They Chose China

In January 1954, months after the end of the Korean War, U.S. soldiers held in POW camps were at last free to return home. A small group, however, refused repatriation to the U.S. and, after being given 90 days to reconsider their decision, 21 American soldiers decided to stay in China. In They Chose China, Academy Award-nominated Chinese documentarian Shuibo Wang tells the controversial story of these forgotten American dissidents.




Using rare archival footage, excerpts from American and Chinese TV programs, as well as period and contemporary interviews, They Chose China chronicles the fascinating history of this group of young Americans who were hailed in China as "peace fighters" and denounced in America as "turncoats" and "traitors." U.S. media claimed that these young POW's had been "brainwashed" by the Chinese communists. The film shows conditions inside these Chinese camps, featuring never-before-seen footage, plus contemporary interviews with some of the camps' Chinese translators, instructors, lecturers, and officers.

The majority of the 21 Americans became disillusioned and returned to America, where they recanted their statements and were imprisoned by the military. Others remained in China, got educations, worked in a variety of jobs, married and raised families. In interviews today, several of the surviving men—including those who remained in China and those who returned to the U.S—along with members of their families recount their unusual experiences, explain their thinking at the time, and the nature of their beliefs today.

The Forgotten Refugees

The Forgotten Refugees is a documentary about the mass exodus of Jews from Arab countries and Iran in the 20th century. The Forgotten Refugees explores the history and destruction of Middle Eastern and North African Jewish communities, some of which had existed for over 2,500 years.




Employing extensive testimony of survivors from Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Iran, the film recounts the stories – of joy and of suffering – that nearly a million individuals have carried with them for so long. Segments on the contributions of Middle Eastern Jews to politics, business and music, testify to the enormously rich cultures which fleeing Jews left behind.

Watch forgotten refugees.avi in Faith & Spirituality | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

The film weaves personal stories with dramatic archival footage of rescue missions, historic images of exodus and resettlement, and analysis by contemporary scholars, to tell the story of how and why the Arab world’s Jewish population declined from one million in 1945 to several thousand today.

Click here for the official website.

Born into Brothels

Born into Brothels is an inspiring look at the transformative journey of a group of extraordinary children in Calcutta’s red light district. Voted Best Documentary by the National Board of Review and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Born into Brothels, which was produced and directed by New York based filmmakers Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, also garnered over 20 major film festival awards including the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and the Best Documentary Award at the Seattle International Film Festival.




A tribute to the resiliency of childhood and the restorative power of art, Born into Brothels is a portrait of several unforgettable children who live in the red light district of Calcutta where their mothers work as prostitutes. Zana Briski, a New York based photographer, gives each of these youngsters a camera and teaches them how to take pictures, simultaneously causing them to look at their world with new eyes. Together with Ross Kauffman, Briski captures the magical way in which beauty can be found in the most unlikely of places and how a bright and promising future becomes a possibility for children who previously had no future at all.

Touching and heartfelt, yet devoid of sentimentality, Born into Brothels defies the tear-stained tourist snapshot of the global underbelly. Briski spent years with these children and became a part of their lives. Their photographs are prisms into their souls, rather than anthropological curiosities, and a true testimony to the power of the indelible creative spirit.

Inside North Korea

Is it just me, or is North Korea one of the most insane places in the world these days? Are you ready to cross into one of the world's most secretive nations, for a rare glimpse of the country and its absolute dictator Kim Jong Il. In this documentary, Lisa Ling takes us on a rare look inside North Korea - something few Americans have ever been able to do.




Posing as an undercover medical coordinator and closely guarded throughout her trip, Lisa moves inside the most isolated nation in the world, encountering a society completely dominated by government and dictatorship. Glimpse life inside North Korea as you've never seen before with personal accounts and powerful footage. Witness first-hand efforts by humanitarians and the challenges they face from the rogue regime.

North Korea offers us a vision of perhaps the most excessive personality cult in modern history. Wiki has this to say about the Kim Jong Il...

Critics maintain Kim Jong-il is the centre of an elaborate personality cult inherited from his father and founder of the DPRK, Kim Il-sung. Defectors have been quoted as saying that North Korean schools deify both father and son. He is often the centre of attention throughout ordinary life in the DPRK. His birthday is one of the most important public holidays in the country.

