01x02 - Mysteries of Xanadu

[bunniefuu]

♪

(wind)

allan: It's tiring, the

winds blowing, its icy cold.

This is so steep I don't know

how they got the bricks up here.

The great wall of china.

Wow!

It's like being on

the top of the world.

Endless wall, endless

watchtowers all the

way to the horizon.

It's like nothing you

could ever imagine.

It's been studied for decades,

but now new technology

is revealing its secrets

like never before.

I'm allan maca.

An archaeologist and expert

in ancient civilizations.

And I'm going to investigate

china's distant past

from a whole new

perspective, space!

Today, state of the art

satellites see the world

in stunning detail,

and reveal hidden archaeology.

Enabling us to recreate

a lost ancient world,

invisible to the naked eye.

Working alongside

leading chinese experts,

my team and I will travel

to some of the country's

most remote and

incredible landscapes,

and with cutting edge science,

investigate previously unknown

cultures, lost cities and

devastating cataclysms.

This is ancient china as

you've never seen it before.

Just outside

china's capital beijing,

10 million people a year come

to marvel at the great wall.

This is the biggest manmade

structure on the planet.

But the only way to really

see just how vast it is,

is from 500 miles

above the earth.

Using satellite images, I'm

going to track the great wall

across towering

mountains and remote desert.

Exploring massive defenses.

They would just

start raining down fire

and arrows from above.

Meeting archaeologists as

they unearth its ancient past.

Wow, this is amazing you've

literally just found these.

And revealing

its long hidden secrets

Sarah: This looks really cool.

Allan: To discover if this

great monument could be

even bigger and far older than

we'd ever thought before.

I'm starting my mission 70

miles north of beijing in the

rugged mountains

of jinshanling.

At a part of the wall

that's remained unchanged

for hundreds of years.

You see pictures of the

great wall in tourist books,

but this is something else.

Out here in jinshanling,

satellite data shows

how the wall crosses

seemingly impossible peaks.

And every few hundred feet,

huge stone structures.

On the ground, these towers

reveal meticulous engineering.

Look at how beautiful this is.

Really formal arches here,

lots of space,

windows all the way around.

You have a 360 degree

view over the landscape.

It's incredible.

This is just one of

around 25,000 watchtowers

built by the ming dynasty,

who ruled china

from 1368 to 1644.

Between the towers,

ingenious defenses.

I'm seeing these strange

holes along the wall

that open to the outside.

What they would have done is

they would have taken about a

five-pound rock,

hollowed it out,

stuffed it with gunpowder, put

a wick in there and literally

just rolled it out

the hole, and boom.

No more invaders.

The ming went to these

extraordinary lengths,

to combat a mortal enemy.

From space, satellites

reveal vast grasslands to

the north of the wall.

Wild enough today, in

the days of the ming,

this was home to

tribes of nomadic horseman.

The mongols.

These fearsome warriors had

been attacking and pillaging

china for centuries.

The ming built the

great wall to keep them out.

Now, 600 years later,

chinese experts are using

science and technology to

reveal its secrets.

Sarah: Everywhere I look

I see watchtowers on the

top of the mountaintops.

Allan: Near a

remote section of the wall.

Sarah: This

view is unbelievable.

Allan: Canadian

archaeologist sarah klassen is

on her way to meet one of

the teams carrying out this

ground-breaking work.

Li zhe and professor zhang

from tianjin university are

using drone data to create

a 3d model of the entire

ming dynasty wall.

It's the most complete

scan ever attempted.

Sarah: Without this technology

doing something like this

would not be possible

just look at the landscape,

you'd have to scale up all of

those cliffs and map all of

these features it would take

decades if it would even be

possible at all.

Allan: The new scans reveal

the incredible achievements

of the ming in some of

china's most extreme terrain.

Even on completely

impassable ridges,

they still succeeded

in erecting towers.

Sarah: Can you

show me what you've done here?

