Dan Snow's History Hit - History of China with Michael Wood

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

Michael Wood joined me on the podcast to talk about his new history of China. He takes a fresh look at Chinese history in the light of the current massive changes inside the country, and how its people and leaders see their place in the world, and its place on the world stage.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We've got history royalty on the podcast today. For the first time, I'm very pleased to say we have Michael Wood. Now here in the UK, he is just OG history broadcaster. He made it popular and cool for historians to walk around in fields wearing flares and cool shirts back in the 70s in the search of awesome historical topics and subjects. I watched him growing up. Everyone watched him growing up. And the thing about Michael Wood is he's not just a very, very gifted broadcaster. He's a brilliant writer.

And he's just written a new history of China, a single volume history of China. It's another just glittering milestone in one of the most exciting public history careers on earth. It was huge. I want to talk to Michael on this podcast about history. This was a live episode. is on earth it was huge i want to talk to michael on this podcast about history this was a live episode once a week we let history hit subscribers join us for a live record of the podcast i steal all their best questions they write them up in the zoom as comments i steal them pass them off as mine so it's everyone wins well i win if you want to join in those live zoom podcasts please go and

subscribe to history hit tv you get many other benefits. You get access to the Netflix for History. A galaxy of history documentaries available on there. New stuff being added all the time. You get to listen to all the backers of the podcast. You get to join the live Zoom chat once a week. We've got Margaret Macmillan coming up this week. All sorts of great people. Some of the world's best historians on

that live weekly podcast. Use the code POD1. That gets you a month for free and your second month is one pound, euro or dollar. And then become a subscriber. Join the revolution. In the meantime, here's Michael Wood. Michael Wood, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Great pleasure to be here.

This latest book, you've written a sort of magisterial, great narrative, sort of almost global history of China, which is one of the most important stories in human history. You mentioned, of course, in it that you've had this great passion for China for a long time. Have you been building this all your life? Is this a life's work? Well, it's a labour of love. I wouldn't say it was a life's work, but long interest in China, going back to school days and university and filming first in the late 80s. But we started work on a series of films for the BBC called The Story of China back in 2013. And since then, we've done, we did those six films.

We did five films about the reform and opening up 40 years ago with eyewitnesses. And we've just done a film on China's greatest poet, Du Fu, with Sir Ian McKellen doing the readings, brilliantly, as you'd expect. And I thought about doing a book when we made the first films, which we shot over 2014 to 15. But it was too big a task, you know. And then when we'd finished it, we got such a great response, even from within China. You know, really, really warm response. You know, even President Xi Jinping was talking about the films in a TV festival.

Can you believe it? You know, talking about how we need to tell the story of China better. And friends said to me, you know, you really should, you know, bring those unfinished chapters out. So the last three or four years,

really, I've been working on it. So it's been an intensive thing. A labour of love, but also to try to write the kind of book that we'd have loved to find. You know, there's a lot of great books on China, a lot of great sinologists, of course, which I'm not. But I wanted to write that kind of book where you get the grand arc of narrative. It's really the way we work in TV, isn't it? You know, within the scope of doing TV programmes, you try to get the grand arc of narrative, but you also try to go close in on those close stories, people's stories, family stories, individual landscapes and stuff like that.

So you're going from the big to the small. So I wrote the kind of book that I really wanted to read, I think. voices. Because, and I'm sure you agree, Dan, that when we're interested in history, and we study history, most of all, you want to touch the people of the past, don't you? And you want to hear their voices. You know, what were they like? How did they feel about the events that swept up their lives? You know, in what way are they like us? In what way are they not? So the voices are everything. So the book's full of voices. And some of the voices are really amazing because they have brand new discoveries. You know, to give you an example, they've just published the letters of Qin dynasty soldiers from the campaigns in which the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, conquered China and

united it, you know, and these have just been published. They're like the Vindolanda tablets from Hadrian's Wall, only much more loquacious as you'd expect with Chinese people. You know, we're just on campaign. We're fighting against this town in Henan. Me and my brother don't know how many of us are going to be killed or taken prisoner or wounded. That's for the future. But mum, if you can go to the market in An anlu i need a really nice shirt and smock made up can you do this or do that if you can't find the right material um send me the money um you know how's auntie so and so is the marriage taking place that's the kind of detail so that's what i've homed in on in the book but being in china is the best thing you You know, I suppose I've, in the last few years, I've done about a dozen visits and I love it.