On his 60th birthday (based on his official date of birth), mass celebrations occurred throughout the country. One point of view is that Kim Jong Il's cult of personality is solely out of respect for Kim Il-sung or out of fear of punishment for failure to pay homage. Media and government sources from outside of North Korea generally support this view, while North Korean government sources say that it is genuine hero worship. The song No Motherland Without You, sung by the North Korean Army Choir, was created especially for Kim and is one of the most popular tunes in the country.

The Dark Side Of Everest

It's the highest peak in the world and holds a unique fascination for extreme climbers. The Dark Side Of Everest asks what it is about the mountain that seduces the sane and taunts the reckless. Why are people prepared to sacrifice their relationships, bank balances and even their lives, just to be able to say: "I've stood on top of the world"? Why, on its slopes, are people so readily prepared to walk past others who are dying? What is it about Everest that continues to lure men and women to its peak, whatever the cost?




"For some mountaineers, the top of the world also represents the peak of human ambition. But when things go badly high on Everest, as they will sooner or later, difficult moral dilemmas play out in dramatic fashion on a global stage.

Watch National Geographic - The Dark Side Of Everest.avi in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

National Geographic Channels International takes viewers to The Dark Side of Everest through the eyes and minds of those who've struggled with the mountain's powerful and potentially fatal allure. Everest veterans discuss how the mountain's hostile environment can affect the human values of those who dare to challenge its heights."

Inside Hamas

What is the reality of daily life in Gaza under Hamas and can a militant religious organisation move from international pariah to meaningful political player? David Rosenberg explores the issues. ‘A man once jumped from the top floor of a burning building in which many members of his family had already perished. He managed to save his life; but as he was falling he hit a person standing down below and broke that person's legs and arms. The jumping man had no choice; yet to the man with the broken limbs he was the cause of his misfortune... The injured man blames the other for his misery and swears to make him pay for it.




The other, afraid of the crippled man's revenge, insults him, kicks him and beats him up whenever they meet.’ The Polish Jewish writer, Isaac Deutscher, used this analogy to illustrate the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the basis on which it would endure. Deutscher doesn’t state the nationality, ethnicity or religion of the man who jumped or of the passer-by. There were enough conflicts throughout the 20th century to show that no community or nation has a monopoly either of doing harm or of being victims. Every group is capable of trampling on the rights of another.

While the creation of Israel in 1948 promised a secure future for Jewish refugees who had survived the Holocaust, it inflicted a permanent injustice on the Palestinian people, most of whom were dispossessed and turned into refugees. The Palestinians call this the Nakba (catastrophe). They fled mainly to neighbouring Arab states and some later reached Europe and America. In further wars (1956 and 1967), Israel gained more territory – Gaza from the Egyptians and the West Bank from Jordan – and annexed East Jerusalem. Today around half the Palestinians in the world live under military occupation in the West Bank, or under Israeli rule in East Jerusalem, or confined in Gaza – a narrow strip of land 40km by 5km along the Mediterranean, home to 1.5 million people, which Israel has evacuated while keeping the population there dependent on it for essential supplies.

China's Stolen Children

Through the personal stories of several men, women and children whose lives are impacted by the stolen-child black market in China, China's Stolen Children brings viewers face-to-face with a crisis brought on by the controversial one-child policy, implemented in 1979 to slow the country's explosive population growth. As narrator Ben Kingsley explains, "The Chinese government doesn't want the outside world to know about the crisis facing China's children, so this film had to be made entirely undercover. The film crew posed as tourists, moved hotels every three days, and changed SIM cards after every phone call." Remarkably, the subjects all agreed to appear on-camera, although several interviews are held in darkened cars or out-of-the-way locations to avoid detection. The result is a harrowing look at an illegal but largely uncontrollable practice that has reached epidemic proportions.



The film is a powerful indictment of the unforeseen impact of the world's largest experiment in social engineering. One man, Detective Zhu, works full-time to locate missing children, with modest success. His latest case involves Chen Jie, a boy kidnapped at 5 while under his grandmother's care (his heartbroken parents hire Zhu to track him down). Also profiled are Wang Li, a trafficker who once sold his own son; Jong Jang, one of the lucky few stolen children to be rescued; and Way Ling, a mother-to-be who, at 19, is too young to be legally married, and who now faces a dilemma: whether to pay exorbitant fines to keep a baby born without identity or rights, or sell it through a broker like Wang Li. While thousands of heart-wrenching tales like these unfold each year, Zhu laments that authorities seem more concerned with keeping the crisis quiet than tracking down stolen sons and daughters.

