0:00:00.300,0:00:06.200
All over Europe, the medieval lower-classes[br]started doing something absolutely unheard-of:

0:00:06.200,0:00:08.106
They started enjoying themselves!

0:00:08.106,0:00:10.512
Some of them even started <i>washing</i>!

0:00:10.512,0:00:13.794
The reason for all this dynamic activity was because,

0:00:13.794,0:00:17.809
as Europe recovered from the chaos and confusion[br]of the 10th century,

0:00:17.809,0:00:19.762
prosperity ... [clears throat],

0:00:19.762,0:00:21.215
if I could just have your attention for a moment,

0:00:21.215,0:00:23.028
prosperity encouraged trade,

0:00:23.028,0:00:26.981
and merchants began to travel around[br]selling anything they could get people to buy.

0:00:26.981,0:00:30.247
Between 1150 and 1300 the population tripled.

0:00:30.247,0:00:31.700
Towns grew up.

0:00:31.700,0:00:34.059
So did the number of craftsmen and professions

0:00:34.059,0:00:35.919
and so did the paperwork

0:00:35.919,0:00:37.731
and the bureaucracy.

0:00:37.731,0:00:40.731
[♪ cheerful ♪]

0:00:40.731,0:00:44.856
If you think about it, these must have been[br]great days for most of them;

0:00:44.856,0:00:46.669
cash to buy things with,

0:00:46.669,0:00:49.747
paying the landlord rent, instead of forced-labor,

0:00:49.747,0:00:52.700
justice perhaps? at the new village law courts,

0:00:52.700,0:00:55.294
even a little "personalized medical-treatment".

0:00:55.294,0:00:56.700
May have been a bit rough,

0:00:56.700,0:00:58.419
but it was better than <i>nothing</i>!

0:00:58.419,0:01:03.169
Well ... almost...

0:01:03.169,0:01:05.762
Ok so a peasant couldn't get to be a prince

0:01:05.762,0:01:11.700
but he <i>could</i> expect his kids to grow up[br]to a better life.

0:01:11.700,0:01:14.153
Meanwhile as the rustic-rollicking continued,

0:01:14.153,0:01:15.559
in the King's palace,

0:01:15.559,0:01:17.200
it was "Lead-Balloon Time".

0:01:17.200,0:01:22.809
I mean, here were all these hayseeds committing[br]the *unforgivable sin* of not doing their duty!

0:01:22.809,0:01:26.434
which was to work till they dropped,[br]and practice the longbow on Sundays.

0:01:26.434,0:01:27.981
You remember the longbow?

0:01:27.981,0:01:32.153
It took a lot of practice to make a good archer,[br]who'd go out and get himself slaughtered for you,

0:01:32.153,0:01:35.169
and these <i>idiots</i> weren't getting the practice!

0:01:35.169,0:01:37.888
It began to look, to the Kings and Princes...

0:01:37.888,0:01:48.450
as if you couldn't go out and have yourself[br]a nice, old-fashioned war anymore!

0:01:48.450,0:01:53.216
And then good-old human ingenuity came out[br]with a less-demanding way to kill people.

0:01:53.216,0:01:56.028
Now to be fair to the Europeans,[br]they didn't actually invent it.

0:01:56.028,0:01:59.169
But they took to it's immense, destructive potential

0:01:59.169,0:02:02.810
with all the gay-abandon of an alcoholoc in a brewery.

0:02:02.810,0:02:05.060
And in case you're wondering why I'm telling you all this

0:02:05.060,0:02:07.153
with my pig friends here

0:02:07.153,0:02:11.825
It's because that one of the first places they found[br]the principle ingreedient for the new terror weapon

0:02:11.825,0:02:13.325
was in a pigsty.

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Why?

0:02:14.513,0:02:17.982
Well, you see a pig's home, is also his toilet.

0:02:17.982,0:02:28.419
And you make gunpowder from urine and dung.

0:02:28.419,0:02:32.138
Using that kind of muck to get to this lethal powder

0:02:32.138,0:02:35.044
involved going through a bit of Chemistry first.

0:02:35.044,0:02:37.247
The urine became "ammonia"

0:02:37.247,0:02:46.903
and the bacteria in the dung,[br]turned the ammonia into a "nitrate".

0:02:46.903,0:02:51.669
Having mixed the mess with wood-ash[br]and then filtered water through it all,

0:02:51.669,0:02:57.060
boiling that water produced "saltpeter" crystals.

0:02:57.060,0:03:02.466
This powder is a mixture of saltpeter, sulphur,[br]and charcoal.