You know, I remember one of my daughters saying, you know, oh God, the story of China is over, Dad. You must be really pleased you don't have to go back. And I said, I can't wait to go back. I love China and the sociability of the people and affable and sociable and fun. sociability of the people and affable and sociable and fun. And the more you immerse yourself in the real culture, then the more you understand about the things that have been passed down. You know, when I first went in the early 80s, I thought the old cultures of China had been

smashed by Chairman Mao, you know, cultural revolution, all that stuff, that it was gone. You know, the war against old ideas, old customs, old beliefs, whatever Chairman Mao said, had been won by the communists. And now you go back and you, you know, I mean, we went back in 2013 to see old friends and we went to the Qingming Festival, which is the ceremony of the ancestors, which Mao had banned, where you go back to the grave of the ancestral founder

or the oldest member of the family, and you do the rituals for the ancestors. And it's come flooding back, you know. And I remember filming it with the family in 2014, and the daughter, Qin Baoshin's daughter, the head of the family, saying, you know, look, if you're going to come with a film crew, you mustn't let us down. Don't change the schedule.

You've got to come, because if Dad knows that you're coming, he'll really pull all the stops out. And when we arrived on this wooded mountainside outside the little town of Wuxi that April, you know, 400 people turned up from all over China, all bearing the same surname to do the rituals for the ancestors. And this is everywhere now. So when you ask this question about familiarity, the more you did that, the more comfortable you felt in it, the more you understood, the more family stories are told. And that was very enriching. So the book's actually got quite a few families that run through the last thousand years with their family histories,

woodblock printed that they saved from the cultural revolution, you know. And so there are interviews with these people. And in fact, the last three pages of photographs in the book are the photographs of living families doing these things, you know. So in answer to your question, and it's a long answer, yeah, you have to immerse yourself as you do in any period. I mean, you know, the 10th century in England is not like us in many ways, you know. But the more you do, the more you see the continuities of the culture. And of course, the more you understand the humanity of the culture. If I was a historian from Fiji and I was suddenly doing Western European history, I think I might find the relationship between church and state pretty weird, right?

What are the elements of Chinese history that were hardest for you as a Western scholar, do you think, that felt different to how the forces that tend to drive European history have gone? Religion hasn't been the centre of Chinese conception of the world and humanity. It's not that religion isn't important and it's a really rising force now. It's not that Buddhism isn't important, and it's a really rising force now. It's not that Buddhism wasn't a massive cultural influence on China. But the essential core of Chinese belief about humanity and society didn't come from a theocratic system with an overarching deity or any of that. Confucius never talks about the afterlife. And in the West, of course, a theological system. I mean, you know, Tom Holland's just done a really dazzling book, Dominion, about, you know, the way we in the Near Eastern idiosyncrasy, rather than a universal value. It's a cultural civilizational form. And China's not like that at all. And so what I would say to the person from Fiji is that there's a pull in Chinese history from very, very long ago,

probably from the late Bronze Age, but certainly from the 10th century BC onwards, between authoritarian, often ferociously authoritarian governments, where the state is everything. Disorder is to be feared above all else. You know, better a year of tyranny than a day of anarchy, you know, that kind of thing. And on the other side, the conception of virtue being a guiding rule in society, which, of course, Confucius codified.

