One question from each film, answered properly – with the sources.
Season One: The Art of Chinese Tea
- Why Is the “Ancient” Chinese Tea Ceremony So New?Gongfu tea looks ancient. It began as a regional Chaozhou habit, was rebuilt in Taiwan in the twentieth century, and returned to the mainland after the 1980s – with Japanese elements folded in and later forgotten.
- Why Do the Same Leaves Make Six Different Teas?One plant makes green, white, yellow, oolong, black and dark tea. What separates them is what happens to the leaf after it is picked.
The Silk Road
- Who Actually Opened the Silk Road?In 138 BC a Han envoy was sent west to find an ally. He failed – and came home with the first reliable Chinese account of Central Asia.
- What Was the Jade Gate?Two low forts of rammed earth, about 68 kilometres apart in the Gobi, marked the western edge of Han China. Every caravan heading west passed one of them.
- How Did Goods Actually Travel the Silk Road?Not in one journey and not by one merchant. Goods moved through a chain of trading posts and middlemen, and the price grew at every stage.
- How Big Was Chang’an, the Tang Capital?A walled grid of 108 residential wards and two markets, holding about a million people – for a time the largest city in the world.
- What Is Inside the Mogao Caves?492 decorated cave temples cut into a cliff at Dunhuang, holding some 45,000 square metres of wall painting – the largest body of Buddhist art in China.
- How Is Silk Made, Step by Step?One caterpillar, one mulberry leaf and a single unbroken filament about a kilometre long: the process behind the cloth that travelled the Silk Road.
- How Did Buddhism Reach China?Not by conquest or decree, but along the trade routes – carried by anonymous monks who translated texts as they travelled.
- Which Chinese Inventions Travelled the Silk Road?Paper and printing, and later gunpowder – three technologies that left China along the same routes as silk, and changed what the west could do.
- When Did the Silk Road Become a Railway?The overland corridor was rebuilt as steel in the twentieth century – but the trains only started running regularly after 2011.
- What Was the Maritime Silk Road?From about 50 BC, ships could ride the monsoon winds across the Arabian Sea – and the sea route slowly took the trade away from the land.
- Who Restores the Dunhuang Caves?The Dunhuang Academy, working with the Getty Conservation Institute since 1989 – and the enemy is not time, it is salt.
- Is the Silk Road Still There?The trade route ended. The corridor did not – it was rebuilt as rail, and the arguments about it are the same ones as two thousand years ago.
Every claim is drawn from the sources listed at the foot of each piece. Anything we could not confirm has been left out.