Sima Qian: Grand Historian

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...

4 Touko 201813min

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...

3 Touko 201813min

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...

2 Touko 201813min

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...

1 Touko 201813min

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...

30 Huhti 201813min

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...

27 Huhti 201813min

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...

26 Huhti 201813min

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...

25 Huhti 201813min