Confucian values, benevolence, kindness, virtue. The ruler must be good and virtuous, and then the ruler possesses the mandate of heaven. If the ruler is not, the ruler possesses the mandate of heaven if the ruler is not the ruler loses it so the pull between those two big ideas you know what they call the legalist form of government the first emperor you know all about the first emperor you've been and seen the terracotta army that's one side of the story and the other side is is this conception of morality at the heart of civilization chinese civilization had morality at the heart of civilisation. Chinese civilisation had morality at the heart of it,

not given by a god, devised by men. So those things I think are interesting. And I think that absence of religion in that overarching sense is a really interesting thing when you come from a society where religion, as you say, has been so important. What about familiar? When did you feel this is stuff that feels very universal, that feels very familiar, whether it's factions vying for the throne, whether it's regions breaking away and being brought back in under imperial central control? What are the things that remind you of the universality of government, the nexus between cash and

armed forces? What is it? Yes, in one level, you say the story is one of coming together and breaking up. Famous novel, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms begins. The first lines, it is a truth universally acknowledged, we might translate it as, that the empire which is united will fall apart, and the empire that falls apart will come back together again. So that breathing in and out of Chinese civilization is a characteristic. Somebody once said that in the West, our conception of history is the rise and fall of many different civilizations. Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Charlemagne and the Middle Ages and Spain and so on. In China, the conception of history is the rise and fall

and rise again of one civilisation. And I think that's the thing that you observe as you see the curve of Chinese history. You know, we look at China and we think, you know, it's so big and it's so long-lasting. It's the longest-lasting state in continuously existing state in the world, you know. And you imagine, as they did in the 18th

century, looking at China that the Europeans did that it's always been like that there's a kind of monumental stability to it. And actually, it's not like that at all. You know, there've been cataclysmic breaks in Chinese history with unbelievable violence, and how China ever got reunited. By all the normal rules of history, you would have expected it to have ended up like Europe with a load of separate countries which were forever fighting each other. But it didn't. And that, many people would say, is because of that sense of a single hand civilization, hand speech, hand script, and hand culture, as they say. And that was the thing, that even when the country broke apart in times of unbelievable violence and chaos, like under the five dynasties in the 10th century,

violent time east and west, nevertheless, you get not only philosophers, but fighting men and governors and men involved in, men who are involved in the nitty gritty of warfare, all of them still holding that ideal that we must try to attain the united rule again. You know, so that's deep in the DNA of China, really, really deep in the DNA of China. really deep in the DNA of China. And they value it more than, well, you know, as you can see today, as you've seen through the last hundred years, order is above all else. You know, there's a famous moment that Deng Xiaoping's translator was telling me when we were interviewing him a couple of years ago, when Deng had gone to America, and he was talking to Jimmy Carter, and Jimmy Carter started moaning about American politics. And Deng, through the translator, shook his head and said, you think so? You should try ruling China. So order matters above all things. Land a Viking longship on island shores,

scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. How do you answer that central question, the centrifugal force of Han culture? And is it geography? You know, Jared Diamond, guns, gems and steel. Europe's got lots of mountains in it.

China is easier to unify these big internal waterways. Is geography at play here? And if not, then it's the most successful state creation project in the history of the world. For 2,000 years, compared to Europe, which is an off-lamented, fragmented society. I mean, it's extraordinary. It is the most successful state-making project in the world. That sense of the deep unity of the culture is really, really important, I think. Really important. And they worked very hard at it. You know, you see those periods where they developed the greatest civilization that had yet been on Earth, or one of the greatest in the Song Dynasty,

between the 900s and the 1200s, with astounding achievements in culture and science and everything. And then they're conquered by the Mongols, and that's an incredible shock to the Chinese. And when a native dynasty is established again, the Ming, they revert to, they almost overcompensate from the openness of the Song. And they have a really buttoned down, 1644, who were outsiders again. You know, they were Manchus. And from then until 1911, you have movements wanting to restore the Ming is their kind of their word. You know, we want a native dynasty again. So there's forever people kicking against that. But the Manchu rulers included some of the greatest rulers in Chinese history. Kangxi,