PART ONE

Watch China's Stolen Children [Part 1] in Educational | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

PART TWO

Watch China's Stolen Children [Part 2] in Educational | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

PART THREE

Watch China's Stolen Children [Part 3] in Educational | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Legal abortions are commonplace for Chinese families in the one-child era. Moreover, with ultrasound machines allowing parents to determine gender at 4-5 months, many first-time pregnancies are aborted if the fetus is female. This selective (and illegal) practice is the result of China's traditional preference for sons; here and in other Asian cultures, brides migrate to husbands' families, leaving their own parents to fend for themselves in old age. Because of this, parents covet male babies. In the one-child era, as many as 40 million baby girls have been selectively aborted - creating a gender gap that has left millions of men with little hope of finding wives. And while the black market for male children remains robust, there is a growing demand for girls as well.

First Olympian

Two and a half thousand years ago, sport was tough. Few athletes survived the rigours of the great sporting arenas of the Ancient Greeks and only one athlete has survived the ravages of time to offer a unique insight into a remarkable ancient world. First Olympian tells the “Athlete of Taranto´s” fascinating story.




Fifty years ago, a skeleton was found in Taranto in Southern Italy. On opening an ancient tomb,archaeologists found the skeleton with four richly decorated jars in each corner of the tomb, revealing that the owner had an obsession for sport. Cutting edge forensic analysis reveals fascinating details about his diet, general health and appearance and which sports he excelled at.

Watch THE FIRST OLYMPIAN in Educational | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Lavish special effects and dramatic reconstruction then recreate the awesome sight of ancient Olympia and the games that would have drawn up to 40,000 spectators. They were definitely more brutal than the Olympics of today - one wrestler ensured victory by breaking his opponents’ fingers - but were they more physically challenging? To discover the truth, modern athletes are put to the test in a series of events using equipment designed from the remains of ancient originals.

The Betrayed

Fergal Keane investigates how a terrible slaughter, three quarters of a century ago, has returned to haunt the relationship between Turkey and its western allies. For decades the Armenian people have campaigned to have the killings of hundreds of thousands of their forefathers in Ottoman Turkey in 1915 recognised as genocide.




But there has been an equally determined campaign by Turkey to deny genocide with threats of reprisals against any country which uses the word to describe the slaughter. Now as the United States steps up its efforts to win Ankara's support in any conflict with Iraq Correspondent reveals new Turkish pressures. Threats to withdraw military bases have forced the American Congress to abandon legislation which would have used the all important term, "genocide".

The programme also discloses how President George W Bush and his predecessor Bill Clinton both broke promises to the Armenian community that they would recognise genocide. Talking to Armenian survivors, Turkish officials and key political figures in the United States Correspondent investigates a story of terrible slaughter, political intrigue and a people betrayed.

Lost Treasures of the Ancient World - Ancient China

The Great Wall of China remains the most soaring architectural achievement of the Chinese people - but it's not the only one, as this program reveals.




Man has constructed many remarkable monuments, but only one can be seen from space. The Great Wall of China remains the most soaring architectural achievement of the Chinese people –but it’s not the only one, as this entertaining and informative program reveals.

Highlights include dazzling graphic re-creations of a Chinese village from seven thousand years ago, the terracotta army of the First Chinese Emperor and Beijing’s Forbidden City. Features superb 3D graphics, State-of-the-art computer generated animation, all new location footage, and expert commentary and analyses.

The Battle for Canada

In the first half of the 18th century, British and French interests in North America increasingly overlapped. British war minister William Pitt ordered an invasion up the St. Lawrence. Racing winter, British forces scaled the cliffs near Quebec City at night, with no retreat possible.




For 3 years French and British soldiers had fought for control of North America. In a suprise attack led by English General James Wolfe in 1759, British forces scaled the steep cliffs surrounding the fortress of Quebec, overtaking the French and ushered in an era of British rule of Canada.

This excellent documentary is part of the 'History's Turning Points" series and is a definative history of this important event in the history of North America.

