‘DRAGON’ TAKES LOOK AT CHINA

Few of us will ever get closer to China than a wok. But watching “The Heart of the Dragon” on PBS will do for now.

Premiering at 8 tonight on Channel 28 is a handsome, wise and fascinating 12-part documentary series that humanizes and personalizes a 5,000-year-old civilization that Westerners tend to regard as a cross between Confucius and Charlie Chan.

Western stereotypes aside, however, the Chinese are merely diverse, not necessarily Confucian or brutal, or even inscrutable.

British executive producer Peter Montagnon and his crews freely filmed inside the People’s Republic of China for 18 months with government permission and later showed the finished documentary to jittery Chinese officials as a courtesy. But Montagnon says there was no censorship.

Hosted by Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer for PBS, “The Heart of the Dragon” has already aired on Britain’s commercially supported Channel Four. Each episode focuses on a specific universal activity such as marrying, working, caring or trading.

Tonight’s topic is remembering.

“To understand a man, you must know his memories,” says narrator Anthony Quayle. The Chinese are a timeless people with a continuity of generations, Quayle notes, a people with many memories.

And many “firsts.” The Chinese invented gunpowder, printing, paper and the magnetic compass. But they also can lay claim, on the negative side, to the first bureaucracy, and one whose existence today, experts say, apparently accustoms Chinese to obstruction and inertia.

It’s a kick knowing that even in 221 BC there were Chinese counterparts to today’s infuriating bureaucrats.

This exposure to Chinese antiquity via TV is healthy for an infant nation like America, one so full of itself and its accomplishments that it sometimes forgets that greatness is fleeting and center stage is merely on loan.

Among the most astounding spectacles in the first hour, for example, is the army--yes, an entire army--of life-size stone figures guarding the grave of Qin Shihuangdi, the first emperor of China.

What fitting grandeur in death for a man who was certain he had created a dynasty that would endure 10,000 generations. It lasted 14 years.

The camera passes across these stone soldiers slowly, dwells on them until they seem almost to come to life.

In a sense they do, in another place and time, as we watch old newsreels of China suffering at the hands of the Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s. That period was followed by the anguished civil war that resulted in the 1949 communist victory.

Mao Tse-tung attempted to fashion the Chinese into a classless society. Maoism sprawls across the second half of the hour, from his Great Leap Forward flop to his brutal Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution during which most of China’s intelligentsia was oppressed or murdered.

Episode 2 of “The Heart of the Dragon” is about eating, from a man who has made a capitalist-style fortune in the takeout chicken business to a restaurant serving 10,000 customers a day in 20 dining rooms.

The political extremism represented by the Red Guards has diminished, but we learn that China remains a nation of extremist eaters whose tastes vary from region to region.

Names that most of us know only from restaurant menus--Szechuan, Canton and others--suddenly assume added meaning as we see the geographic areas that dishes from those regions represent.

Cantonese fare includes monkey brain soup and anything that swims and anything with four legs except tables, according to Quayle. The Chinese also dine on yummy anteater and cooked snake.

Fish is the food staple in some areas, and the fishermen on the Li River in Guangxi have followed in the tradition of their ingenious ancestors by training cormorants to do the catching.

The TV screen offers an amazing sight. Each fisherman has trained a bird to come to his call. He ties a string around its neck to prevent it from swallowing, then puts it into the water. Urged on by its master, the bird plunges under water and returns to the boat with a fish--again and again and again.

What a splendid series.

It probably makes no difference that “The Heart of the Dragon” is yet another important documentary series that was conceived and executed by non-Americans (Montagnon also produced “Civilisation”). All that really matters is its availability to Americans.

Yet its existence is a reminder of the high premium that the British place on documentaries.

Documentaries are a British TV staple. But “Frontline” on PBS is our only regularly scheduled documentary series. And in commercial TV, the traditional long-form exploratory documentary almost has been eclipsed by “60 Minutes” and “20/20” quickies and, far worse, by docudramas that are often more devoted to theatrics than truth.

Meanwhile, “The Heart of the Dragon” plays compellingly on.