The Lost Pyramids of China: Everything You Didn't Know | TRACKS

power beyond belief luxury beyond imagination mummies beyond description riches beyond fabulous welcome to the afterlife ancient Chinese style enter the secret splendid tragic world of China's mega tombs man-made mountains that once proclaimed the might of Empress and brought dynasties to their knees [Music] China Shanxi Province a few kilometers outside the city of Xian just another day on another busy highway in the world's fastest growing economy until the highway suddenly becomes a runway [Music] over the next 45 minutes a team of experts steers a small drone aircraft over Shang she's farmlands and brings it back to earth retrieving its precious payload images of an astonishing world a world of mega marvels hundreds of earth and mounds rising above the farmlands near Xian some merely large others gigantic what's buried inside them is mostly unknown but who's inside isn't any mystery these are the tombs of empress generals lords and ladies some of the richest and most powerful people who ever lived on earth 2,000 years ago these peaceful farmlands ran with blood as armies clashed and dynasties rose and fell they rang with music and laughter as China's nobility reveled in all life's pleasures and they echoed with the sounds of toil as thousands of workers built massive pyramid tombs monuments of a splendid world even death couldn't end these tombs were symbols of power they were symbols of wealth they were symbols of political legitimacy they said everything about how a person lived in their lifetime they said it for eternity to put it simply we could say I've got the biggest tomb I'm the best it's a rare event when archaeologists open one of these mega tombs giving experts like architectural historian Tanya ik Feld a look inside so many mysteries still lie beneath the earth but one thing is clear centuries ago building these tombs was a mega challenge to satisfy their Empress engineers had to move millions of tons of earth dig huge holes dozens of meters deep and cover them with man-made mountains how did they do it today the earth is yielding a terrible secret the tragic price have built on these monuments to glory a price paid in suffering and blood a price the Chinese people often refuse to pay for nearly a thousand years these massive engineering projects helped create powerful dynasties but they also help destroy them and one tomb was the greatest and the most destructive of them all the year is 246 BC China doesn't exist instead seven small kingdoms fight each other for supremacy [Music] in one of them called chin a new king has just inherited the throne he's only 13 years old but one of his first acts as king is to order the construction of his tomb to us 13 might seem a little young to be worrying about death but as archaeologist Charles Higham points out 2,000 years ago 13 was a lot older than it is today who can tell how long he would live some people were dying in their 20s or 30s and therefore it was vital for him to ensure his immortality immediately for the royal tomb builders success or failure depended on getting one thing right location in ancient China important tombs had to be built on higher ground and a king's tomb had to be the highest of all but building on high ground was no guarantee of success unless workers could easily dig it doesn't meet his deep the tomb builders picked a site 89 kilometers from the royal capital on the slopes of a mountain called Mount Lee what they probably didn't know was that the tomb they were about to build would be one of the greatest tombs ever built on earth because the boy king of Qin didn't go to an early grave he grew up to do something no Chinese ruler had ever done he crushed his rivals in a series of brutal Wars and unified their kingdoms into a single Empire under his command the Empire of Qin in English China by 221 BC he was the most powerful man in his world and he knew it he renamed himself Qin Shi Huangdi the first emperor of China and he wanted a tomb that would leave no doubt about who he was and what he had done what better way to project your limitless power than to have the biggest mausoleum the biggest pyramid ever built for his tomb builders the first Emperor's triumph was one of history's biggest game changes now they couldn't just build a tomb that was fit for a king they had to build a monument to the most powerful man in China's history luckily they were already working from a brilliant blueprint a tomb that centuries later would astonish its discoverers 1977 Chinese archaeologists excavate the tomb of an aristocrat named Zhang hole Yi who died some 200 years before the first emperor it was a tomb unlike any ever found in China earlier Chinese tombs had been simple vertical shafts but song hole yeast who was an underground palace divided into chambers with holes in their walls and the coffin so that his soul could roam at will through his eternal mansion 200 years before the first emperor's tomb now we have a whole new concept and that concept is this that you don't have a tomb you have a palace an underground set of chambers each one to its own purpose within which the dead would live in perpetuity these great and powerful men would live on after death and their tombs would need to satisfy all their requirements some whole years after life required a complete orchestra and almost ten tons of exquisite bronze serving vessels the bronze serving vessels the wine vessels the food vessels in this particular tomb are at least in my view some of the most if not the most spectacular bronze castings ever to come from the ancient world but fine music and fine food weren't all that kept Zhong all year eternally happy archeologists found the skeletons of eight young women in his tomb concubines slain at his death to keep their master company for eternity some two centuries after the death of Jean Paul Yi Engineers