The Celts

For 800 years, a proud, vibrant, richly imaginative warrior people swept ruthlessly across Europe. The ancient Greeks called them "Keltoi" and honored them as one of the great barbarian races. Follow their fascinating story from their earliest roots 2,500 years ago through the flowering of their unique culture and their enduring heritage today, enhanced with stunning reconstructions of iron-age villages, dramatizations of major historical events and visits to modern Celtic lands.




The Celts gives an in depth view on Celtic civilization from past to present. It shows culture, history, music and language and the struggles of the Celtic people to find their identity. It covers all genres of the culture and is beautifully written. This collection contains a wealth of information and is probably one of the best sources of information on the Celts ever.

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

Click here for more on the Celts.

Looking for the Revolution

THIS DOCUMENTARY IS IN JAPANESE ONLY...ENGLISH LINK WILL BE POSTED SOON!

Che Guevara died in Southern Bolivia while trying to ignite the sparks of revolution throughout South America. His death at the hands of Bolivian Rangers trained and financed by the US Government, marked the beginning of the cocaine era in Bolivia. Forty years later and under pressure from the masses who gave him a clear mandate, the first indigenous President Evo Morales (an ex-coca leaf farmer) is promising to continue the revolution.




He has nationalised the oil industry and passed laws on Agrarian reform. Despite the revolutionary-sounding election speeches and campaign iconography that accompanied his landslide victory, on closer inspection it emerges that the old system is pretty much alive inside the new one. Corruption, nepotism and old-fashioned populism are at the core of this movement.

Watch ���������������Looking for the Revolution� in Politics | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

The more Morales does to create employment, the more the landowners conspire against him and paralyse Bolivia’s economy. As a result, no jobs are created and the pressure from the poor increases. The cycle of tension threatens to crush both the country and the indigenous revolution. Looking for the Revolution is about the dynamics of that tension as witnessed by the characters of the film - the struggle for power between landowners and the indigenous movement, and the continuation of a revolution Morales-style, started so long ago.

Palestine Is Still The Issue

In 1977, the award-winning journalist and film-maker, John Pilger, made a documentary called Palestine Is Still The Issue. He told how almost a million Palestinians had been forced off their land in 1948, and again in 1967.




In this in-depth documentary, he has returned to the West Bank of the Jordan and Gaza, and to Israel, to ask why the Palestinians, whose right of return was affirmed by the United Nations more than half a century ago, are still caught in a terrible limbo -- refugees in their own land, controlled by Israel in the longest military occupation in modern times.




"The fate and struggle of the Palestinians," says Pilger, "are not just critical to the overdue recognition of their basic human rights, but are also central to whether the region, and the wider world, are plunged into war. Israel is now one of the biggest military powers in the world. While nothing changes, the dangers become greater. This is a film about a nation of people, traumatized, humiliated and yet resilient. In trying to liberate less than a quarter of historic Palestine, they have had no army, no air force, and no powerful friends -- and have fought back with slingshots and now with the terrorism of the suicide bombers."

In a series of extraordinary interviews with both Palestinians and Israelis, John Pilger weaves together the issue of Palestine. He speaks to the families of suicide bombers and their victims; he sees the humiliation of Palestinians imposed on them at myriad checkpoints and with a permit system not dissimilar to apartheid South Africa's infamous pass laws. He goes into the refugee camps and meets children who, he says, "no longer dream like other children, or if they do, it is about death." Continually asking for the solution, John Pilger says it is time to bring justice, as well as peace, to Palestine.

Monsoon Railway

Monsoon Railway traces the amazing stories of some of the 1.5 million people who work for the world's greatest railway. For the last 150 years the railway in India has driven social and economic development in the country, and it is a railway on which the billion-strong population depends.




Focusing on an area in the North East of India - Assam and Bengal - Monsoon Railway captures a rare snapshot of the lives of those who work on the network, and follows three workers from July to September 2004 during the unforgiving rains of the summer monsoon.

PART ONE

Watch Monsoon Railway [Part 1] | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

PART TWO

Watch Monsoon Railway [Part 2] | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

PART THREE

Watch Monsoon Railway [Part 3] | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Mao’s Bloody Revolution Revealed

Mao’s Bloody Revolution Revealed is hosted by Philip Short, BBC correspondent and author of Mao: A Life. Bloody Revolution can be divided into two parts. The first half of the documentary covers the course of the Chinese revolution up to the the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.




