Episode list

With over 1.3 billion citizens and a land mass barely larger than the USA, it would be easy to think China is just crammed with people, but as Globe Trekker's Ultimate China shows, this is a land of incredible diversity. Megan McCormick starts out in the old capital, Xianyang, which was established over 2000 years ago and is the home of Emperor Qin's huge mausoleum with its army of terracotta warriors. On a brief journey through the history of the nation, Megan McCormick, Justine Shapiro and Zay Harding visit the forbidden city of Beijing and the centuries of Imperial reign. During these centuries, we find that China led the world in arts and sciences and became rich selling silk, porcelain and tea along the silk route and from ports such as Quanzhou. But the Imperial era was brought to an end by the Opium wars with Britain and the series of revolutions that followed, culminating in the communist revolution under Mao Zedong. Justine meets a teacher who experienced Mao's oppression in the cultural revolution and Zay talks to one of the original long marchers who fought beside Mao against Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalist army. China seems to be modernizing at an incredible place, but many millions of Chinese still live peasant lifestyles. Away from the cities, Justine visits the beautiful Miao people of the south west and sees the swinging festival of the Akka people. Zay sees the extraordinary Tolou mud homes of the Hakka people of Fujian. And between them all they see that China has stunning rural landscapes, ranging from jagged mountains to vast deserts. In the midst of that, Chinese ingenuity is everywhere, from elevators up mountains, to the Great Wall of China and, most recently and dramatically, the Three Gorges Dam project which is transforming the Chinese landscape forever.

Megan McCormick visits two islands, Hong Kong and Taiwan, full of past conflicts but also full of history, traditions and interesting stuff to see. She starts her journey in the modern Hong Kong, but she has also time to visit some smaller villages around the city. She even meets movie stuntmen and gets to experience their job. In Taiwan, she starts in the capital, Taipei, and travels across the island until she meets one of the last aboriginal tribes in Taiwan.