- In the Story of China we've reached the 10th century, more than 1,000 years since the first emperor united China.

(horse neighing) (dramatic music) After the fall of the Tang dynasty in 907, China was plunged into decades of civil war.

The soldier-poet Wang Renyu witnessed the destruction of his country.

The barbarians have overthrown the Tang Dynasty, he wrote, our cities have been abandoned, our Temple courtyards lie in ruin.

China has entered a truly dark time, but things cannot go on like this forever.

The way surely has not been finally lost, I believe heaven will soon announce a new dynasty.

And in around the year 960, it did.

(dramatic music) (explosion booming) - [Announcer] The Story of China - In the West we see history as the rise and fall of different civilizations.

In China there's one civilization, which has gone through cycles of order and disorder.

And in the Middle Ages, like Europe after the Second World War, the Chinese set out to build a brave new world.

(dramatic music) In the Story of China, we've reached the Song dynasty.

(Chinese music) We're in the city of Kaifeng in the middle of China.

(speaking foreign language) Mu, mushroom.

Mushroom, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

A thousand years ago this was the greatest and most exciting place on Earth.

Its creativity and inventiveness surpassed, and of course preceded, the European Renaissance.

In the Song Renaissance the Chinese set out to make the most enlightened society on earth, the best governance, housing and food, the best education and science.

And this is their story.

Since the great age of the Tang dynasty, China had shrunk dramatically.

After 907 it fragmented into 16 dynasties in a little over 50 years, warlords fighting each other for the empire.

(traditional music) At this point there was no certainty that China would ever be reunited.

(martial chanting and yelling) But as it says in China's famous novel, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, it is a truth universally acknowledged that everything long united will fall apart.

And everything long divided will come back together again.

For the new dynasty, there would be a new capital.

The Song chose the provincial backwater of Kaifeng in the middle of the Yellow River plain, and turned it into the greatest city on earth.

Now it's rebuilding again.

After the struggles of the 20th century, today's Chinese people are fascinated by the spectacle of what their ancestors achieved and want to touch that time again.

And as always in Chinese history, great events were foretold by signs and omens.

(gentle music) Here in Kaifeng the most famous tale tells of the birth of two peasant brothers, who, like Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, became the first emperors of the new dynasty.

Story goes like this: At the time of chaos and war and destruction, after the fall of the Tang dynasty, a man called Chen Duan fled to the sacred mountain Huashan where he lived in a cave and became a hermit.

And he acquired prophetic visionary powers.

And one day he came off the mountain and in the road he met a crowd of refugees and there was a poor man carrying two baskets on a pole on his shoulders.

And when the hermit looked into the basket there were two baby boys, but the hermit saw dragons and he roared out with laughter.

And everybody said, why are you laughing?

And he said, I never expected that the mandate of heaven would come back to earth so quickly.

(speaking foreign language) - [Translator] In this very street two dragons appeared.

And those two dragons were emperors.

(speaking foreign language) Everyone knows about the two dragons of this street.

They both became emperors later, two dragons, two emperors.

(speaking foreign language) - [Translator] Legend says the father carried the boys on a shoulder pole.

(speaking foreign language) They came here as refugees.

Father and mother begged for a living.

The father's pole had a basket at each end, one boy in each basket.

(speaking foreign language) (Michael laughing) And in this way he carried them here.

And why here?

Because Kaifeng was Fu back then, in today's language we say, capital.

(speaking foreign language) If you go to the west end of the street, the dragon's head is still there.

(speaking foreign language) - Ah, that's fantastic.

(speaking foreign language) There's the surviving dragon, the last dragon of Twin Dragon Alley.

Any day now Twin Dragon Alley will be redeveloped and soon only the story will remain.

But the prophesy of the old holy man came true.

(singing in foreign language) In 960 the two brothers triumphed in a civil war and proclaimed a new dynasty, the Song.

And the older brother, Taizou, built the capital here, a vast new metropolis of wood and brick thrown up in a feverish construction boom.

