human community
with a shared civilization.
The unique advantage of space
will definitely play a part
in the construction of the Belt and Road Initiative.
For thousands of years,
the movement of goods, people, and inventions across Eurasia
has played a critical role in shaping human destiny.
And it may soon be helping to shape humanity's future.
Transcript by Margarida Mariz (2025)