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The bells, and the ancient methods of playing them, travelled well beyond the boundaries of China, and the closest surviving form of this ancient music is today found not in China but in the Korean court music that originated in the twelfth century and is still played in Korea now.

In Europe we rarely listen to music that is more than 500 or 600 years old, but the music of the ancient Chinese bells has been resonating harmoniously for more than 2,500 years, symbolizing not only the sound of an era but the underlying political ideals of an ancient society and its modern successors. It’s a Confucian principle that China once again finds very appealing today – although that hasn’t always been the case. Here is Isabel Hilton again:

Confucianism was really the soul of the Chinese state for the best part of 2,000 years, but in the early twentieth century it was very strongly criticized by the modernizers, the revolutionaries, the people who blamed Confucianism for the decline of China in the previous 200 years, and it fell out of favour. But Confucianism never really went away. Curiously, harmonious society is what we hear today on the lips of Chinese leaders. What the leadership today wants is a society that is more content, in which people are content with their station, so no more class struggle; in which the leaders are seen to embody virtue as in the old Confucian idea. It is their virtue that makes people accept their right to rule. So we’ve seen the taking of this very old idea of harmony, and we’re seeing it in a modern form to justify a static political system, a system in which the right to rule is not questioned.

And bells are still going strong. The ancient bells used for the 1997 Hong Kong ceremony were played again at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. And Confucius is now, it seems, the flavour of the decade. He has his own $25 million biopic, a bestselling book, a TV series and a hundred-part animated series on his teachings. The age of Confucius has come again.

PART SEVEN

Empire Builders

300 BC–AD 10

Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire in 334 BC ushered in an age of megalomaniac rulers and great empires. Although there had been empires before, this was the first time regional superpowers emerged in different parts of the globe. In the Middle East and the Mediterranean, Alexander became a model for rulers to emulate or reject: Augustus, the first Roman emperor, imitated Alexander by using his own image to represent imperial power to his subjects. In contrast, the Greek rulers of Egypt looked back to Egypt’s past in times of political weakness, and in India the Emperor Ashoka rejected oppressive rule altogether, promoting his peaceful philosophy through inscriptions on pillars across the subcontinent. While Ashoka’s empire did not last long beyond his lifetime, his ideals survived. The Roman Empire continued for the next 400 years, rivalled in size, population and sophistication only by the Han Dynasty in China, where the state produced luxury goods to win both admiration and obedience.

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Coin with Head of Alexander

Silver coin of Alexander the Great, minted in Lampsakos (Lapseki), Turkey

MINTED 305–281 BC

Just over 2,000 years ago there were, in Europe and Asia, great empires whose legacies are still strongly felt in the world today – the Roman Empire in the West, the empire of Ashoka in India and the Han Dynasty in China. I want to examine how power in such empires is constructed and projected. Military might is just the beginning – it’s the easy part. How does a ruler stamp his authority on the very minds of his subjects? In this area images are generally more effective than words, and the most effective of all images are those we see so often that we hardly notice them: coins. So the ambitious ruler shapes the currency: the message is on the money, and that message can live on long after the ruler is dead. Although this silver coin shows the