- This is Song building manual, commissioned in the early 12th century.

(gentle music) If you are of a certain social status and if you can afford it you can build your house according to these styles.

- [Michael] So this tells you how to build a city almost, doesn't it?

- Well for a city of over a million people you would need lots of buildings.

- [Michael] Biggest city in the world, perhaps, at that point?

- Oh, yes, definitely at that time.

- [Michael] And to go with the new buildings was a whole new conception of city life.

- Kaifeng was a much more open city, the lifestyle was much more vibrant than the Tang Chang'an.

All sorts of shops, all sorts of restaurants, even fast food, there's mention of fast food.

And there was no curfew, that was very important.

Before this, residents in the city, these urban dwellers were supposed to stay in their own wards after the bell.

But in Kaifeng they were allowed to just flock to the markets and-- - So all the-- - And enjoy their time.

- [Michael] All the pleasures of city life really start to unfold at this time.

- Yes.

- So a new capital, for a new age.

The largest city anywhere on Earth until the 19th century.

And just like today's China the city became a magnet for people flooding in.

In a few years it went from one square mile to 16.

Only a few ancient buildings survive today above ground.

One of them is the famous Iron pagoda, so called because of the metallic sheen of its tiles.

We're out in the northeast corner of the old city here.

The iron pagoda is on a bit of raised ground in this corner.

The emperor had built this artificial mountain called the Hill of Longevity.

Wonderful, these Chinese names, aren't they?

Compared with other great capitals of world history like Rome or Constantinople, little survives from Kaifeng's golden age.

And you can see why when you look below the ground.

Down here is evidence of 20 devastating floods of the Yellow River since the Song dynasty.

This pit is a metaphor for the story of the city.

They've called Kaifeng the city of memory, China's capital of memory.

And in this pit underneath the West Gate you can see why.

That is the Qing dynasty city wall, the 18th- and 19th-century Qing dynasty city wall.

And this smaller brickwork here the Ming dynasty wall, Tudor period, part of it, carries on down.

And the Song dynasty city wall, maybe 20 feet below the floor level here.

It's amazing thought, isn't it?

And the reason why?

That huge deposit of Yellow River mud, which is only a few miles from the city.

These floods have been incredibly destructive all the way through Chinese history, sweeping through the whole city destroying almost everything, even in recent times, 1842 for example.

No wonder then that the city has been memorialized, if you like, not in stone, not in great buildings, but in words and in paintings.

(gentle music) A million people thronged these streets, said a Song poet.

There were restaurants as far as the eye could see.

Everywhere there was music in the air.

(singing in foreign language) What would we give to see that age again?

wrote one citizen.

(singing in foreign language) But we can see the streets of Song Kaifeng today, in China's most famous work of art.

It's a great painting called the Festival on the River.

As historical sources go, this is one of the most fabulous that exists in the world.

It's a scroll, it's nearly 20 feet long.

I'd need to unroll it across the middle of the street to get a real sense of it.

It's a depiction of the greatest city on earth, done by a court painter in about 1120 and it shows the life of the ordinary people.

There's nothing quite like it anywhere before the age of photography.

It gives you the streets, the alleyways, the hutongs, the shops, the taverns and restaurants.

And they're all real places and real people.

Take Mr. Wang, for example.

He lived just down the street from the spice shop opposite a favorite local bar, Shanyang's Licensed Tavern.

Painted in sections from on-the-ground observation, the scroll is a wonderful image of the sheer vitality and the amazing profusion of urban life in Song China.

Here, 400 years before the European Renaissance with its commitment to human values, was a city dedicated to the prosperity and well-being of its people.

A city for the many, not just the few.

Not kings or warriors or the church but the lives of the ordinary people.

(electronic music) It's an image of themselves the Chinese have loved ever since.

So much so that they couldn't resist bringing it back to life.

A journey back to a Golden Age, described by the Song writer Meng Yuanlao.

- [Narrator] They were such happy times.

So many people and an abundance of things in the shops.