Allan: And within

the scans, new discoveries.

Li zhe has spotted

mysterious openings,

along the base of the wall.

Using his data, I'm

heading 120 miles east,

to investigate.

Allan: Look at this

rugged landscape.

Check out this ridge, see the

watchtowers up on the ridge,

that's where the wall is.

The wall is snaking all the way

down to this saddle over here,

that's where I want to go

Today, the wall

here has crumbled away,

but originally it would've stood

as tall as a three-story house.

Wow.

Can you imagine solid wall all

the way down from this ridge,

then all of a sudden

there's this door?

Clear through to daylight.

It's completely baffling,

why would a defensive wall

have a doorway running

right through it?

Yeah. This is a pretty

small, compact space right now

but without all this rubble

here this would have been

the size of a person,

they would have just

walked right through here.

The crazy thing is, you know,

this is not some random

hole in the wall.

This thing is

incredibly well built.

Look at all these

bricks, just a perfect,

beautifully made arch.

So this was planned

and the question is why?

Li zhe has found more

than 50 of these doors

along this

part of the wall.

And it's thought they could

be used by scouts sent out

to spy on the enemy.

But the data are

revealing something else.

The ragged edge revealed

in this scan isn't a

decayed doorway,

but the entrance to a hidden

tunnel that was once bricked up,

before being smashed open.

Sarah: This looks really cool.

Allan: This new discovery

is completely different from

any of the other openings

li zhe has found.

Potentially a way of

launching a sudden attack.

Allan: Smashing open

this thin layer of bricks,

allowed the ming

forces to ambush the enemy.

Before li zhe's discovery,

experts had no idea these

hidden tunnels even existed.

It's an incredible find.

Allan: The latest

technology is revealing that

the wall is far more

than a simple barrier.

It's a complex

military system.

The big question is, just

how far does it stretch?

Using satellite images, we can

reconstruct how the ming wall

extends far to the west.

From mountain ranges,

through wild grasslands

and into barren desert.

Right to its end, where

the ming stopped building.

Here, at the very furthest

reaches of their empire

A huge construction.

Far greater than any

of the thousands of

towers along the way.

What is it?

And what was it for?

To find out, I'm going to

follow the wall to a far-flung

corner of western china.

♪

allan: I'm

investigating the secrets of

one of the world's

greatest ancient icons.

Using satellite data, I've

tracked the great wall all the

way from the mountains east

of beijing to the gobi desert,

a 500,000 square mile expanse

in the far north west of china.

Just over here I can

see sections of the wall.

The feat of engineering

required to build something so

far out here, in just this

barren desolate environment,

just kind of boggles the mind.

After hours following the wall,

something massive

emerges from the desert haze.

A mighty fortress.

Today, the modern city

of jiayuguan is nearby,

but 600 years ago this

fortress would have stood

alone in a

desolate wilderness.

I never imagined I'd

ever see something like this,

all the way out

here in western china.

The great wall

terminates in the mountains

just a few miles south of here.

Making this incredible structure

the wall's final gateway.

The last fortress at the

furthest edge of the ming

dynasty's vast empire.

Look at how massive this is.

This rivals any gate or

battlement anywhere in the

world at this time.

Here, you really get a

sense of the ambition,

the engineering and the

immense power of the ming.

A deep moat, walls

up to 36 feet high,

and watchtowers on

every corner form three

layers of defense.

And even if the enemy

does make it inside;

there are traps designed to

create devastating k*ll zones.

You walk into this

courtyard and if you're an

invading army, they

can close those doors,

close those iron doors

there and you're trapped here,

and all of a sudden they would

just start raining down

fire and arrows from above,

and your invading

force is doomed.

This is an ingenious military

strategy all set and fixed in

the design of this

incredible fortress.

It's massive, but also

meticulously built.

