No cast information available.
In the heart of Beijing lies the largest palace in the world, The Forbidden City. For five hundred years, it served as the home of the almighty Emperors of China along with their wives, concubines, and entourages of tens of thousands of eunuchs and civil servants. But the Forbidden City is more than an imperial residence; it is the center of the universe, a unique complex of structures revealing a hierarchy of power both imperial and divine.
Millions of tourists visit Angkor Wat in Cambodia every year to marvel at its remarkable architecture, yet most are probably unaware that when it was built nearly 1,000 years ago it was even more impressive. Using remote sensing technology, scientists now know what is hidden beneath the nearby paddy fields and jungle: a sophisticated metropolis with an elaborate network of houses, canals, boulevards and temples covering 30 square kilometres that housed three-quarters of a million people. To put that into perspective, London at that time was home to just 18,000. These previously hidden finds tell us a great deal about life during the golden age of the powerful Khmer dynasty.
No two volcanoes are alike; each one has its own distinctive landscape, climate, and geological context. Just as unique are the people we meet along the way who help us comprehend how greatly our planet – and our lives – have been shaped by volcanic phenomena. For the scientific aspect of each episode, we explore the very diverse range of questions raised by volcanic phenomena in such varied fields as earth sciences, climatology, biodiversity, oceanography, geography, agronomics, and archaeology. The cultural part of the show delves into mythology, religion, philosophy, folk and artistic traditions, cooking, and ways of life.
Chasing Mummies: The Amazing Adventures of Zahi Hawass is a reality television series which is airing on The History Channel in the United States. Produced by Boutique TV, this series depicts the adventures of archaeologist and Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass and his discoveries in Egypt as he is followed by young archeological fellows and a camera crew. The series began on Wednesday, 14 July 2010 and aired Wednesdays at 10pm on the History Channel. The shows illustrates the complexities in the almost never-ending quest to preserve and discover artifacts from ancient Egypt.
This program reveals the unorthodox life of Puyi, the last Emperor of China, through the use of rare footage from the period. Puyi's story, set against the immense luxury of the Chinese nobility, the decadent 1930s in Tianjin, the upheaval of World War II, the bleakness of prison, plus the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, reflects the turbulent history of China and its people during the early and middle 20th Century.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Mao Tsetung established a system of labor camps for systematic repression, known as Laogai, an abbreviation for "Reform Through Labor". In such camps, forced labor and physical and mental torture were used to bring about a so-called mental reform, re-education in the spirit of the Chinese Communist Party. Millions of Chinese were affected. Many were executed. In hundreds of camps, the Party took advantage of the prisoners' free labor to build the economy. Self-criticism and denunciation were often the only way to escape martyrdom. Successive waves of purges culminated in the Cultural Revolution, which saw massive human rights abuses, political assassinations, massacres, and exiles in remote parts of the country. Using unreleased archive footage, the documentary tells the story of the invention, development and improvement of China's totalitarian system of surveillance and repression up to the present day, never told before.