The wonderful festivals.

So many sights for the eye to enjoy.

Above all I remember the humane and congenial character of the citizens, always ready to help a stranger.

(people talking) The lamplit nights, the sounds of music from the myriad taverns and wine bars.

But you see then, this was a time of peace.

(speaking foreign language) - [Translator] The Song era was great.

The society was very stable and the country was prosperous.

- [Translator] Yes, the country was well off and peaceful, an absolute picture of prosperity.

- There are many legacies of the Song in today's China.

And one that's become celebrated across the world is Chinese cuisine.

The Song thought that people should be well fed and eating became the great social ritual it is today.

Chinese cooking, of course, is one of the great cuisines of the world and the oldest cuisine in the world.

But the beginnings lie in poor peoples' food.

Here they fed both the well off and the working people of the city.

People had to get used to making the best out of whatever food source they could lay their hands on and to make it palatable.

But by the time of the Song Dynasty, it's, well, the first great restaurant culture of the world.

The Chinese people by then are the best fed people in the world, probably the best fed that had ever been in history, And there's wonderful accounts of the restaurant culture of the time, 70 great restaurants here in Kaifeng.

The waiters rushing from table to table, taking the orders, and rushing back from the hatch with three dishes of food down one arm and 20 bowls down the other.

And never making a mistake, says one contemporary.

And that in turn of course brings you a kind of foodie culture.

They've got cookbooks back in the Song Dynasty.

One of them has been reprinted ever since, the last time in 2004.

(singing in foreign language) Pure recipes from the Mountain House Cook Book.

Oranges stuffed with crabmeat.

Bean curd steamed with hibiscus flowers and each one of these recipes has got delightful notes by the author telling you where he first picked it up.

Take this one, plum blossom noodle cake soup.

I picked up this recipe from an old scholar in the Zimou Mountains, one beautiful snowy night.

And whenever I taste it, that exquisite moment comes flooding back.

(Chinese music) (twangy Chinese music) (traffic roaring) The Mountain House Cookbook was one of thousands of books you could buy in Kaifeng.

Publishing boomed.

From vast imperial encyclopedias to poetry, history, and ritual.

And self-help manuals for the literate man and woman in the street.

The Chinese had invented wood block printing back in the Tang, one of the many great Chinese inventions in the history of civilization.

And now in the Song they devised movable type too, though that never took off here in the same way that it did with us in the West.

- The first mention of this is slightly after 1040 by a person called Bi Sheng, using clay to print with a movable typeset.

So each one of these is a Chinese character and they form part of a page in a frame.

- [Michael] But it wasn't taken up.

- No, no.

- The Chinese made this invention which has proved so useful to the rest of the world but they didn't find it useful, why?

- It has to do with the Chinese characters because there are so many of them.

Say if you look at this page, almost every character is a different one.

Economically it wasn't viable, it wasn't efficient, especially compared to just using a single wood block print.

- [Michael] Too cumbersome for such a vast range of characters?

- [Lik] Yes.

- [Michael] And you can see exactly why when East met West in the 20th century, with the typewriter.

- Each individual metal type is a Chinese character.

You would have to choose the right one, by navigating this, - [Michael] And how many characters have they got for this machine then?

- [Lik] Probably about 2,000.

- [Michael] So how many do you need to negotiate, let's say, a newspaper in modern China then?

- About three or 4,000-- - Three or 4,000.

- [Lik] For the average.

- [Michael] So strangely enough, although this seems very cumbersome to be carving a wood blocks, it's actually much more efficient.

And especially if a book stays in print for centuries as they do in China.

So tell us about the readership in the Song then?

Does reading percolate down into ordinary people?

- Well of course there are the more elite classes who can read and who are expected to read.

But definitely literacy is spreading in the Song.

Even if they weren't able to read themselves, they would be easily able to find someone who can do that for them.

(speaking foreign language) (gentle music) - One of the great things about the Song Dynasty is the attention to what we would call I suppose civic values.

They even publish books on old age.