The precision of construction

here is amazing and,

you know, the emperor

demanded that and there's this

legend that says the architect

told the emperor,

he said I can tell you the

exact number of bricks it will

take to build this fortress.

He said it would be 99,999.

And incredibly, at the end of

construction there was just

one brick left.

And that brick is set over

there on that little ledge,

as a kind of mini monument to

the incredible precision and

design of this fortress.

Its position, right at the end

of the ming dynasty's great wall

earned it the name 'the first

and greatest pass under heaven'.

But this fortress is just one

small part of a megastructure

like nothing else on earth.

Just one end of their

great wall of china.

♪

until we had images from

space, experts didn't know

how massive the ming dynasty's

great wall really was.

But now, chinese experts

have calculated it's

5,500 miles long.

That's over 1500 miles more

than previously thought and

long enough to stretch

from new york to los angeles,

and all the way back again.

But new technology is

also unearthing secrets,

that take us beyond the

great empire of the ming.

1200 miles away, sarah

has set up a base camp in

the shadow of the great wall.

We know the fortress of

jiayuguan marks the end of the

ming wall but the satellite

data reveals something else.

Sarah: Oh wow.

Allan: Chinese

experts have told sarah about

another section, even

further into the desert.

Sarah: If I zoom

in on the satellite imagery

I can see that this part of the

wall is much more eroded than

other parts of the wall.

So that might suggest that

it's older than the parts of

the wall built

during the ming dynasty.

Allan: This wall stretches

far beyond the ming fortress

continuing west for

hundreds of miles.

Sarah: The wall is

completely straight in the

middle of this desert.

There is absolutely

nothing else around here.

I can't imagine why they would

need to build a wall here.

Allan: So what's going on?

I'm heading west in

search of answers.

I want to know, just

how old is this wall?

Where does it go?

And if the ming didn't

build it, who did?

♪

allan: I'm now more than

230 miles west of

the fortress of jiayuguan.

I'm here in the kumtag

desert and it's one of the

harshest environments I've

ever been in in my life.

You know, very

little grows here,

the temperatures are

literally below freezing.

It's a hell of a place to

imagine finding archaeology.

Sarah's guiding me

to faint traces of

what looks like an

even older wall,

that she's spotted on

the satellite data.

If I get up here, I think

I can get my first glimpse.

Wow, this is cool and it's

not exactly what I expected.

And it looks

kind of primitive.

I wanna see more, I

wanna get up closer.

Here in the middle of nowhere a

stretch of ancient wall.

And it looks very different

from anything I've seen so far.

This is a very distinctive

kind of material.

We have rammed

earth packed down,

with a reed foundation.

These are reeds!

This is actually, you

know, a type of thick grass,

pressed in there to

serve as a foundation to

hold the wall stable.

This framework is an

ingenious way of building

even with the desert's

loose sand and gravel.

But if the ming didn't

build this then who did?

To find out, I'm

meeting zhang junmin,

the head of a team from

the gansu institute of

relics and archaeology,

who are digging for answers.

This is so cool,

tell me what you have here.

Zhang: These are two

arrowheads we found nearby.

One is bronze and one is iron.

You can see that

it's still sharp.

Allan: I've never seen this

shape to an arrowhead before,

you know where it's basically

three sided like this.

Is that common?

Zhang: We found lots of these

along the wall in this area.

These arrowheads are very

typical of the han dynasty.

Allan: 1500

years before the ming.

Before the roman

empire formed in the west.

And cleopatra

ruled ancient egypt.

The han dynasty rose to power.

They oversaw a

golden age of art,

culture and

economic prosperity.

They're so well preserved,

I'm just amazed.

Look at that edge.

It's just incredible.

The form is just so

clear and beautiful.

These tiny arrowheads

reveal something momentous,

that the wall here is

more than 2000 years old.

It's an even earlier

great wall of china,

that once stretched

for over 6000 miles.

Much of the famous ming

dynasty wall was simply built

right on top,

1500 years later.

