Posters of the third season of the documentary featuring a jade horse.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Making the documentary took the production team to museums, archaeological institutions and relic sites around the country, where they filmed hundreds of artifacts. And the crew, aided by modern postproduction techniques and the incorporation of contemporary language, are able to connect the past with the present, while imparting lots of information and engaging viewers.

One episode, for example, features Tang pottery figures and official documents that were excavated from the Astana Tombs and are currently on show at the Xinjiang Museum in Urumqi.

The Astana Tombs form an ancient cemetery site where aristocrats, officials and commons of different ethnic groups living in the nearby ancient city of Gaochang were buried between the third and eighth centuries. Since the late 1950s, some 456 tombs and 10,000 valuable relics have been unearthed in an area covering some 10 square kilometers, thus being hailed by historians as an underground museum.