I worked on a 12-part TV documentary series on China in the early 80s which went out weekly from January 1984 on the then-new Channel Four. It was part of a series of series: a ten-parter called The Russians; a ten-parter called The Arabs; we managed to negotiate a 12-parter because we shot more material than originally anticipated. We then had to change our title from The Chinese to The Heart of The Dragon because a Canadian six-parter with our original name aired a few months into our two-year project.
Each 54-minute episode (with a commercial break) was based on a theme and named accordingly, e.g., Eating, Working, Living, Discovering. The first was Remembering, an introduction to the history of China, with the first half focusing on pre-1949 China, and the second on post-1949 China. In the pre-1949 half, the commentary said emperors in imperial China were believed to have been given the mandate of Heaven to rule.
A few weeks before the first episode was to be aired, we invited journalists to view the video copy in our office so that they could write up previews. One of them rang me after her viewing, and said, “I’ve just viewed your pre-broadcast fine cut, and need to fill in a bit of detail. Your narrative mentioned that in imperial China, people accepted emperors as their rulers because they believed emperors had the right to rule over them by dint of their having been given the mandate of Heaven. I wonder if you could let me have a photocopy of that mandate?”
(London, 1984)
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