Видео 187
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52:26

The Buddhist Merlin

30:22

The Poet Kings: Taking Hinduism to Southeast Asia

47:36

The Lady Macbeth of China

50:16

The Dragon Empress: China’s Game of Thrones

32:03

Gold & God: Connecting India & Ancient Rome

38:58

Scotland: A Nation in Crisis

When charting the rise of Scotland’s global influence, few events have been as tragically remarkable as the Darien Scheme of 1698, which saw woefully unprepared Scottish pioneers attempt to settle and colonise the Isthmus of Panama. Scotland during this period was a country bound to England under one crown, originally that of James I and VI, though still in its own right a sovereign state. However, competitive enmity was developing between the two neighbours over the question of empire and their competing ambitions overseas, with England increasingly restricting Scottish trade as a result. This, and a bad harvest saw Scottish finances in dire straits. So it was that the Scottish governmen...

Видео

52:26

The God Kings of Angkor Wat

Просмотров 46714 часов назад

In the 9th century AD, two years after the Holy Roman Empire was established in Western Christendom, another world-shaking empire was rising in the east, more powerful even than that of Charlemagne and far wealthier. Born in what is today Northern Cambodia but long before the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, the mighty Khmer empire dominated most of mainland Southeast Asia, stretching as far north a...

30:22

The Buddhist Merlin

Просмотров 32721 час назад

While in the West the legends of King Arthur were being born, a Buddhist tantric magician of immense magical powers - Vajrabodhi - was enshrining himself as the Merlin of first India, and then China. Undeniably one of the most extraordinary characters of the 8th century, Vajrabodhi would play a crucial role in transporting Buddhism to the Chinese court, along with Indian scholarship. After bein...

The Poet Kings: Taking Hinduism to Southeast Asia

47:36

The Poet Kings: Taking Hinduism to Southeast Asia

Просмотров 75914 дней назад

India’s transformation of the ancient world is indisputable, and tangible evidence of this can be found in the magnificent Hindu and Buddhist temples scattered across the landscapes of South East Asia. But what was the process by which India transported its vast empire of art, culture, architecture, technology, religion and even writing to South East Asia? The story largely derives in the ascen...

50:16

The Lady Macbeth of China

Просмотров 46214 дней назад

Having garnered absolute power through bloody means, Empress Wu Zetian begins seeing apparitions, haunted by her violent schemes. With her husband incapacitated, the Empress at first held counsel on his behalf from behind a curtain. But she soon officially proclaimed herself a divine ruler. Working alongside a prominent Buddhist monk, she built temples and universities in China, creating a new ...

The Dragon Empress: China’s Game of Thrones

32:03

The Dragon Empress: China’s Game of Thrones

Просмотров 66821 день назад

The inculcation of Buddhism from India as the state religion in China was enabled by the violent rise of China’s only ever woman Emperor. Raised by pious Buddhist parents, Wu Zetian left a trail of bodies in her wake as she charted a path to absolute power. From a lowly ranked concubine in the imperial harem to the corridors of power, she used Buddhism to legitimise her unprecedented claim to r...

Gold & God: Connecting India & Ancient Rome

38:58

Gold & God: Connecting India & Ancient Rome

Просмотров 88321 день назад

It was actually India, not China, that was the greatest trading partner of the Roman Empire. During this era, it’s clear that sea travel was the fastest, most economical and safest way to move people and goods in the pre-modern world, costing about a fifth of the price of equivalent land transport. The Golden Road of early east-west commerce, in other words, lay less overland, through a Persia ...

44:29

The Golden Road: Rise of the Indosphere

Просмотров 1,2 тыс.28 дней назад

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific. Listen as Anita and William discuss his new book and the rise of t...

The Vietnam War: Nixon, Vietnamisation, and the Fall of Saigon

56:45

The Vietnam War: Nixon, Vietnamisation, and the Fall of Saigon

Просмотров 99728 дней назад

With Richard Nixon now in the White House and not wanting to have his presidency consumed by Vietnam like his predecessor’s was, he begins to search for ways to disentangle America from the war. It begins with Vietnamisation and an attempt to reduce South Vietnamese reliance on the Americans, but soon he goes to China and starts making moves on the world stage to reduce Soviet and Chinese suppo...

The Vietnam War: Lyndon Johnson, Americanisation, and Operation Rolling Thunder

54:02

The Vietnam War: Lyndon Johnson, Americanisation, and Operation Rolling Thunder

Просмотров 1,2 тыс.Месяц назад

With the death of JFK, Lyndon B. Johnson took over the Presidency and immediately had to wrestle with America’s relationship with Vietnam after the killing of Diem. Right from the start he prophesised that it would be his downfall and so it was. He consistently resented it and the distraction it was from his domestic agenda, the Great Society. Over his five years in charge, LBJ Americanised the...

The Vietnam War: The Rise of Ho Chi Minh

59:34

The Vietnam War: The Rise of Ho Chi Minh

Просмотров 1,4 тыс.Месяц назад

Vietnam, or Indochina as it was known, had been under French colonial rule since the nineteenth century. This was until the Vietnamese nationalist group, the Viet Minh, took on the French in 1946. Ho Chi Minh, son of a Confucian scholar, former chef in Boston, and lover of French literature, was at their head. The fighting came to an end in 1954 with the Geneva conference splitting the country ...

52:38

The CIA vs Fidel Castro

Просмотров 809Месяц назад

Following the fall of Batista, the Cuban revolution took a more radical turn. Castro was not a communist to begin with, but as those around him became increasingly Marxist, the CIA’s desire to regain control of the island grew. With the failure of JFK’s Bay of Pigs invasion, events escalated into the Cuban Missile Crisis as the USSR brought nuclear weapons to America’s doorstep. Listen as Anita...

54:52

The Cuban Revolution

Просмотров 1,2 тыс.Месяц назад

It’s 1959 and the swaggering Cuban revolutionary, Fidel Castro, has just overthrown the unpopular American backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Che Guevara, the Marxist physician whose face would become an internationally recognised symbol of resistance, is at his side. But how did the small Caribbean nation go from a profitable outpost of the Spanish empire to a heady American party island, rif...

48:47

The Korean War: Dividing the Peninsula

Просмотров 839Месяц назад

The Korean War was a brutal affair. It is estimated that 3,000,000 people were killed in the conflict that absolutely devastated the Korean Peninsula. And the legacy of it is still with us today; it was over the course of this war that the division between North and South solidified into two separate nations. It was also at this time that Kim Il Sung rose to prominence, establishing North Korea...

44:51

The Birth of North Korea

Просмотров 983Месяц назад

Whilst we know the Korean Peninsula is split into two quite separate countries, North Korea and South Korea, that has not always been been the case. Korea was an independent, singular nation until the Japanese colonised it at the start of the 20th century. This collapsed after the Second World War, at which time the USA and Russia swept in to create their own spheres of influence, separated by ...