0:03:02.466,0:03:03.732
All you do now

0:03:03.732,0:03:05.372
is apply a flame,

0:03:05.372,0:03:07.278
stand *very far* back,

0:03:07.278,0:03:10.372
and...

0:03:10.372,0:03:21.528
[♪ oriental, ritualistic ♪]

0:03:21.528,0:03:23.544
Gunpowder was a Chinese invention

0:03:23.544,0:03:28.091
and they had it 700 years before we, in the west,[br]got our hands on it.

0:03:28.091,0:03:30.169
And it's very proabable <i>we</i> only got it,

0:03:30.169,0:03:33.716
because the Arabs picked it up in China[br]and brought it back with them,

0:03:33.716,0:03:36.763
like they did with so many Chinese ideas.

0:03:36.763,0:03:40.028
It's very likely that whoever it was,[br](who invented gunpowder)

0:03:40.028,0:03:42.435
he was one of their "philosopher-chemists",

0:03:42.435,0:03:46.435
actually searching for the secret-recipe for immortality.

0:03:46.435,0:03:50.013
Ironic, isn't it?

0:03:50.013,0:04:00.138
[♪ oriental, ritualistic ♪, fire-crackers exploding]

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[shouting] In the main, apart from the odd[br]rocket or granade,

0:04:04.123,0:04:06.982
that was how the chinese used their gunpoweder;

0:04:06.982,0:04:24.232
for fireworks in religious rituals.

0:04:24.232,0:04:28.498
[Buddhist chanting]

0:04:28.498,0:04:30.513
Which brings us for a minute or two,

0:04:30.513,0:04:33.248
to the business about the Chinese inventing everything.

0:04:33.248,0:04:36.826
And yet, not using it way we did.

0:04:36.826,0:04:38.513
This is part of the reason:

0:04:38.513,0:04:43.779
Their view of life.

0:04:43.779,0:04:59.779
[♪ oriental, ritualistic, chimes ♪]

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The thing that's surprises us in the "West"

0:05:02.591,0:05:07.679
because we use everything we can get hold of,[br]to cause change to happen,

0:05:07.679,0:05:10.810
is that the Chinese had so much,

0:05:10.810,0:05:19.982
and changed so little.

0:05:19.982,0:05:22.920
What I mean by "so much",

0:05:22.920,0:05:24.858
is this:

0:05:24.858,0:05:27.264
They had gunpowder, you saw.

0:05:27.264,0:05:29.405
And look what we did with that.

0:05:29.405,0:05:31.155
And then 2000 years ago,

0:05:31.155,0:05:35.421
they used to spin magnetic spoons on[br]pictures of the earth and sky,

0:05:35.421,0:05:40.780
and, depending which way the spoon pointed,[br]when it stopped, they made a politcal prediction.

0:05:40.780,0:05:43.905
When <i>we</i> got hold of that,[br]in the form of the compass needle,

0:05:43.905,0:05:46.093
we used it to conquer the world,

0:05:46.093,0:05:48.046
to set up empires,

0:05:48.046,0:05:52.265
aided in our voyages by a Chinese rudder.

0:05:52.265,0:05:54.077
Chinese looms,

0:05:54.077,0:05:57.484
capeable of making complex patterns like that[br]helped to set up

0:05:57.484,0:06:01.702
the great 13th century, European textile industries.

0:06:01.702,0:06:04.390
A thousand years before us, the Chinese had

0:06:04.390,0:06:05.843
blast furnaces

0:06:05.843,0:06:07.015
steel

0:06:07.015,0:06:07.655
pistons

0:06:07.655,0:06:08.734
cranks

0:06:08.734,0:06:10.812
and... this:

0:06:10.812,0:06:12.953
Paper.

0:06:12.953,0:06:14.859
Part of the reason why,

0:06:14.859,0:06:19.625
in spite of all this, change didn't come in China[br]in the way it did when all this came to the West

0:06:19.625,0:06:21.265
was this:

0:06:21.265,0:06:22.390
Not printing,

0:06:22.390,0:06:23.844
although they invented that too...

0:06:23.844,0:06:29.062
no, this word:

0:06:29.062,0:06:34.281
Tao (道)

0:06:34.281,0:06:35.656
道 -

0:06:35.656,0:06:38.625
it means "the universal way",

0:06:38.625,0:06:41.703
the fundamental order of nature.

0:06:41.703,0:06:46.828
The Taoist scholars were a group who[br]looked for some rational order in things:

0:06:46.828,0:06:49.140
To see how the universe worked.

0:06:49.140,0:06:51.625
And because of their investigations

0:06:51.625,0:06:53.750
gave china what <i>we</i> would call

0:06:53.750,0:06:57.922
"technology".