for example, reigned for 61 years. They are more Chinese than the Chinese in terms of their rulership projects. You know, they want to rebuild the culture, not fall prey to the corruption and failure of nerve and leadership of the Ming. And, you know, the idea of emperors must work and work and work, burn the midnight oil. They must uphold Han Chinese culture. They produce their aphorisms, which are read out twice a month in every village about how to be a good citizen. President Xi's done something similar

where you can get it on an app now on your mobile phone. But this didactic pushing of what it is to be a good, loyal, obedient citizen. And they did these huge cultural projects, you know, encyclopedias and collected Tang poems. And these are foreigners ruling China, but are wanting to push to everybody this sense of the unity of pan culture. So I think it is the most astounding civilizational project in history. And the communists, of course, kicked Mao, kicked against a lot of these things after 1949 and wanted to ape the Western

model. What did he say at one point, you know, with the Great Leap Forward, we're going to overtake Manchester in five years. And of course, now, since the opening up in 78, 79, the current government really pushing the greatness of the Chinese past and all this stuff, because they realised that the 30 years of communism, which attempted to erase that rich past and create a new society with new people, was a miserable failure, because the Chinese are too loyal to their deep culture of what it means to be Chinese. If I can give you an example, we just did this film about Du Fu, China's greatest poet, with Ian McKellen. And the show went out on the BBC, first of all, and it was immediately pirated in China. And everybody was talking about it. We've got lots of interviews on the papers and all that. And then friends from Beijing phoned up

and said, you're not going to believe this, but the most powerful commission of the Communist Party, the Central Commission for Discipline, who xi jinping's anti-corruption campaign have done an editorial on the film on their website asking why the the campaign against corruption had been a failure and citing these confucian values which were espoused by the poet Dufu. These had not been internalised by the Communist Party cadres. And this is why we have essentially failed in this task we've set ourselves. Brutal punishments, Karen's stick, killing the monkey to catch the, you know, all those phrases they have. But they themselves were citing their greatest poet, the poet who they see as the conscience of the nation, who lived in the 8th century, who enshrined in literature the values of Confucian society.

And they are taking that perspective on their own failures today. These debates are amazingly active in China. And history is a really dynamic force. You know, you can quote a story from the past and you don't have to say anything else. People immediately understand that you're really talking about the government. In the same way, the bit of Chinese history that sinologists seem to think is more important for us to know about

and realise is, of course, the century of humiliation, the burning of one of the great acts of vandalism in world history, the burning of the Summer Palace by the British Indian Army, British Enforce. That has a clear purpose in today's China, doesn't it? So the 19th century history of China is a very hot topic that you'll have experienced and talked about to friends and interviewees out there. Yes, yeah. It's quite interesting, though, because I know Chinese historians now, this narrative of the century of humiliation and China's victimhood, there's a lot of Chinese historians

that are completely fed up with that and really think the government should move on. You know, the Opium Wars happened. And I know one or two Chinese historians who say, look, we've got to view this more creatively. You know, that every dynasty that ran into trouble, that lost the nerve at the top, the great power of good rulership, needed an injection of something new to transform itself or for a new dynasty to take over. And one Chinese historian I know, she says that, you know, the British were the catalyst for today's China. It was the British who were the catalyst.

And it was what happened in the treaty ports like Shanghai, where the Western world really came into China in the 19th century. The banks and the telegraph and international communications and international culture. And so this is not in any way to excuse what happened because it was horrendous what happened. And we can talk about what the motivations were of the British, why they felt they could only act that way. There were critics in China at the time who said we should take this very, very carefully and not be doing what the government's doing.

You know, people have argued against the government's position. But I think it lasted for a long time, that idea of the century of humiliation. But they definitely have now risen away from that. And they are now flexing their muscles. It became apparent fairly soon after Xi came in in 2013 or whenever it was that a new world was being made. I mean, what's interesting about the 19th century reformers, though, was, of course, there were many debates, even before the Opium War, about what the future held for China. And did the old imperial system still serve the state? Were there changes that should be made?

