Puyi, the Last Emperor of China

China Before China, an eight-episode documentary that tells stories of the origins and early development of Chinese civilization based on key archaeological findings.

Tracing Xi Jinping's defining moments, how he's exercising his power and the impact on China and relations with the U.S.

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.

Retrace almost 2,000 years of Chinese ancient history – a period that holds vital clues to understanding how this powerful nation was built. Witness the evolution of civilization and visit the places where the dignitaries are buried, also visit the mausoleum of China's first emperor Qin Shi Huang Di.

China's First Emperor was a documentary aired on The History Channel on 2008. It tells the story of Qin Shi Huang's career as a military leader and ruthless ruler and how he unified China during the Qin Dynasty. He is played by Xu Peng Kai.

Michael Wood embarks on a great historical adventure, exploring the stories, people and landscapes that have helped create China's distinctive character and genius over four thousand years.

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.

China's history of the last 200 years seems like a boomerang, returning to the West what it once unleashed. The series reveals how devastating the struggles for identity and power have been for the population since the fall of the "Middle Kingdom," and how closely these tragedies are intertwined with our own. Great hopes were placed in a wide variety of visions for the future—and each time, bitter disappointment ensued. From the decline of the empire to its resurgence as a superpower, China's history is both a dream and a nightmare, in which human life is of little value.