China is a wonderful subject for a TV historian. Not only is there masses of material, the whole civilisation is built on history, reverence for the past and veneration of one’s ancestors.Maoism tried to root out those tendencies, but now they are back, which made it a good time for Michael Wood to bring us The Story of China (from 21 January), a six-part chronological sweep from the earliest awakenings of Chinese civilisation, some 5,000 years ago, to the present day. Wood has tended to specialise in classical and medieval Europe, but in this first episode, “Ancestors”, he made a good fist of explaining the earliest part of the Chinese story.“Story” is the key word, rather than history. There are no written records for the early part of China’s rise to