Should some more constitutional form of monarchy be brought in? the catastrophic Taiping War in the 1850s and 60s, worst war of the 19th century, then reform became an absolutely massive consideration for the Chinese. And you get all kinds of trajectories rising at that point. Some of the reformers, of course, were banished, went to Japan to try and fight their cause. But many of these threads arose and into the early 20th century of which communism was one and it maybe it was an accident that the communists won in the end I mean Mao once indicated that he thought that it was but a lot of these trajectories are still active I mean feminism's a really interesting question I'd look at it in the book you know there's some really great Chinese feminist writers from the end of the 1890s, very beginning of after 1900. He Jun's great feminist manifesto of 1907, at the same time that the suffragettes are fighting here,

if you read it on a piece of paper, you couldn't believe that this is written in late imperial China, but it was. So late imperial China was a very, very dynamic, very dynamic place. And the biggest battle of the Chinese people was with their own deep traditions of government, which they felt by now were really past their date and were cannibalising the young, as Lu Xiong put it. My last question is, in terms of historiography changing as well, is I've been all orientalist in this conversation and regard China as this kind of exotic entity that I know a little about. But really, in terms of the scholarship of the second century BC, we're talking more about trade and transmission across the Silk Road and possibly even Greek artisans or Greek trained artisans helping the first emperor with his burial necropolis. Should we think more about China, not as this kind of isolated thing that's quote unquote discovered in the early modern period?

During the course of writing this book, were you seeing that kind of transmission like you get with feminism in the early 20th century? Was that transmission at play throughout the last 2000 years? I think it was. People have this view of China as a kind of closed civilization, don't they? You know, behind the Great Wall. But actually, it's always been open to influences and in certain periods, amazingly so. A while back, I did a Vox Pops with the Chinese public in the Shanghai Expo, where there's a fabulous animation of the Kaifeng Scroll from the 12th century, a giant electronic reproduction of it. And I asked everybody, what's your favourite period of Chinese history?

And I'd say about 90% of the Chinese punters said the Tang dynasty. Now, the Tang starts in the early 600s and ended in 907. And then the Silk Road is really in operation. You know, they go out in the late 600s into Central Asia. And astounding connections are made. I think you can almost make a comparison between with the influence of Chinese on East Asia, in Japan and Korea and Southeast Asia and so on. The spread of Chinese script, Chinese language, Chinese culture, with the influence of, say, Latin Christian civilization in the West in what we used to call the Dark Ages. But they're going out in all directions and people are coming in. They're going out in all directions and people are coming in. There's a stone stele in Xi'an, which records the first formal Christian mission to China in 635. And the emperor hears the story.

He has the Gospels translated. And he says, this seems a creed that's beneficial to the whole of mankind. I have no objection to you preaching the faith in our country, building churches and so on. to the whole of mankind. I have no objection to you preaching the faith in our country, building churches and so on. And I've often thought, you know, if you think about 635 in Anglo-Saxon Winchester, the Chinese embassy wanting to build a kind of Buddhist temple.

It's inconceivable, even in Constantinople. And that's just one of many, many of these kind of missions. You know, Xuanzang, the great traveller who goes all the way, a 16-year journey, all the way through Central Asia down into India, and goes back with 600 manuscripts of the Buddhist scriptures to translate and initiates a phase of real opening up of cultures where hundreds of Buddhist monks and scholars travel across India, Indonesia, by boat, by the Silk Road. It's an amazingly open-minded time, I think. And it's very easy to forget that there are those moments like that in Chinese history,

I think. You know, even in the Qing dynasty in the 17th century, they've got Jesuits, scholars, scientists in the court, Jesuit artists bringing Western artistic ideas to the Qing court, we underestimate their adaptiveness and their willingness to open up at our peril. Michael, we could go on and talk about this all night, but I mustn't. I have to let you go. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. The book is called?

The Story of China. There we go. With a wonderful dragon on the front. You've got to have a dragon, haven't you? The imperial dragon. So Michael, thank you very much and do good luck with the book. Thank you very much. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts,

and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps and basically boosts up the chart, which is good, and then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't want to subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you don't want to buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favour.

Thanks. Thank you.