This, you're not going to believe this, but this is a book about, well it's called How to Help Old People Live Better, Longer and More Fulfilling Lives, and it was written in 1085 and it's gone through editions in every dynasty of China ever since, and this is the latest 2013 printing.

How about that?

Now to care for old people, you have to look at the nature of their whole life.

Everybody has things that they really like.

Things that make them glad.

Books and paintings, music.

There are millions of things that people like.

If a person frequently seeks out the things that they've loved all their life and focuses on their essence and has these things around them, it will give them endless joy and pleasure and their days will be joyful.

(singing in foreign language) And today's citizens still follow the Song's self-help message.

(speaking foreign language) - [Translator] Be happy, have a happy heart.

(speaking foreign language) Don't bother with trivial things, be tolerant of others, but strict with yourself.

(singing in foreign language) Even when old and secure, try to contribute to society.

Keep busy like we do, dancing.

- So dancing is very good, yeah?

(speaking foreign language) So, in its ideas about the good life, the Song went beyond any earlier civilization, even the ancient Greeks.

(singing in foreign language) And in science, the list of their inventions is incredible.

From gunpowder and blast furnaces to the evolution theory.

Like other great epochs of world civilization, from the ancient Greeks to the European Renaissance, China's rulers under the Song, like the Emperor Shenzong, bought into the project to expand all forms of human knowledge.

The most famous scientist came from a village down in Fujian on the South Coast.

Su Song, there he is.

One of the great polymaths of the Song Dynasty and they don't come much more poly than him.

He was an engineer, astronomer, scholar, and poet but he also wrote treatises on mineralogy and zoology and pharmacology.

It's real left-brain, right-brain stuff isn't it?

But their education enabled them to be both artistic and scientific, endlessly creative and endlessly curious.

He reminds you of some of the great figures of the Renaissance in Europe.

I suppose you could say that he's the Chinese Leonardo but to put it more correctly, Leonardo is the Western Su Song.

(gentle music) This is Su Song's pet project: an astronomical clock.

His proud hometown has just rebuilt a working replica.

45 feet high, its mechanism a water clock, driven by an endless chain drive.

And little painted wooden figures marking the days, hours and minutes, like a giant Swiss clock.

(gentle music) Inside the clock, there had to be a clock captain standing like a captain on the bridge of a boat 24 hours a day.

And periodically topping the water level up in the tanks.

There you go.

Wonderful, imagining this in the middle of Kaifeng, ringing out the hours 24 hours a day for the citizens as they go about their business.

It's like the Song dynasty's Big Ben.

(bells tolling) The Song is one of the great ages of world science.

In China then, unlike medieval Europe, there was no church doctrine telling people how to understand the nature of the universe.

Just look at this.

Though there were many religious beliefs as there still are.

See the goddess of mercy, it's a real women's cult here.

Isn't this fantastic, it's a people's temple, this.

The official religions of the empire were Buddhism and Taoism, but religion wasn't an area where the government intruded into people's daily lives.

The key thing for the Song was to foster their Confucian ideas of conformity and loyalty, right through society, and so long as religion did that it was accepted.

(chanting in foreign language) The Song, just like the Tang, had many Muslim and Christian communities, which still survive.

(chanting in foreign language) And in Kaifeng so do the last of the Chinese Jews.

(chanting in foreign language) (shofar reverberating) They came here along the Silk Road from Persia a thousand years ago.

Their synagogue in these alleys closed in 1855, but here today is Chinese Rosh Hashanah.

(praying in foreign language) Under the Song, the population of China doubled.

100 million in the year 1000, it was 200 million by the late 1200s, more than a third of the world's people.

And with a huge urban population, the Chinese invented many games and sports, including what they called kick-ball.

Football was massive in the Song dynasty, a thousand years ago.

And it's massive again in today's China.

(speaking foreign language) So I suppose you could say, as the Chinese would, (speaking foreign language) football's coming home.

(crowd cheering) It wasn't a mass sport of course.

There was no such thing then.