The second half covers what is referred to as the Cultural Revolution decade of 1966 to 1976. About three quarters of the the second half focuses on the height of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1969 or 1971; the remaining time mostly focuses on 1971 to 1976 and Mao’s death.

Bloody Revolution contains much boilerplate anti-communism of the ‘Mao was a butcher’ and ‘people ate their babies’ variety that has been addressed numerous times and in different ways. The narrative of Bloody Revolution is a convergence of the official revisionist Chinese state’s account and traditional western anti-communist ones.

The Story of India

For over two millennia, India has been at the centre of world history. But how did India come to be? What is India?




These are the big questions behind this intrepid journey around the contemporary subcontinent. In this landmark series, historian and acclaimed writer Michael Wood embarks on a dazzling and exciting expedition through today's India, looking to the present for clues to her past, and to the past for clues to her future.




The journey takes the viewer through majestic landscapes and reveals some of the greatest monuments and artistic treasures on Earth. From Buddhism to Bollywood, from mathematics to outsourcing, Michael Wood discovers India's impact on history - and on us.

PART ONE

PART TWO

More documentaries like this...

China from the Inside

Clash of the Worlds

The Life of Buddha


Get this documentary on DVD today...

Silk - The Thread Connecting East and West

Beautiful, smooth, soft, delicate, strong, and precious: silk. This amazing fabric has captivated human imagination for over 2000 years. Throughout history, it has clothed the rich and powerful. But more than this, it has been a form of currency, a tool of diplomacy, a badge of rank, and a fabric of the divine. And silk, above all other treasures, has been the thread connecting East and West. It is an artifact that has truly shaped history.




The discovery of silk is said to have taken place in China almost two and a half thousand years ago by the wife of the "yellow emperor", Huang Di. Legend has it that the lady H'si Ling made her discovery when a silk moth cocoon fell from a mulberry tree into her hot tea where it began to unravel.

The empress has been revered ever since as "the lady of silk" who taught the Chinese to cultivate mulberry trees and raise silk worms. Her discovery of the secret of silk would profoundly influence the history of China and the world.


More documentaries like this...

China from the Inside

Mysteries of Asia

Tibet's Hidden Kingdom

The Seven Wonders of the Muslim World

Tank Man

On June 5, 1989, one day after the Chinese army's deadly crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, a single, unarmed young man stood his ground before a column of tanks on the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Captured on film and video by Western journalists, this extraordinary confrontation became an icon of the struggle for freedom around the world.




Seventeen years later, veteran filmmaker Antony Thomas goes to China in search of "The Tank Man." Who was he? What was his fate? And what does he mean for a China that today has become a global economic powerhouse?



Drawing on interviews with Chinese and Western eyewitnesses, Thomas recounts the amazing events of the spring of 1989, when a student protest that began in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic central space of the nation, spread throughout much of the rest of China. Several weeks later, when the government sent in the army to end the demonstrations, the citizens of Beijing poured into the streets in support of the students. "You had a million people on the street, minimum. ... That was unprecedented, definitely in modern Chinese post-revolutionary history," says John Pomfret, who was in Beijing at the time, reporting for the Associated Press.




The demonstrations ended in a massacre on the night of June 3-4, when the government sent the troops into the city with orders to clear Tiananmen Square. Eyewitnesses recount what happened -- from the first shots fired in the city's outskirts, to the students' withdrawal from the square in the early hours of June 4, to the Tank Man's courageous stand the following day.




From there, Thomas looks at what the Tank Man's life might be like in today's China. China observers and scholars, including Orville Schell, talk about the turning point the nationwide unrest of 1989 represented. "After the massacre of 1989, [Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping] in effect said, 'We will not stop economic reform; [but] we will, in effect, halt political reform.'"




Almost two decades later, the educated elite who led the protests of 1989 have benefited handsomely from China's rapid economic growth, but many Chinese workers still face brutal working conditions and low wages. "A lot of factories do not even have one day off," says labor expert Dr. Anita Chan who has been researching working conditions inside China for 15 years. "That means seven days a week, 13 hours a day."




In fact, some experts see the emergence of two Chinas: one modern, wealthy and urban; the other rural, poor and disenfranchised. There is evidence that unrest among workers and peasants is growing; in 2005, there were more than 87,000 "civil disturbances" in the country. "China is on a knife's edge," says Dr. Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch. "If we in the West are not aware of this, the leaders in Beijing are very much so, and this is their top concern. They know that the stability is very fragile."




