He was nicknamed "the steel mill" for his capacity to just keep going on and on. He was Mao's lieutenant who was purged twice and rose three times, the final time to the very top. He enabled China's e...
Bruce Lee: Screen Warrior (00:13:58)
He may still be the most famous non-western film star in the world. Yet he made only a handful of films in the early 1970s, none of which are artistic masterpieces. It wasn't his acting that made Bruc...
Mao Zedong: The Man Who Made Modern China (00:13:18)
In the early 1920s, he was just a library assistant at Peking University. Yet by the end of his life, he would rule a fifth of all humanity, turn China into a major power, and destroy the lives of mil...
Factory Girls: Modern Girls, Modern Dreams (00:13:42)
They came out of the countryside and helped to build China's industrial revolution. In the late 19th century, textile factories started to appear in the Yangtze delta, and working in them, teenage gir...
Cixi: Ambivalent Empress (00:13:53)
She rose to power behind the scenes in China's late 19th century imperial court, and became one of the most powerful women ever to exercise authority in the empire. Cixi was a dowager empress, and her...
Hong Xiuquan v Zeng Guofan: The Duellists (00:13:56)
This was the duel that shaped China. Hong Xiuquan was a poor boy who went into a trance and became convinced he was Jesus's younger brother, with a mission to conquer China. Zeng Guofan was a loyal Co...
Wang Jingwei: Revolutionary Renegade (00:13:46)
He is condemned as China's worst traitor. What made him do it? In 1938, as China was plunged into war, Wang Jingwei defected to the enemy, Japan. Yet in his early life, he had been one of the great fi...
Lu Xun: Compassionate Cynic (00:13:47)
To create one character who says something profound about the society you live in might be a stroke of luck. To create three suggests you really do have your hand on the nation's pulse. That creator w...
Robert Hart: Chinese Customs (00:12:56)
He was a servant of the Chinese empire, respected in Beijing and London alike. Yet he was no son of Shanghai, but of Ulster. Robert Hart grew up in Portadown, but his real life started when he shipped...
Zheng He: The Admiral Goes to Africa (00:13:34)
China rarely had an image as a great maritime power. But for a brief time in the mid-15th century, that all changed under the Ming dynasty and its admiral, Zheng He. He was sent out on seven voyages t...
River Elegy: River and Ocean (00:13:55)
In 1988, one of the most important television programmes in history was shown. Titled River Elegy, it was watched by perhaps 100 million Chinese viewers. Despite its stirring music and dramatic imager...
Li Qingzhao: Patriotic Poet (00:13:53)
Li Qingzhao, who lived (1084-1151) during the late Song dynasty, is recognised as one of China's greatest poets. She grew up within China's culture of highly regulated court bureaucracy. While her hus...
Confucius: Becoming the Sage (00:13:46)
If there were a competition for most famous Chinese in history, Confucius (551-479 BCE) would surely come out on top. He was the philosopher and ethicist who has given China a significant part of its ...
Kublai Khan: Cosmopolitan Conqueror (00:13:47)
He was the man with the pleasure dome, according to Coleridge, but in reality Kublai Khan didn't have so much time for pleasure. He was too busy running one of the most complex and cosmopolitan empire...
Sima Qian: Grand Historian (00:13:27)
He wasn't quite the man who invented history in China, but he certainly shaped it for thousands of years. Author of the Shi Ji (Records of the Grand Historian), Sima Qian told the history of China in ...
Ding Ling: Sophie, Sensation and Sex (00:13:50)
In 1927, China's literary scene was struck by a sensational new character. Her name was Sophie, and she was tormented by sexual longing, unashamedly self-centred about her desires and dreams, and dete...
Matteo Ricci: Jesuit and Geometrist (00:13:33)
Better living through geometry. That was one of the lessons shared with the Chinese emperor by the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci. He was part of an enterprising group of Jesuits priests who brought their...
Kumarajiva: Translator Monk (00:13:42)
Millions of Chinese speak the words of Kumarajiva (334-413) every day. Far fewer have any idea of who he is. He was perhaps China's most influential translator: in medieval China, he translated some o...
Chiang Kai-Shek and Soong Meiling: Asian Power Couple (00:13:47)
Rana Mitter argues that we can think about Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong Meiling (Madame Chiang) as Asia's first power couple. They dominated politics in China and were...
Wu Zetian: The Female Emperor (00:13:52)
Rana Mitter tells the story of Wu Zetian, the only woman ever to rule as China's emperor in her own right, in two thousand years of dynastic history. Even more remarkably,, she did it during one of th...
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