China’s Greatest Treasures: from antiquities to apps, BBC series looks at their influence today

For his upcoming series China’s Greatest Treasures, art critic and BBC host Alastair Sooke shows how important works of Chinese art continue to influence the nation today.

In the first episode entitled “Family and Ancestors”, Sooke, 37, goes to the Shanghai Museum to see the 3,000-year-old Da Ke Ding, a large bronze cauldron used for ritual sacrifices to powerful ancestors during the Zhou dynasty. Sooke later goes to a town called Baogai in Hunan province during Ching Ming, the annual tomb-sweeping festival.

“I was a token member of the Liao family and got to place incense sticks into a similar-looking cauldron to pay respects to the Liao ancestors,” Sooke recalls, speaking on the phone to the Post from London. “It was very moving to see this continuity, particularly the way the family was honoured – not just from the past centuries, but millennia.”

Other subjects covered in the series, which kicks off on October 5, include calligraphy, food, China’s links with the rest of the world, mass production, and Chinese-made apps. So not all the treasures featured in the series are antiquities.

Sooke is the host of such shows as An Art Lovers’ Guide, Treasures of Ancient Greece and Trump on Culture: Brave New World? He explains how he and UK-based Mustang Films, which co-produced China’s Greatest Treasures with a subsidiary of China’s CCTV state broadcaster in collaboration with BBC World News, went through months of meetings with Chinese art experts in Britain to pare down a massive wish list of treasures they wanted to feature in the six-part series.

“We do a different approach where we feature particular artefacts and parachute in and tell a focused story on the artefact,” Sooke says. “We link them with China today and see why they still resonate, why they are still relevant.”

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Sooke, who is the chief art critic for British newspaper The Daily Telegraph and has written three books about art, is quick to admit he is no Chinese art expert, but he hopes viewers will learn along with him as he talks to art experts in China.

It was Mustang Films’ collaboration with the CCTV subsidiary, CDIMC (CCTV Documentary International Media Company), which opened doors to film special places and museums.

“I wonder if we would get the same access if we didn’t work with CDIMC,” Sooke says. “We were able to film on the open floor of the terracotta warriors [at the Emperor Qin Shihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum in Xian] and behind the scenes at the Forbidden City.

“We had intense negotiations about how much access we had to fragile works of art like scroll paintings and calligraphy,” he adds. “We had to rehearse with a replica and then we only had 20 minutes to shoot with the real thing. So you can see how treasured the art is in China.”

This was Sooke’s second visit to China; the first was in 2015 when he went to Shanghai to film Soupcans and Superstars: How Pop Art Changed the World. But the filming schedule for China’s Greatest Treasures was much more intense; running from February to May this year, it took place in three three-week blocks, with two episodes each time, and eight to 10 days’ break back in the UK in between.

“It was great fun, and quite exhausting,” Sooke says. “For the tomb-sweeping shoot in Baogai, we arrived there the day before to build a rapport with the locals because we were going right into it the next morning. And I’m glad we did that because it paid dividends.”

He also has fond memories of arriving at Huashan Mountain in Xian the night before the shoot there, where the entire crew ate and slept in a dormitory for 10 people. They had to wake up early the next morning to film the sunrise.

“I looked out at the landscape and I saw the Chinese landscape painting in front of me: the light, the shade, even the birds. It sounds cliché but it felt quite magical,” he says. “It was like seeing scrolls unfurling before your eyes. It was not the same feeling you get reading a caption of a scroll painting in [London’s] Victoria and Albert Museum.”

Although Sooke may be a bona fide art critic, he says he failed at being a food critic, struggling to find words to describe what he was eating in one episode.

“Although the sequence didn’t make the final cut, one of my happiest memories of the shoot was the day we spent filming in a culinary school in Changsha … I was in awe of the chefs who taught me about the so-called ‘eight treasures’ of Chinese cuisine,” he says.

“My guide, a brilliant food blogger from Beijing, was eloquent on the history and cultural significance of each dish, whereas my analysis didn’t extend much beyond ‘delicious!’ or ‘spicy!’”

Despite being at a loss for words himself, Sooke hopes viewers will enjoy a more spontaneous inside look at China.

“The Chinese are very hospitable. We had many banquets that involved the custom of drinking baijiu [a Chinese spirit] where there is a trajectory. At first the toasts sounded formal between the British and the hosts, complimenting each other, and as the dinner progressed it became more raucous and informal,” Sooke says.

“I hope the latter spirit is conveyed and captured in the series.”

China’s Greatest Treasures, Now TV (Ch 320), Hong Kong Cable TV (Ch 122) and TVB/myTVsuper (CH 709), as well as BBC World News.