Battered by desert winds

for over two millennia,

what remains of this

ancient stretch of great wall,

are just fragments of what

was once a mighty barrier.

It's kind of hard just looking

at these ruined sections

of the wall to get a sense of

what it looked like originally,

so using historical sources

and archaeological evidence,

we've made this pretty

phenomenal digital

reconstruction

of what the wall might

have looked like.

It's just amazing, wow.

When it was first built,

the wall would have

stood up to 20 feet high.

This thing was enormous.

I can only imagine being part

of an invading nomad army and

coming up against this wall

and thinking you know maybe

it's better to just go home

because this was formidable.

Then

Another discovery, just

unearthed from the desert

sands that suggests the

wall was about more than just

defending chinese territory.

Zhang: We found

this coin nearby.

It's a wuzhu coin

from the han dynasty.

Allan: Wow this is

amazing, you've literally

just found these.

Zhang: It may be they were

left here by merchants.

Allan: These merchants may

have been traveling along

a series of ancient trade

routes, known as the silk road.

Established by the han, the

silk road stretched from china

through central

asia and india,

to modern-day turkey,

egypt, arabia and rome.

It brought huge wealth to

china and had to be defended

at all costs.

So the great wall was not just

about protecting the empire.

It also served to protect

china's gateway to this vital

artery of global trade.

But there's something

else intriguing here.

Alongside the wall,

more ancient remains.

Rising from the desert, a

mysterious, eroded structure.

My tech team, ryan kastner

and eric lo, are joining me,

and working with experts

from peking university,

we're going to investigate.

Allan: I'm on a

quest to uncover the secrets

of the great wall of china.

And my tech team is

working with researchers,

ma li, wu yunan and

ma qinglong from

peking university

to investigate what seems

to be a mysterious tower,

built near an

ancient section of wall.

Ryan: So they're

flying the drone now,

we're going to first do sort

of a lawnmower pattern over

the top to get the aerial

view of the tower there.

Allan: The drone takes hundreds

of images of the structure,

which will combine

to make a detailed

three-dimensional model.

After that, the team will scan

a four mile section of the

wall for traces of

any more remains.

Ryan: Using a drone

to be able to fly will

save us a lot of time.

A drone can go a lot

faster than we can on foot.

Allan: Hours of flight, and

1500 individual pictures later.

Ryan: Hey guys come on in.

Allan: And I've

come to check out the results

with archaeologist and leading

han wall expert yang jun,

who'll help us

interpret our findings.

Allan: Alright guys so

show me what you got.

Ryan: Alright so, to

give you some context,

you can see the wall

from the satellite

imagery very clearly.

If you look it's a

nice linear feature here.

Allan: But switching to

the 3d elevation model,

reveals details not visible

in the satellite imagery.

Ryan: So if we look

actually in this spot here,

right where it bends there,

there seems to be a clear,

clear bump there.

That doesn't

seem to be natural.

You can see in the

elevation model,

the redder it is,

the taller it is.

And it's a five or six

meter tall mound there.

It seems to make a whole lot

of sense to us that that would

be another tower.

Allan: Yeah because it turns

at an angle and cuts back south.

Ryan: Right exactly exactly, so

that would be a natural spot

where you'd want to look

out to see on all sides

where everything was.

Allan: The structure's height

and strategic position

suggests it may have

been a watchtower.

Then ryan spots

something totally unexpected.

Ryan: You can see

a clear structure,

another tower that

was behind the wall.

Basically on top of a hill.

Allan: This is

really interesting.

Did they build

towers off the wall?

Yang: From our research

we've found most of the towers

were along the wall, but there

are a few that are outside it.

Allan: It'sbizarre,

some of these towers

are deep in enemy territory,

miles beyond the wall.

Were they really just

simple watchtowers?

Or could there be

more going on here?

600 miles away, in a vault

at the gansu jiandu museum,

are ancient relics which

could hold the answer.

