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Hello, 400 BC to 200 AD is known as the Axial Age. When great civilizations in Asia and the Mediterranean forged the ideas that dominated the next 2,000 years.

In China, the equivalent to the Golden Age in Greece was the warring states period. It was a time of political turmoil, economic change and intellectual fermant that laid the foundations for the first Chinese empire.

Astronomy was systematized, acupuncture developed, the principles of Yin and Yang were invented, Confucianism grew and Taoism emerged as a hundred schools of thought are reputed to have vined for the patronage of rival kings.

Why was a period of war such a fertile age for culture and thought? What kind of ideas were developed and how do they still inform the thinking of nearly a fifth of the world's population?

With me to discuss the warring states period in China, a Chris Cullen, director of the Need and Research Institute at Cambridge University,

Carl Michelson, assistant keeper of Chinese art in the Department of Asia at the British Museum, and Vivian Lowe, lecturer at the Welcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine.

Chris Cullen, the period when the great ideas in Chinese philosophy flourish was the warring states period, but what about the era before then?

Can you give us a picture of the political set of an early China until we get there?

Certainly. I think it's most important to think how the past looked to the people in the warring states period.

If they look back and said, how have we got here? How has our world become as it was?

Quite a lot of them saw an ideal age that had existed once, say, around a thousand BC in the early Joe dynasty when there had been righteous kings ruling an orderly country, everything tied together,

and afterwards things went wrong, principally went wrong around 770 BC when the central feudal order of the Joe dynasty collapsed.

The Joe kings lost their power, they became a little like the Pope in medieval Europe, honored, but without any military strength.

And China began to be something rather like Europe in medieval times, a series of kingdoms that all recognized themselves as having some cultural unity rather like Christendom, say, but capable of going to war with one another, which was the beginning of what was called in China, the spring and autumn period from about 770 BC.

But still there were rules as to how you conducted your warfare. This was a gently business taking place between people who recognized themselves as being at least second cousins twice removed, so to speak.

What the warring states brought, as its name implies, was a sense that there weren't really any rules anymore except to win.

China was divided into, essentially, seven great states, each one of which saw itself as potentially ruling the whole of China.

If only it could manage to destroy everybody else, seize their economic resources, use their population as a labor force, destroy the military force of their enemies, and take over everything, and establish a new unified rule of China to replace the old Joe dynasty feudalism.

That feudalism, which was seen as the golden age in the past, something, however, for a new ruler to restore, which was what was eventually done by the Chinden dynasty in 221 BC, but they didn't last for very long.

The permanent job was done by the Han.

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