began building the first emperor's tomb China's greatest underground palace but according to archaeologist Wang surely the tomb builders couldn't even tackle that challenge until they solved another problem a problem that threatened disaster we are standing on a drainage side of Mount Li there are five streams flowing down through Mount Li and all of them were flowing directly towards the first emperor's tomb every year during flood season the level of the water was high the tombs construction might be plagued by floods before they could start building the first emperor's tomb his engineers had to divert the streams that threatened to destroy it drivers on this highway may not know it but they are passing the 2,000 year-old solution I'm standing on the dam which is 3,000 meters long between 20 and 75 metres wide at the top and between 12 and 15 meters high it was built with Earth's removed from man-made ditches that redirected streams around the tomb for the first Emperor's tomb builders constructing a dam that size was only the warm-up act with water now diverted from the tomb site they had to dig big until they had a burial chamber large enough for an emperor's underground Palace when the Emperor died years later they'd have to cover the pit with a man-made Mountain fortunately for them they were about to build China's biggest tomb with one of history's most remarkable building materials even today it's easy to find easy to work with and very very cheap on New Zealand's North Island engineering student John Chia and his team are building a house but this house isn't made of brick or wood or stone it's made of dirt that's right good control them very carefully if you Ram it softly Perth you'll get it down a little bit John and his crew a part of a worldwide movement in 21st century builders who think that turning the earth under our feet into roofs over our heads is a great way to go it might look like ordinary dirt but it's actually a very strong material these earth structures last hundreds of years sometimes even thousands of years structures like the oldest sections of the Great Wall of China still standing today thanks to some simple but powerful building techniques that haven't changed in over 2,000 years whether it's a house in modern New Zealand or the Great Wall of China building successfully with dirt depends on two things first add a binding material to the earth so it won't crack and fall apart try and try and be like the rain sprinkle it all over that lightly today the New Zealand crews using flax fibers that grow nearby but the first emperor's builders had binders of their own that were just as easy to find the Chinese use sticky rice to bind this soil it's also quite common to use manure second keep water out water will find its way into any air pockets inside an earthen wall once inside it will turn the earth to mud or freeze and expand and the wall will collapse so if you're building with us you need to make sure it doesn't have any air pockets and there's only one way to do that ramming it down into a frame to squeeze out all the air until it's as dense as concrete judging from what I can see the boys have done a very good job and I can tell because the wall is very smooth and when you feel it it's very solid and that means we got the ramming right and these guys aren't the only ones who got it right in xi'an archaeologists are excavating the tomb of an ancient chinese general it's rammed earth walls a nearly 2000 years old and still going strong the secret of this rammed earth construction is to build it up in small layers and pound it very very thoroughly until it becomes extremely hard that way it becomes very very stable this wall shows the rammed earth construction what we see here are many many layers perhaps 25 or 30 just in this small part of wall that have been marked out by the archaeologists each one showing a layer of rammed earth we've taken hundreds of men many months to complete the whole tomb using this method of rammed earth construction to knock on it it's almost as hard as concrete hundreds of layers have rammed earth built this generals tomb and it was tiny compared with the tomb of China's first emperor a man-made Mountain some 350 meters on each side between 50 and 70 meters high and made from more than three and a half million tons of earth and it was more than just a two it was nearly six thousand hectares one of the largest mortuary complexes anywhere on earth the tombs never been excavated but ancient accounts give an unforgettable description of the burial chamber its roof shining with heavenly constellations its floor recreating the Emperor's realm with flowing rivers and oceans made of mercury and replicas of all his palaces waiting to welcome his soul surrounded by everything he would need to rule for eternity as he had on earth everything the ancient accounts don't even mention what his tomb builders tucked away in three obscure pits in one corner of the tomb an army of clay 8,000 strong the now famous terracotta warriors nearby pits held other magnificent statues of jugglers acrobats officials and chariots and horses attended by their grooms the Emperor's world modeled in bronze and clay and a break from a very dark tradition before the first emperor Chinese rulers sacrificed real people to serve them in death but the number of human lives needed to equip this tomb for the afterlife would have been too awful to contemplate by the time of the first emperor it was clear that you couldn't literally slay an entire regiment of an army but replicas were perfectly satisfactory but concubines were different ancient records claim that the first emperor took all his childless concubines with him to the grave but are those ancient records true in 2005 a team of archaeologists found evidence they might be they discovered the outlines of a huge 80 by 50 meter chamber inside the mound surrounded by a stone