7月2日-世界遺産（5）  

央視國際 (2004年07月07日 15:18)

　　本期關鍵詞：

　　the Taj Mahal 泰姬陵

　　the Great Pyramids金字塔

　　the Great Wall 長城

　　泰姬陵：The lovers in this story are the 17th century indian emperor shah jehan (shah juh-han) and his wife mumtaz mahal (moo-mtaz may-hal)

　　“This is something unique, I should say, for a, an emperor in this case, he really loved her.”

　　She took a leading role in advising him, which is something unique for a woman to do for a husband who's an emperor.

　　Over the course of their nineteen year marriage she gave birth to 14 children. but in 1631 while trying to deliver their fifteenth—she tragically died.

　　He was heartbroken when she died, And after her death, he decided to build the world's greatest monument ever built, for love.”

　　He ordered the royal architects to design the most beautiful building the world has known and decided to name it after his beloved, mum-taz mahal.

　　He summoned twenty-thousand laborers and sent caravans to all corners of his empire in search of precious metals and gems.

　　Imagine the amount of time these people have taken to make these things. You know, I mean, by hand.”

　　And after seventeen years of construction, shah jehan’s monument was completed and his beloved empress was moved to her final resting place.

　　Everything had gone according to plan, but shah jehan’s luck was about to change… in 1658, just four years after the completion of the taj mahal, he was thrown out of power.

　　Unfortunately, his son, Aran Azibe imprisoned him, his own father. And the last seven years of his life he spent in prison. And he was allowed to look at Taj Mahal through a window.”

　　I am sure he was thinking about his wife and the romance they had. And, he was, heart broken.

　　His life was in ruins, but when he died his ultimate wish was granted… he was buried beside his beloved wife in the taj mahal.

　　For devoting the wealth and power of an empire to love, the taj mahal rests at number six on our countdown.

　　金字塔：It took them only 400 years to get from nothing to the biggest. And within a short time you got pharaohs building the biggest things ever built on earth.”

　　Built 4,000 years ago, the three great pyramids at Giza, in thee Egyptian desert remain the most colossal buildings ever constructed.

　　It's a statement for the present and it's a statement for the ages aren't we great. We have this great ruler. We build these mighty works.

　　As an anthropologist and author, jared diamond has always been fascinated by great civilizations.

　　I can tell you with dead certainty what happened as if I had been there myself. Here you've got this state that's just formed and it doesn't yet have a big army and it's got to be able to impress the surrounding people without yet having the big army. What's it going to do? Well, one thing to do is to build something big that really shows off your power.”

　　That message is still loud and clear today on the outskirts of the sprawling Egyptian capitol, Cairo, where modern skyscrapers seem dwarfed by these gigantic monuments to the power of the pharaohs.

　　The pyramids were built by Egyptians under the orders of the Egyptian leader, whose title was pharaoh. What we call them today is the 4th dynasty. There was a sequence of pharaohs culminating around 2615 B.C. with the pharaoh Cheops who built the biggest thing ever built, the Great Pyramid.

　　Also known as khu-fu, this massive structure was the was the slam dunk of pyramid building and no future Pharoah ever tried to match it.

　　Once you've put this big thing up, Cheops has built a pyramid 770 feet on one side and 481 feet tall, what is the next guy going to do. Is he going to build a pyramid a mile long and two miles high? Impossible. You stop competing.”

　　How ancient builders managed to build these massive structures has never been fully answered but the effort clearly required brains and brawn.

　　“Was there engineering genius involved? Yes, there was. For example, when you're putting the block right at the top, how are you going to lug a block of stone that weighs several tons 480 feet up a structure. How are you going to do it at all, and how are you going to do it without leaving scratches on all the rest of the structure. And how many people does it take to drag a block weighing several tons 480 feet up into the sky.

　　Approximately, 2.3 million blocks of stone were cut, transported and assembled to create the Great Pyramid

　　The Paroahs may have set out to build magnificent tombs for themselves, but in the end they created monuments to human potential.

　　長城：It’s an immeasurable human achievement. There is no comparison.

　　“This Wall is the most time consuming, material consuming, labor intensive project, construction project in Human history. In my eyes, it is the ultimate human construction.

　　Englishman William Lindesay may be the only person on earth who has walked the entire length of the great wall of china.

　　William’s trip took five months. and he walked more than three thousand miles… which is over twenty miles a day.

　　Like a massive sleeping dragon, the great wall snakes across china’s landscape, rising and falling with the contours of the countryside.

　　“The thing that fascinates me about the great wall is, I believe it's the world's greatest open air museum. You, you are walking on history.”

　　It's part of the geography of China, and this is totally unique, totally unique. That's what makes it a wonder of the world.

　　The person responsible for this great wonder was a powerful war lord named chin chu wong.

　　The map of China looked like a jig saw. Seven pieces, and seven kingdoms vying for power, but one of these kingdoms the Chin kingdom conquered the other six kingdoms to create what is regarded as the first centralized empire in Chinese history.

　　Emperor chin was brash and ambitious but he knew he could never defeat the ruthless horseriding warriors to the north… the mongols.

　　[He] decided that a wall should be built to prevent those Mongols invading again. So he started the very, very long history of Great Wall building.

　　In ten years, the emperor chin achieved his goal.. the equivalent of erecting a wall from california to new york with bare hands and rudimentary tools.

　　That’s a mile of new wall every day for almost four thousand days.

　　And for another 2ooo years Chinese dynasties built walls. in the end a whole network of walls spread across the northern tier of the country… ten feet across and twenty feet tall. 35-thousand miles in total. enough to more than circle the globe.

　　“In the past, the Great Wall Of China served very real, practical needs. To defend the country. Now it's regarded as a symbol, the soul of the Chinese Nation.”

責編：蘭華 　來源：CCTV.com