But soccer in the Song was a spectator sport with clubs, rules, and fans.

(dramatic music) The Emperor's not arrived yet.

(cheering in foreign language) (whistle blowing) (speaking foreign language) Oh, whoa!

Different ways of playing the game in the Song dynasty.

In the favorite one, the goals were posts about 10 meters high, with colored net hung between them with a hole through which you had to shoot the ball.

And of course, being China, ethical conduct was vital.

In Song soccer it was play up and play the game.

Abusing the referee was un-Confucian, and professional fouls were unthinkable.

(crowd cheering) (whistle blowing) Well, almost.

And after all, in history, aren't complex team games another mark of a high civilization?

(dramatic music) (people cheering) (whistle blowing) (people cheering) Though not yet the people's sport, football wasn't just for the elite.

China was opening up socially, and that went for government too.

- There was definitely a lot of social mobility going on during the Song.

The social classes were in flux in some sense.

People from all sorts of backgrounds could engage more closely, who were more sensitive towards the social situation.

They became involved in government too.

New schools for learning opened up and academies were established as well that sought to teach the classics and also to foster good character.

- It was the great age of Confucian social values.

And how they set about creating that ethos is startlingly modern.

It's freshers' week here in Henan university in Kaifeng.

The story of universities goes back a long way in China.

Much further back than in the West.

And amazingly, here in Kaifeng in the 11th century there was a national university.

In 1069 the emperor expanded the student body from 1,000 to more than 3,000.

They had financial support and board and lodging.

And the big idea was to draw in students from the provinces, talented youngsters, perhaps even from middling or lower families, to come into the metropolis for the best education.

And the goal, as the emperor put it himself, for the morality of the culture.

As educationalists say today, the ethos is the thing.

For the examinations, the students studied literature, history, and Confucian classics.

The emperor and his advisers were looking for tomorrow's administrators to govern a harmonious Confucian society.

(speaking foreign language) - There was a new class of literati who previously, perhaps, didn't have a chance to sit through the examination system, but now they had.

(speaking foreign language) Confucian teachings were really at the core of these civil examinations.

And because they had such an important role to play in those examinations and that so many people took examinations, it meant that it was a way for Confucian ideas to really permeate into society.

You could say that it was a meritocratic society where excellence and learning was really prized.

(speaking foreign language) - [Michael] Meritocratic, but not universal.

Half of the population were excluded from this educational revolution: women.

But ironically, it's through the writings of a woman that we get one of the best insights into the world of the Song.

These students are studying her work in today's university in Kaifeng.

She's the poet Li Qingzhao.

(speaking foreign language) - [Translator] Li Qingzhao was a curious girl.

She would stand at the gate, looking out and talking to people.

Not proper behavior for an upper-class woman.

But that was the young Li Qingzhao for you.

- She was not only a great poet, she wrote an autobiography and was a brilliant observer of her times.

Her father had encouraged her to write poetry from an early age and attend male poetic gatherings.

And she was already famous, and in print, when she was 17, when she married a student from the university here in Kaifeng.

And they spent a lot of time here in the great old Buddhist temple in the middle of town.

Wandering its courtyards, making rice paper rubbings of its inscriptions.

But recent feminist criticism here in China is giving us another view of her altogether.

The strains within her marriage in a society dominated by men, the ambitions of a brilliant woman to find a voice that was not only interior and personal but public and political.

- She was criticized by some at the time for saying things, for writing poetry.

Women were not supposed to write poetry.

This was, you know, a man thing.

And poetry was one of the major ways of social interaction amongst men.

You would go and drink a cup of wine and you would compose poetry with each other.

You would say two lines of a poem and I would give you the next two lines.

You would create new poetry in that way.

Women could do this, but increasingly there were courtesans who did this, respectable women didn't participate with men doing it.

They still wrote, but we don't have very much surviving.

- [Michael] A lot of women wrote poetry, didn't they?

- [Naomi] A lot of women did write poetry, yes, yes.