wall nearly 150 meters long and 125 meters wide they also discovered high concentrations of mercury in the surrounding soil a huge burial chamber and high concentrations of mercury hint the tails of underground rivers and seas of mercury and stories of sacrificed concubines might be true but there's another incredible story about this tomb a story that's created a mystery a mystery that remains unsolved to this day ancient records say that when the first empress tomb was finished it was 115 meters high twice as tall as it is today at that height its base would have been 500 meters on each side making the tomb five times bigger than it is today and four times bigger than Egypt's Great Pyramid if it was so much bigger why is it so much smaller today many experts believe that 2,000 years of wind and rain have eroded the tombs and normos dirt mound but there's another theory some believe the tombs too low because it was never finished why would the most powerful man in China spend years building himself an incredible tomb and then not finish it in this pomegranate orchard near the two archaeologist Jang Jong Lee may have found the answer there are huge numbers of bones here this one is either a thigh or shin there is a sculpt over here you can even see Pete here so the body lies this way the first emperor's tomb wasn't just built with tons of cheap dirt it was also built with thousands of cheap human lives we cannot tell how many skeletons are here they're all mixed together I think there's one here and another over here the bodies are not placed in any order this is a group tool who were these people they're modern portraits are nearby when he unified all of China the first emperor acquired the biggest labor force in Chinese history a force he conscripted to build his mega to today visitors to the tomb site see those workers depicted as heroes but their bones tell a very different story look at this skull from the teeth we know that this person was only around 30 years old but he died because of intense work and difficult working conditions even for strong young men in the prime of life building the first emperor's tomb was a living hell toom workers labored from dawn to dusk work to exhaustion deprived of food and sleep thousands succumbed to miserable deaths after any worker died his body was thrown in a burial ground rather than in a personal grave the bones were piled up more than 10 centimeters high the Terracotta Warriors were buried with more consideration and dignity than the workers who were worked to death archeologists have found most of these workers tossed into pits without proper burial but one group of shackled broken men was interred in graves and buried with tiles listing each man's name and hometown what made these men different the answer deepens the tragedy yeah the dead laborers came from different backgrounds those who could afford to carve their names on tiles had a higher social status they came here to repay their debts feeder impoverished debtors suffered side by side with criminals and slaves even ordinary citizens had to give one year of their lives to building the tomb but many worked far longer the first emperor could give any reason to keep citizens working so many citizens couldn't go back to their normal lives the first Emperor's tomb is entirely impressive it's wonderful its innovative it's inspirational the tomb is also shocking because of the human suffering it caused the tombs horrific toll and human labor wasn't its only cost no Chinese ruler had ever spent so much money on his tomb in the end the price was too high the first emperor died in 210 BC the next year China's exhausted people rose in revolt three years later his successor was murdered and his dynasty ended after only 15 years in the chaos that followed the Emperor's death his tomb may never have been finished and that might explain why it isn't as tall as it supposed to be the tomb built to proclaim an omnipotent dynasty helped destroy it in a single lifetime but the first Emperor's great achievement a unified China never fell apart new rulers would inherit his empire and struggle with a seemingly impossible challenge how to build great tombs without destroying their dynasties [Music] [Music] 2002 BC eight bloody years have passed since the death of China's first infant a peasant leader defeats rival armies and founds China's next imperial dynasty the heart the manner of government of the hand was far less abrasive far less dramatic and far less of the harshness that is to be found with the totalitarian approach of the first emperor but the first emperor still haunts the new dynasty his massive tomb dominates the landscape demanding to be equalled by anyone claiming to succeed him the first time Emperor also wanted a tomb which would serve as a monument equally impressive to that of the first emperor the dilemma for him was how to do this without also causing hardship to the people generations of Han Emperor's would read that riddle building a line of gigantic tombs just north of their imperial capital and that location was no accident 2,000 years ago these tombs stood between the Han Empire and its most terrifying enemy the Huns [Music] year-after-year the murderous nomads swept down from the northern steppes plundering China's well Han Emperor's built their tombs where they could help defend the Empire it's a sign of architectural and monumental strength in a physical sense also in a spiritual sense if the spirits of the Empress could live on then they would be protective force between those at the Capitol those in the in the Han Empire and those beyond but to offer more than symbolic protection the Imperial tombs would also have to be military outposts that one tomb called an Ling archeologists zone and Fong has found evidence that they were across the road a modern village still boasts rammed earth walls built during the Han Dynasty when this village