Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates): A peculiar concrete box

overlooking the coast of China.

It looks like a speaker only it is the size of a building.

In Scotland the windswept remnants

of a sea-faring people.

These men were a special breed of professional plunderers.

An unassuming Swiss village with a covert purpose.

This is not your average bucolic Swiss pasture,

this is a killing field.

And an epic Alaskan venture that led to fame and fortune.

They were celebrities and incredibly famous

in American culture

and they were controversial at times.

Decaying relics...

Ruins of lost worlds,

sites haunted by the past,

their secrets waiting to be revealed.

(Theme music)

On the coast of a tiny island just a few miles from mainland China

a bizarre block looms over the shoreline.

One of the strangest things on the island

is this weird concrete box,

it almost looks like an office building.

What appear to be windows in an apartment block

are not windows at all.

They're little circular openings, almost like a speaker on a radio.

Structures littering a nearby beach might offer a clue to it's purpose.

There's rusty pieces of metal sticking out of the beach

and there's various odd structures

sticking out of the ground here and there.

Someone has clearly invested a great deal

in making it very hard to land on this shore.

But not all of the defences here are immediately visible.

There's a huge underground complex carved in to one of these mountains.

There are tunnels here that are big enough

to drive a truck through.

This wasn't some little hideaway, this was a serious underground base.

As small and insignificant as it appears today,

this island came very close to triggering a nuclear war.

Yang shi rong grew up here

and remembers a time when this beach was strictly out of bounds.

This is kinmen island.

Within sight of neighbouring China,

this territory actually belongs to another country, Taiwan.

This unique understanding

was born out of the Chinese civil war,

which came to a head in 1949.

Mao totally defeats the nationalist forces

and drives them out of China and on to the island of Taiwan,

where they exist to this day as the republic of China.

Chairman mao's communists,

the people's liberation army had ousted the nationalists

led by general chiang Kai-shek.

Mao zedong seats himself in power in mainland China.

And the previous government of China under chiang Kai-shek

and the nationalist movement

flees to the island of Taiwan,

but they don't only take the island of Taiwan,

they take this little island group directly off the coast of China.

The biggest island of the group is kinmen,

just four miles from the mainland.

There's no way that the communists wanted to tolerate

what they saw as subversives right off their coast,

and in 1949 mao's forces attack kinmen island.

But the defences that can be seen here today

show the nationalists were expecting them.

There's a 56-hour battle for kinmen

as amphibious Chinese communist forces

land on kinmen and try to rest it from its nationalist defenders.

Bullet ridden buildings

are testament to the ferocity of the fighting.

Yet mao's communist army

wasn't up to the challenge of taking kinmen

from the nationalists.

They establish a beach head

but they cannot break out on to the rest of the island.

They didn't have the technical capability

to put a big enough force on shore.

Those that did make it on to the beaches were met with mines,

bunkers, and obstacles,

all backed up by a force far larger than they expected.

Using these beach obstacles, using these defences,

chiang Kai-shek pushes them back in to the sea.

For mao it was a disaster,

9,000 communist soldiers stormed ashore,

the majority of were killed or taken prisoner.

The republic of China forces were able to repel the attack

but it wouldn't be the last time they came under fire.

Separated by only a few miles of water,

the islanders knew it was just a matter of time.

The Taiwanese build up kinmen as a major defence bastion.

They honeycomb all the cliffs and hills

with bunkers

and they make this a much more defensible place.

The cold war was now running hot throughout east Asia

and kinmen island found itself on the front line.

We saw Korea falling to the communists,

indo-China falling to the communists,

all of China falling to the communists.

The us felt that it was losing this battle of containment,

and that something had to be done.

Us president Dwight eisenhower fearing a domino effect

of nations falling to communism

offered protection to the Chinese nationalists

on Taiwan and kinmen.

In 1954 there's a major international crisis

when mao zedong bombards kinmen

and the neighbouring islands with artillery,

forcing the United States

to tell the communists to cease and desist.

There's a second crisis in 1958, much bigger one.