- [Michael] Being published is a different matter, perhaps.

- [Naomi] That's right, yes, yes.

- Paradoxical period for women, isn't it, the Song.

You know, so many social advances, women's voice appearing strongly, perhaps for the first time.

And yet, foot binding's starting to become widespread.

- It's very mixed, because women become crucial to this political notion of loyalty, and they have their equal part to play in that.

But at the same time they are also being, their rights that they have previously had, their economic rights, have been taken away from them.

- So women could be highly educated, but to play their part in male-led Confucian society, women were to cultivate loyalty to father, husband and state, to ensure national cohesion.

So wrote the leading conservative, the historian Sima Guang.

But in the late 11th century, right up to the top, the old way of doing things was challenged.

The leading light in the reformers was a man called Wang Anshi, a southerner, who had spent 20 years in local government.

Wang pushed reforms across the board.

Fairer taxes, government loans for the poor.

New degrees in law and science.

Breaking down class barriers in the name of economic efficiency.

With growing threats on its frontiers, the state had an enormous defense budget, and Wang thought a more open society would make the economy work better.

The Confucian classics, the old way of doing things, were put in their place.

They had to have practical application.

And, of course, the old-fashioned Confucian bureaucrats were horrified.

And they took their case to the emperor here in the palace in Kaifeng.

The Emperor favored the reformers, but the conservatives in his council saw root-and-branch reform as potentially destabilizing in uncertain times.

In the winter of 1070, the great conservative opponent of the reforms, Sima Guang, petitioned the emperor.

He said, "We don't need these new laws.

"What we need are good men trained in the old ways.

"Look at the last 1500 years of Chinese history, said Sima Guang, "You'll see "the periods of peace add up to only 300 years, if that.

"This shows how hard it is to create order "and how hard you must work to keep it once you've got it."

And he ended with this: "I fear at the moment that our house "may not be able to shelter our nation "from the rains and the storms that are to come."

(banner snapping) It's one of the great what-ifs of history.

At this point, towards 1100, China was best placed to become the world's first modern society, with the most egalitarian system of government anywhere before modern times.

Why that didn't happen was due to events beyond their control, which in the end would overwhelm them.

The last fifty years of Song China saw climate change and famine, and the incessant drumbeat of foreign armies on the frontiers.

(Chinese music) And now the emperor and the people no longer saw eye to eye.

The harmony was gone.

(bells chiming) (Chinese music) (rain pattering) (bells tolling) One contemporary wrote, the problem was also the wasting of national resources at a critical time.

Public opinion wanted more defense spending, not grand building projects.

Where now are the people of boldness and vision?

(gongs clanging) The achievements of the Song dynasty for 100 years were amazing across every field of human endeavor.

(Chinese music) In 1101 the last great emperor of the united Northern and Southern Song came to the throne, Huizong.

(Chinese music) He was a renaissance prince, surrounded himself with poets and thinkers, he was an accomplished painter.

In his wonderful gardens, he listened to symphonies by Buddhist musicians, but as he plunged deeper into his introverted speculations about sacred kingship, he lost touch with reality.

When much harder choices were needed, choices about military expenditure and defense budgets and deployment of armies, as the barbarian forces gathered on the frontier.

And when the crisis came, as he himself admitted, "I myself was mediocre, "and in the end I failed the nation."

(explosions booming) The Song shared the East Asian land mass with many other states, and in the 1120s Jurchen invaders swept down from the North.

(dramatic music) In 1127 the siege of Kaifeng began.

It's one of the greatest, most poignant tragedies in Chinese history.

Just imagine the scene: Thick snow swirling down from the sky.

On the horizon, the gate towers of the outer city are on fire and many of the houses are burning.

And here inside the walls of the inner city are hundreds of thousands of terrified citizens of Kaifeng still resisting, hopelessly.

The food's run out, the markets are empty.

There are rumors, even, that people are eating human flesh.

And the government now try to buy off the invaders but they've no cards left to play.

When they give gold, the invaders want more.