was an Ling's fortified tomb town west of where I'm standing is eiling's Toontown we have discovered that a Ling's town was 1200 meters long from east to west 800 meters wide from south to north father in Han times an Ling's to moon was home to a hundred thousand people who helped build and maintain the Imperial tomb and they help defend the Empire whenever the hunt showed up but marauding nomads once the only threat Han Emperor's had other dangerous enemies inside their own borders powerful Nobles who commanded their own armies potential rivals to the imperial throne another reason for toontown's the emperor always chose a powerful aristocrat to oversee the building of his tomb and honor no one could refuse even though it meant leaving home to live in a tomb town in return the tomb town was excused from paying taxes but the emperor got the best of the bargain by separating rivals from their power base at home by moving these local strongman close to the Capitol the Emperor could control them the local Lords lost their power and the Emperor's power [Music] the size of Imperial han tombs hints at magnificent burials inside [Music] but that's something we might never know because no archaeologist has ever excavated a Han Emperor's tomb these are great ancestors of the Chinese people is it right and proper to get into and to excavate and to find out more when they should in fact be left as they would have wished themselves in peace in perpetuity well this is a very interesting dilemma but archaeologists haven't the tombs of royal Han princes inside there found an astonishing world built for an afterlife beyond imagination some 850 kilometers from the Imperial tombs at Xian lies the modern city of Xu Zhuo during the Han Dynasty this place was ruled by the Emperor's relatives today you can visit their tombs where kings believe their luxurious lives on earth would continue after death one tune called Bay Dongshan was a reproduction of an earthly palace built inside a hill complete with a kitchen pantries washrooms everything a dead King would need to party on in his accustomed style this room was for enjoyment it was for dancing it was for pleasure there would have been music there had been feasting here to be great endless banquets and it was here to entertain the dead prince in perpetuity and so all around us we have all the other chambers that were necessary to maintain his lifestyle forever in one of Bay Dongshan chambers a hole in the floor leaves no doubt these tombs had everything a nearby tune called Grecian boasts a grander version of the same convenience a toilet but unlike bay Dongshan groschen was hollowed out of solid rock a feat that reveals its ancient builders considerable skill the entrance tunnel to the GUI charme toon is 56 meters long but it was constructed with such incredible accuracy that today a laser beam goes straight down the tunnel without touching anything dripping underground water would have eventually destroyed this tomb but it's ingenious builders turned their biggest problem into an asset the two builders here was so intent on getting everything perfect for their prints that they very sensibly hear where the water is dripping steadily down the rocks they very sensibly cut a basin or well into which the water was retained and accumulates and of course the prince would have needed water for cooking to be bigoted for washing and here it was an eternal supply [Music] but to properly enjoy the afterlife a king needed more than just the perfect tomb he also needed a magnificent burial suit made of thousands of pieces of jade believed to preserve the body forever ancient texts hint that during the Han Dynasty alchemists and embalmers tried to keep aristocratic corpses eternally fresh and at least once they may have succeeded in 1971 workers digging a tunnel in the Chinese city of Chang Chau played one of the most incredible archaeological discoveries of all time a tomb built in the second century BC at the time of the Han Dynasty fully equipped with model servants musical instruments and baskets of food for the eternal enjoyment of the dead but none of those treasures compared to what archaeologists found inside the coffin the body of a noblewoman named Shin GA Shin za had died more than a hundred years before the birth of Jesus but incredibly her body was so well preserved that Chinese pathologists could autopsy it like a freshly dead corpse no one can explain how Shin GI became one of the best preserved mummies ever found but some believe her tomb builders had engineered her amazing preservation dead bodies decay faster when they're exposed to air and water in the grave but Shinju azem bombers buried her in a tomb 20 meters deep wrapped her body tightly and 20 layers of silk sealed it into for nested coffins each of them sealed with lacquer and surrounded her wooden burial chamber with a meter and a half of charcoal and over a meter of dense white clay all that would have kept air and water away from her corpse proof to some experts that chinchou is - was purpose-built to preserve her body but the Harn also surrounded tombs with loose stones and gravel because air and water weren't the only tomb invaders in ancient China grave robbers were the ultimate threat to a happy afterlife [Music] some tomb builders tried false advertising to keep robbers away this 2,000 year old inscription on the glacier - advises would-be thieves not to bother since the tomb has nothing valuable inside [Music] it didn't work Gretchen was robbed anyway according to archaeologist Jiang Jin Ling loose stones and gravel were a much better way to foil tomb robbers simply because the robbers couldn't dig through them when robbers try to dig a hole the sand and stones would collapse and keep falling down so they couldn't keep digging this is a burglar proof method but that wasn't the only way the Han discouraged tomb robbers this army of clay soldiers