The Chinese government has responded to this threat by cracking down on dissent, and on the media. The regime has managed to erase the Tank Man's image, famous throughout the world, from Chinese memory. Thomas shows the iconic picture to undergraduates at Beijing University, the nerve center of the 1989 protests; none of them recognize it. Central to the regime's struggle to control information is its filtering of the Internet, a complex undertaking that raises serious issues about the role of Western IT companies in China's censorship strategy.

In the face of official silence about 1989 and the Tank Man, the program concludes with Thomas' quest to find out what became of the Tank Man and who he was. In the end, his identity remains a mystery, but the symbolism of his act of defiance continues to have power. "That story ... is not getting weaker because of time. Because we don't know who he is, it's actually getting stronger," says Xiao Qiang of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley. "In the long frame of history ... human freedom, courage, dignity will stay and prevail, and that's what that picture will testify [to] forever."

More documentaries like this...

China from the Inside

Cyber War

Mysteries of Asia

Own this classic documentary on DVD...

The Last Aztec

This documentary series takes an anything but common look at a well known story...the Spanish invasion and colonisation of Mexico. DBC Pierre takes us on a journey through modern-day Mexico as he tries to get to the bottom of how a small group of Spanish invaders were able to conquor a mighty empire. So who is DBC Pierre?

DBC Pierre (born 1961 in South Australia, Australia) is a writer. Born Peter Warren Finlay, the "DBC" part of his nom-de-plume (normally so written, without punctuation) stands for "Dirty But Clean". "Pierre" was a nickname bestowed on him by childhood friends after a cartoon character of that name. Pierre was awarded the Booker Prize for fiction on 14 October 2003 for his novel Vernon God Little. He is the third Australian to be so honoured, although he has told the British press that he prefers to consider himself a Mexican.

"Mexico, with its contrasts, its crushing poverty and sparkling wealth, its institutionalised corruption and cultural wisdom, its love of life and its embracing of death, undoubtedly set me on a path toward the deep end, philosophically and emotionally speaking." – DBC Pierre

PART ONE

Early in the 14th century, a city rose from snake-infested waters, built by the Tenocha tribe who came to be known as the Aztecs. Their city was the capital of Mexico - Tenochtitlan.

When Hernan Cortes led the Spanish Conquistadors to Mexico in 1519, the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma believed the invaders to be gods, fulfilling the prophecy of the return of the feathered serpent deity, Quetzalcoatl. The long held belief that this prophecy signified the end of the Aztec empire coincided with the arrival of the Spanish. Moctezuma in his confusion, offered gifts from the vast treasure troves of gold, sourced from mines that have now disappeared, but failed to deter the Conquistadors as they made their way to Tenochtitlan.

The Spaniards received a warm welcome when they eventually arrived but were wary because of the sacrificial bloodshed they saw as they travelled to meet Moctezuma. However they were overcome by the beauty and splendour of the city. The Aztecs were amazed at the sight of the Spaniards who were paler with long white beards, rode on horseback, and had guns and a cross - none of which they had ever experienced.

PART TWO

When the Spaniard Cortes and his men marched on the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, they hoped they would find Moctezuma's gold and untold riches. But they had no idea what was in store for them. Following the meeting of Emperor Moctezuma and Cortes, they were housed in a splendid palace and lavished with gifts.

Cortes came to realise that the Aztecs lived in a strangely innocent world, a magical realm that was to be their undoing. He put his knowledge to good use and in a bold move, imprisoned the emperor in his own palace. The monarch fell, surrendering his power and wealth to become a puppet of the Spaniards.

On May 13, 1521, it is thought that Moctezuma died from a blow to the head from a rock thrown by one of his subjects. Overnight, his body, magical entourage and most spectacularly of all, his vast well-documented gold-laden treasure-disappeared. No trace of Moctezuma was ever found. Presenter and best-selling author DBC Pierre visited a location believed to hold the key to this mystery, but came away none the wiser.

More documentaries like this...

The Kogi - From the Heart of the World

Clash of the Worlds

The Crusades - the Cresent & the Cross

An Islamic History of Europe

Shamans of the Amazon