Jenny: Ni hao.

Xiao: Ni hao.

Allan: Research director,

xiao congli has agreed to

show our historian,

dr chai-hui jenny liu,

these amazing finds.

Jenny: These are wooden slips,

they are about the length of

a ruler.

The wood looks well preserved.

On it you have

these writings in ink.

Very fine writing.

Allan: Buried in

the desert for 2,000 years,

these slips were unearthed in

what was once the office of

a military commander.

And they contain

instructions for soldiers

stationed at the towers.

Jenny: Ok they're

really hard to make out.

Oh, first of all on the

very top there is one dot,

and that tells you that's

the beginning of the rules.

And the first two

characters is xiongnu?

Xiongnu.

That means the huns.

Allan: The huns

were feared nomadic horseman,

who roamed the northern

grasslands 1,000 years

before the mongols.

Jenny: So the rule here is

talking about what you should

do when the huns

come into the border.

(speaking mandarin).

Jenny: So the next

characters say you must

raise a flag on the pole

(speaking mandarin).

Allan:

Raising this flag, a

marker known as a peng,

could only have one purpose,

to signal other towers.

And there are even rules

for what to do at night

when flags can't be seen.

Jenny: By night start a

fire on top of tower.

(speaking mandarin).

Jenny: And do not put it

out until the morning.

All towers that see this light

should also light and it goes

all the way down the defense

line until it reaches the

commandry where

the soldiers are.

(speaking mandarin).

Allan: And the slips even

contain instructions

on how to signal how many

enemies were attacking.

Jenny: So let's say you

have more than 1,000 huns and

that's what they've sighted.

There is a very specific

signal that they must send,

so that without words the

commandry would know there are

1,000 rides coming toward us.

Allan: This tells us the towers

we've mapped in the desert,

including those deep

in enemy territory,

are not simple watchtowers,

they're beacon towers.

Part of a complex

early warning system.

Using our drone data, we can

now reconstruct a complete 3d

model of what they

may have looked like.

Built over 2000 years ago,

they were made of rammed

earth clad in plaster.

And stood up to 26 feet high,

with platforms on top where

the fires were lit.

And thanks to the incredible

insights revealed in the

wooden slips we now know

that these towers formed a

sophisticated

communication system,

designed to provide early

warning, of an attack,

and pass it for hundreds

of miles along the wall.

What the han created

is remarkable,

but were they the first to

build a defensive wall to

protect their empire?

To trace the wall

back to its very roots,

I need to travel even

further back in time.

To the reign of a tyrant of

unrivaled power and ambition.

The man who conceived

of another of ancient

china's greatest icons.

The terracotta warriors.

Allan: I'm in the city of xi'an.

Having travelled over 1,000

miles from the deserts of

the far north west.

This was once the

ancient capital of china.

I want to trace the

origins of the great wall,

but to do that I need to

go back in time to the

formation of china itself.

And explore the story of

china's first emperor.

I'm starting out with

his most famous creation.

The terracotta warriors.

I've been reading about

this for years and years but

this is my first time here,

and I'm telling you nothing,

nothing prepares you

for this experience.

This is literally one of the

greatest achievements in all

of ancient civilization,

anywhere in the world.

More than 6,000 figures.

Row upon row of

soldiers and commanders.

An entire army

immortalized in clay.

And all built for the

first emperor of china,

qin shi huang di.

From where I'm standing there's

no two figures that are alike.

The uniforms are different;

their facial expressions

are different, right down

to the mustaches.

This tells me about the power

that the emperor was able to

summon, in his

lifetime as a ruler.

This is extraordinary.

From space, we can see

that the huge hangar that

shelters the terracotta

army is just one tiny part

of his massive

mausoleum complex.

And at its center, is this.

Hidden within this

strange looking hill,

is the emperor's tomb.

It's never been opened.