found in a Han generals tomb his striking evidence of a downsized afterlife these troops would dull size compared to the first Emperor's life-size Terracotta Army and their weapons were toys unlike the real weapons the Terracotta Warriors held what we see here is that the ruling class have learnt a lot about how to be a wise ruler there was not that degree of wastefulness that we saw in the Qin period han dynasty tombs cost less money than the first Emperor's massive mausoleum but a grim discovery reveals that Han tomb builders could be just as cruel as the first emperor excavators found these iron shackles still clamped to the bones of workers who died building a Han Emperor's tomb archaeologist Chen ball shows just how painful they were the two round ones are worn on the wrists and are very similar to handcuffs are you gonna see the one with the long tail was designed to put on a slave's neck to get you to Mitchell the long tail pushed down against the spine in this way slaves were forced to bend down while working they couldn't stand up straight so it prevented slaves from escaping through the centuries there were uprisings at tomb construction science it was not unknown for the workers to revolt to throw stones at officials to cause damage and to run away in 220 ad after four centuries of rule the Han Dynasty finally collapsed leaving future Emperor's to ponder the enduring riddle of building for grandeur while hanging on to power one dynasty would search the past and find a brilliant solution that still gave Emperor's glory while finally ending centuries of suffering about 600 AD China emerged from the centuries of political chaos that follow the downfall of the heart for the next 300 years the emperors of the Tang Dynasty would lead their country to new heights of wealth and sophistication during the Tang Dynasty China was the most advanced country in the whole world it had a thriving capital with more than a million people it was multicultural people came from all over the world it was well connected to other parts of Asia and even to Europe via the Silk Route it was prosperous was enlightened it was advanced enlightened as they were tong emperors were well aware of the age-old Imperial predicament only great tools guaranteed respect but expensive tools that drained the Treasury and enslaved the people guaranteed rebellion as one tongue in proceeded the people are like water they can support your ship or they can overturn it and sink it preferring to sail instead of sink tong emperors searched for a solution to the problem of tune building they found it here at Barling the tomb of a Han Emperor named Wendy [Music] appalled by tomb buildings huge cost and the terrible suffering it caused Wendy decreed that his tomb would be different [Music] Barling isn't a huge pit covered with a man-made mound instead wendy ordered his engineers to tunnel the shaft into a mountain it was easy it was cheap and it found a grandeur in nature instead of building it on the backs of slaves a great emperor should have a very high and big mound on his tomb but the problem disappears when it comes to a mountain tomb the only thing to do is to dig a shaft digging a shaft only needs dozens of people while constructing a mound we need at least tens of thousands of people bombing was a revolution in tune design and an inspiration for the emperors of town Emperor one - the tongue Empress stood out as a wise and enlightened Emperor who cared for his people and use common sense in the exercise of his rule this is Jews on a mountain 83 kilometers from modern Cheyenne it's also darling the tomb of the Tong Emperor Taizong who died in 649 ad somewhere on this mountain is the shaft leading to Thais Young's burial chamber today no one knows where it is ancient records say that Thais Young's engineers built a plank road up the sheer face of Jiujiang mountain so they could dig the Emperor's tomb where it could never be found we can't explore the lost tomb of Emperor Taizong but we can enter the nearby tomb of his beloved daughter Chang Liu who died in 643 AD at the age of 23 princess Chang Liu went to a Tong style eternity significantly downsized from the luxurious after lives of dynasties past Moe life-size armies of clay attended her only small figurines and no kitchens banquet rooms and toilets awaited her only paintings of the earthly life she would still enjoy in death there were rules about how many figurines could be buried fifty was seventy and how big figurines could be made forty centimeters or fifty centimeters different standards applied to different classes of people the tongue Emperor's were well aware that tombs would be robbed therefore they saw that it would be wasteful to into evaluation tombs this meant that tombs would be less attractive to tomb robbers remain undisturbed and for the spirit there could be an undisturbed afterlife someday in the future archaeologists may finally open the first Empress to excavate the vast burial mounds of the Han Empress and discover the secret mountain chambers of the town if they do what will they find their Imperial corpses astonishingly well-preserved treasures beyond imagination or only what the tomb robbers left behind that day may never come but our few tantalizing glimpses of what lies inside these mega tubes of Rand earth and tunnel drog have placed them among the greatest monuments of the ancient world and among ancient China's greatest mysteries

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Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, chinese pyramids, ancient egypt, ancient china, timeline documentary, ancient history, ancient egyptian history, history channel documentary, history of the world, chinese pyramids documentary, chinese pyramid discovered, TRACKS, tracks travel channel, tracks travel

Id: dV69x7AA5Gw

Length: 50min 8sec (3008 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2019