0:06:57.922,0:07:15.590
[♪ oriental, somber ♪]

0:07:15.590,0:07:18.434
And yet, *explosive change*;

0:07:18.434,0:07:22.840
the kind *we in the west* went through,[br]when we got hold of what China had invented

0:07:22.840,0:07:25.246
didn't happen here.

0:07:25.246,0:07:28.184
And to explain why I'm going to have to[br]hit you with a bit more of... uhh

0:07:28.184,0:07:29.996
"inscrutable chinese philosophy".

0:07:29.996,0:07:35.027
You see the Chinese believed that[br]the universe was filled with "Shen" (神).

0:07:35.027,0:07:37.121
a... a spririt that was in everything.

0:07:37.121,0:07:39.340
And that all you could do was contemplate it.

0:07:39.340,0:07:43.559
Trees, mountains, birds, rivers, were all <i>one</i>,

0:07:43.559,0:07:48.105
and so you couldn't reproduce a model of[br]*a bit of* the universe, and examine it,

0:07:48.105,0:07:50.637
because you couldn't fill it with Shen.

0:07:50.637,0:07:53.621
Now, in the Christian West, we reckoned that

0:07:53.621,0:07:57.387
the universe was made of rational bits and pieces[br]by a rational God,

0:07:57.387,0:08:01.699
and if you were a rational human being,[br]you <i>could</i> make a model of a bit of the universe,

0:08:01.699,0:08:03.699
and then take it apart to see how it worked

0:08:03.699,0:08:06.605
and use what you learned.

0:08:06.605,0:08:11.011
The other fundamental reason why change[br]didn't happen here in China

0:08:11.011,0:08:13.011
was... that:

0:08:13.011,0:08:14.136
Water.

0:08:14.136,0:08:16.824
You see, about 5000 years ago

0:08:16.824,0:08:20.043
the very first great civilized act of the Chinese...

0:08:20.043,0:08:21.308
was irrigation.

0:08:21.308,0:08:22.996
On a <i>vast</i> scale.

0:08:22.996,0:08:24.996
And that needed centralized planning

0:08:24.996,0:08:27.000
and that needed a bureaucracy.

0:08:27.000,0:08:28.949
And what a bureaucracy!

0:08:28.949,0:08:30.902
They pigeonholed everybody,

0:08:30.902,0:08:32.855
and you <i>stayed</i> in your pigeonhole.

0:08:32.855,0:08:34.386
I mean, you were a merchant,

0:08:34.386,0:08:37.886
you saw a bit of technology and you thought, "ha![br]this will give me a lead over the other fellow,"

0:08:37.886,0:08:39.840
"I'll rise in the world"

0:08:39.840,0:08:41.074
No way.

0:08:41.074,0:08:43.621
You were not permitted to rise in the world.

0:08:43.621,0:08:45.371
So you didn't bother.

0:08:45.371,0:08:46.777
No incentive?

0:08:46.777,0:08:48.714
No change.

0:08:48.714,0:08:50.871
Whereas in the medieval West...

0:08:50.871,0:08:53.652
you had a little money, you got ahead;

0:08:53.652,0:08:55.558
profit-motivate, you know?

0:08:55.558,0:08:58.574
And that is why we were able to do,[br]with technology,

0:08:58.574,0:09:00.855
what the Chinese could <i>never</i> have done.

0:09:00.855,0:09:02.933
Like... for instance,

0:09:02.933,0:09:05.839
putting gunpowder into one of these:

0:09:05.839,0:09:07.480
[bell rings]

0:09:07.480,0:09:13.699
Or, to be more accurate, one of those:

0:09:13.699,0:09:16.918
The fact that bell-making was a peaceful,[br]religious business,

0:09:16.918,0:09:20.730
didn't stop 13th century Europeans from[br]grabbing the idea!

0:09:20.730,0:09:23.261
Look how easy it was to adapt:

0:09:23.261,0:09:25.167
And the bell becomes a bombard.

0:09:25.167,0:09:26.808
Instant artillery!

0:09:26.808,0:09:33.058
For the Princes and Generals, happily,[br]it was business-as-usual once more.

0:09:33.058,0:09:43.323
[♪ church bells ♪]

0:09:43.323,0:09:45.308
This picturesque little town

0:09:45.308,0:09:48.398
called (inaudible), near the Yugoslav border,

0:09:48.398,0:09:54.417
was one of the first places where the exciting[br]new way of killing people was tried-out (1327)

0:09:54.417,0:09:56.605
by a bunch of passing Germans.

0:09:56.605,0:09:57.917
Now, early on,

0:09:57.917,9:59:59.000
the new guns made...