They want millions of ounces of gold and silver, they want precious silks and fine wines.

They want antiques and temple bells and ritual vessels.

They want the musical instruments played by the imperial orchestra and they want people, they want craftsmen, but especially they want women.

They want the ladies in waiting from the imperial palace, they want the 1,500 female musicians who used to play before the emperor, they want the wives and daughters of the royal family, and the courtiers and the leading citizens.

All to be delivered to their great camps to the north and south of the city.

And of course many of those women committed suicide rather than go.

And so the city which symbolizes the very best that civilization had yet achieved on earth was brought to nothing.

(bell tolling) In a bitter poem on the government's incompetence, Li Qingzhao reflected on the catastrophe.

(speaking foreign language) - [Translator] An age of glory passed like a lightning flash.

The troops of the Northern Barbarians appeared as if they had dropped from heaven.

Tatar horses paraded in front of your banqueting hall and trampled pearls and emeralds into the fragrant dust.

What a waste of time it was, for great artists to carve your name into polished cliffs, the mandate of heaven passed from you but you didn't see.

Times change and power passes, it is the pity of the world.

- So once more the cycles of Chinese history brought suffering and chaos upon the nation.

The emperor, Huizong, and thousands of his courtiers were seized and taken north where they died in captivity.

But his brother fled beyond the reach of the invaders across the Yangtze river.

And vast numbers of refugees followed.

You get a great sense of a Chinese medieval village from here, don't you?

The big difference would be that today the houses are made out of brick and concrete, then, they would have been wooden-framed, wooden-fronted houses like those old ones over there.

And the people here were not scholars and bureaucrats, they were boatmen and dockers and warehouse men.

(gentle music) Among the millions who fled south of the Yangtze River was the poet Li Qingzhao, who wrote about it in the earliest-surviving autobiography by a woman.

At that time, she wrote, those who lived in the west of the Yangtze river fled east, Those in north fled south, those in the hills fled to the cities, those in cities fled to the hills.

And in the end there was no one who was not uprooted.

And I, myself, Li Qingzhao, fled upstream, crossed the river near the rapids and I got to Jinhua.

And there I found a place to live in the house of the Qin family.

And after all the terror and all the hardship, there I found some peace of mind.

(pop music) And so the patient and long-suffering Chinese people set out once more, as they have so often, to rebuild, refusing to give up on the Song dream.

And it was here in the South in the 12th century that Chinese civilization was reborn, in what we call the Southern Song.

(speaking foreign language) - Up to this point the South has been politically, and to some degree, economically, somewhat more peripheral to the north, but now is the moment when that completely changes.

More and more people are settling in the south, more and more commerce and so on is developing in the south, and the economy booms.

China is, in a sense, moving.

It's moving from this very northern orientation, a northern east-west orientation, to a much more compact southeastern orientation that tends to be how we think of China now.

- The site they chose for the new capital was a then-unimportant place called Hangzhou.

Standing on the West Lake, one of China's loveliest spots.

The Chinese have a proverb: in heaven there is paradise, but here on earth there are Suzhou and Hangzhou.

In fact, the story goes Hangzhou was chosen because of the beauty of its landscape.

And here they set out to recreate the lost city of dreams.

There's a wonderful Chinese description from that time, which gives you a sense of the landscape that has enchanted Chinese poets and painters for more than a thousand years.

Like a camera panning along the horizon, from the blue-grey hills, across the tranquil surface of the lake, and there where the landscape flattens, glittering like fish scales, the brightly glazed tiles of a myriad rooftops.

Here, there was every single conceivable amenity of civilization.

(Chinese music) - So in Hangzhou, Song civilization was restored, from the people's culture to practical government.

There were fire stations, hospitals, old people's homes, and even dance pavilions.

(blues music) When the Italian Marco Polo came here in the 13th century, he called it the best city on earth.

There were shops selling beauty products, makeup and face cream, eyeliner, false hair.

And if shopping in Hangzhou hadn't worn you out, you could repair to tea-shops or wine bars or storytelling houses or huge public theaters.