Archaeologists don't yet know

how to excavate it without

destroying the contents.

But I'm meeting

doctor zhang weixing,

who has been using

seismic scanning technology,

to glimpse what lies beneath.

What do you know

about what's in there?

Weixing: We know there's a huge

burial chamber under the earth.

It's 160 meters by

140 meters in size,

and 30 meters deep.

And within that there's a

huge nine level platform.

Allan: Ancient

texts say the tomb contains a

replica of the cosmos

with pearls as stars,

rivers of liquid mercury,

and even deadly booby traps.

It sounds far-fetched,

but professor zhang

has found evidence

that suggests there may be

some truth to the legends.

Weixing: We found

some unusual things.

When we scanned we

detected very high levels

of mercury in the air,

so we know there is mercury

inside the huge burial chamber.

Allan: Wow, holy smokes.

These findings suggest there's

truth in the ancient texts.

And that means there may also

be truth in what they record

of another of the emperor's

construction projects.

A huge defensive wall.

The first great wall of china.

Though little remains today,

the records show it stretched

for nearly 2000 miles

across northern china.

They also reveal the human cost

of the emperor's ambition.

He forced 300,000

soldiers and half a million

laborers to work on

its construction.

And for many, it

was a death sentence.

They died of

starvation or fatigue,

or in some cases they

were flogged to death.

But it cemented emperor

qin shi huang di's place

in all of world history.

After an incredible

journey spanning

thousands of miles and

reaching far into the past,

I'm nearing the

end of my quest.

But one intriguing

mystery remains.

Did the first emperor really

conjure up the idea for a

great wall, right

out of thin air?

To find the answer, I need

to go back even further,

to a time before his

bloody rise to power,

and before the

formation of china itself.

Allan: I want to

investigate one final mystery

surrounding the

great wall of china.

Just how did the first emperor

get his idea to build a

colossal defensive wall?

That question has taken me

300 miles north of xi'an,

to the loess plateau.

I'm following satellite images

to mysterious lines of rocks

and steep earth banks the

remains of a primitive and

clearly ancient wall.

There's pieces of pottery,

scattered all over here.

All around,

clues to who built it.

I mean, this

piece is just commoner.

Commoner, like cooking jar,

and the designs on the outside

tell me this is very early.

We're talking

about pre-qin empire.

2200 years ago, at a time before

the first emperor came to power,

china was divided into

seven warring states.

To protect their territories,

each state built their own

defensive walls.

Incredibly, these are the

remains of a wall built before

the formation of china itself.

This is pretty cool.

In 221 bc, the king of

one of the warring states,

qin shi huang di, is

waging bloody w*r.

He crushes all other states,

unites china and declares

himself the first emperor.

With his newfound power,

he combines the warring

states existing walls,

and builds new stretches,

to create one huge

defensive shield,

over 3,000 miles long.

The first true

great wall of china.

His incredible construction

would be extended and

developed by the han dynasty.

And over 1,000 years later,

the ming dynasty would take

things even further, creating

the monument we see today.

The great wall

was not one single thing,

it was a mesh of many

walls that span a

huge periods of time.

I mean, truly china is

defined by its walls.

My investigation has taken us

right across china,

to the edge of empire.

I've tracked the great wall

back to its very roots,

more than 2,200 years ago.

And revealed how it's

not one wall but many,

that evolved over the

centuries into an

astonishing military

masterpiece.

We always knew it

was big, but now,

using the latest satellite

imagery and cutting-edge

technology, chinese

archaeologists are revealing

that this world icon is even

greater than we ever imagined.

It's more than twice as

long as previously thought,

spanning 13,000 miles.

Long enough to stretch

half-way around the earth.

On this journey I've learned,

that the great wall was as

alive and dynamic as the

generations of

people who built it.

It's the result of struggle

and achievement spanning

more than 2000 years.

It's not just an enduring

symbol of ancient china,

it's the story

of china itself.