Artifacts — Season 1, Episode 2: Sacred Spaces
Documentary • 30 min • 1 season, 4 episodes • ★ 6.8/10
Episode synopsis
A very long time ago, far away in China, a villager living along the banks of the Yellow River built a simple mud hut to shelter his family. Thousands of years later in the year 1420, the empire's best craftsmen put the final touches on the ultimate masterpiece of Chinese architecture - the Temple of Heaven. Chinese buildings evolved from simple shelters into complex, magnificent structures with great, swooping roofs, stately columns, and rich detail. Between this simple mud hut and this amazingly complex structure - its every detail full of cosmological symbolism - is a tale of emperors, monks, scholars and genius craftsmen - a story which explains an architectural tradition of great beauty and flexibility. And to start this story at the beginning, we have to leap back two millennia, to when the brilliant tyrant Qin Shihuang becomes the first emperor of a unified China.
About Artifacts
How did an Indian Buddhist shrine influence a Japanese pagoda? How are Italian pigs and cowry shells related to porcelain? Why did the ferocious warriors of Mongolia wear silk underwear? And how did wood block printing bring about a revolution in Japan and in European culture? These intriguing questions are investigated in Artifacts, a series that explores the origins and hidden connections among the art and artifacts of the great cultures and belief systems across Asia - on a journey through time and across continents from India to Thailand, China and Japan - to understand the impact of calligraphy, porcelain, architecture, metallurgy, wood block printing and silk on Asian history and on the history of the world in general.