And if that wasn't enough, at the end of the evening you could go to fabulously appointed, exclusive hostess bars where the most famous courtesans of the time would serenade you with beautiful music.

There was even a gay club.

(ravens cawing) (speaking foreign language) But to really understand the remaking of the Song world, you have to leave the glitter of Hangzhou behind.

That's lovely.

Out in the countryside, south of the river, the Southern Song planted hundreds of new towns and villages to supply the capital with food and coal and timber.

And here, at the grassroots, they passed on the cultural ethos of the Song.

Even now in the old county towns, you can meet descendants of the governing class.

(speaking foreign language) - Hello.

- [Michael] God, whoa.

This is Tieshan Town, an Old Song Trading place.

And here in Mr. Xie's crumbling family house, the signboard proudly salutes his ancestors who passed the Song civil service exams.

Hello, hello, hello.

Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello!

Let me just ask you about the sign above, what does that say?

(speaking foreign language) - [Translator] It says Jin Shi, which means the highest degree in the national examinations.

(speaking foreign language) Our family had two Jin Shi at time.

Grandfather and grandson.

This was a great honor, so our family put up this plaque to commemorate it.

We've got good genes in my family.

- [Michael] And despite all the upheavals of the 20th century, the old ideals are still passed on.

Upstairs in the altar room, wooden plaques name the ancestors stretching back a thousand years.

How many ancestors are commemorated here?

(speaking foreign language) - [Translator] There are more than 40 of them.

- Wow, so it's one of the biggest family lineages in China?

- [Translator] Yes, and more than that, we're related to the emperor.

We're sort of, royal family.

(Chinese music) - Oh, so touching.

Across the generations the thread connecting the living with the dead, the Song ethos of virtue, duty, and Confucian morality.

So here in the South, the values of traditional China, handed down from the Han and the Tang dynasties, were preserved.

But the old cycles of Chinese history now returned to haunt them.

(dramatic music) (birds calling) In the 13th century, led by Genghis Khan, the world was turned upside down by the Mongols.

They overran Northern China, creating the most extensive empire in history.

And then they gradually spread their power into the lands of the Southern Song by land and sea, until the last terrible battle.

It was March the 19th, 1279.

(twangy music) Dark day in the story of China.

We're here almost exactly on the anniversary and it was a day just like this, with rain and drizzle.

By the evening you couldn't see the far shore.

The Song commanders had not defended the narrows here, so the Mongol fleet was able to sail through into the lagoon.

And there the Song navy faced them.

They had about 1000 ships lashed together to form a floating fortress.

Their decks protected by wet mud to stop the effects of the fire projectiles from the Mongol catapults.

When the battle began an eyewitness says, the air was full of fiery traces of the Mongol firebombs.

But when the tide rose the Mongols were able to encircle the Song fleet and in the end, the battle was lost and the young emperor was trapped.

And then the emperor's loyal minister Lu Xiu Fu made a famous speech to the little boy: "The affairs of our state have come to this, "but we must not disgrace the nation."

And he took the boy in his arms and he jumped into the sea to commit suicide.

The little boy's pet white parrot began to screech and flap its wings until it overbalanced the cage and fell into the water after its master.

So ended the glory of the Song.

(sea birds calling) The Song Dynasty was one of history's most creative eras, a rival to ancient Athens, medieval Baghdad and Renaissance Italy.

And after the Mongol conquest, China was left in shock.

But Chinese civilization survived.

The cycles of Chinese history, the rise and fall of its dynasties would continue as they always had.

The mandate of heaven was suspended, but it was not lost.

(dramatic music) Coming next in The Story of China, one of the great eras in world history, the Ming dynasty.

This isn't a castle, it's a gate!

It's the time of the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and the Grand Canal.

Absolutely fantastic, isn't it?

And great ocean voyages long before Columbus.

Glorious gardens, and incredible arts and crafts.

The new dynasty are the Ming, the bringers of light.