Mainland China really unloaded on kinmen island,

they launched an artillery barrage

that went on day and night and just didn't stop.

Over 44 days

the people's liberation army

would deliver 470,000 artillery rounds.

It seemed only a matter of time

before the nationalists would have to evacuate kinmen.

The big question in the mind of everyone in China,

everyone on Taiwan,

and even back in Moscow is what is Washington going to do?

In the us at one point the joint chiefs of staff

recommended considering nuclear weapons

to stop China's aggression.

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.

Eisenhower resisted calls for a nuclear strike,

instead he combined a show of naval strength

with the supply of military hardware.

The United States started to give heavy howitzers,

a howitzer is an artillery piece that's able to fire at a high angle.

It's able to throw its shells up high in the air

over a long distance.

These behemoths could fire huge shells over ten miles

making them a formidable problem for the communists.

And kinmen's underground bases provided the ideal location.

These guns made it possible

for the forces on kinmen island to return fire,

they were able to start shelling the mainland.

This initiated a curious ritual.

On alternate days

the gunners on each side would prepare their guns,

load them up and bombard the other side,

while the other side kept their heads down.

While this bizarre artillery duel continued,

the cold war was evolving.

Part of the continued conflict was a propaganda war,

and that entailed a secret weapon on the island.

Built in 1967,

this was the last of five broadcasting walls

erected on kinmen.

The Chinese nationalists realised...

That the communist projects

had killed a lot of people in China,

had made a lot of people hostile

to the government in Beijing.

And so the nationalists decided

to start beaming propaganda

at the communist population on the mainland.

It's said this speaker was so loud,

it could be heard 15 miles inland on the mainland.

Over time the speaker was used not just for political

but cultural warfare.

The speaker tower would blast out songs

from popular Taiwanese singers

and ear splitting anti-communist propaganda.

By the late 1970s improving relations between the United States,

China, and Taiwan meant the guns,

propaganda, and music finally fell silent.

Today, a ferry service runs between Taiwanese kinmen

and the Chinese mainland, but tensions in the region remain.

Officially our support for Taiwan is known as strategic ambiguity.

In other words neither Taiwan nor China really knows

whether we would come to Taiwan's defence,

but so far China has not wanted to push it's luck.

Deep in the Alaskan mountains is a pioneering relic

from america's past.

This area really is remote,

it's a good couple of days away from any major towns.

This setting is just epic.

You've got these beautiful mountain peaks,

an enormous glacier.

Breaking up this rugged scene

is a collection of red buildings tumbling down a hillside.

Everywhere you look you see the ruins of industrial equipment,

you see cables and chains and broken down machinery.

You realise this is 14 storeys high.

This is on a big scale.

You can imagine living up here, if you were a tough pioneer type,

but it is not an easy place to live.

Two of america's best known names made their fortunes here,

but prospecting in this wilderness wasn't for the faint hearted.

Kyle thilbert is an alpine guide

and well used to exploring these ghostly ruins alone.

It can get a little spooky at time

walking through some of these abandoned buildings

and knowing that you are the only person

but you still hear things.

You know, those buildings are starting to fall apart,

they're definitely not quite safe enough

for us to go in to.

Yet some areas are still accessible

and display the remnants of a fully-fledged town.

This building here is the post office and warehouse.

They had mail that was delivered to this building here,

sorted, and distributed throughout town.

These are the remains of a town once known as kennecott.

Because the town is so remote,

they had to be fully self-sufficient,

you can imagine everything from food to parts to clothing.

At its peak,

kennecott had about 550 men on payroll.

So, what was it that drew this many people

to such a remote outpost?

In 1900,

two men, tarantula Jack Smith and Clarence l Warner,

made a discovery that spawned a legend.

They stopped for lunch

and looked across the valley and they saw this green patch.

And one of them said, "oh, that might be good for sheep."

They scrambled up the side of the mountain

and what they thought was green vegetation

actually turned out to be green rocks.

It's still credited

as one of the richest deposits ever discovered in the world.

They made the bonanza discovery.

It's a bonanza,

where the words Smith and Warner supposedly exclaimed

upon their discovery of copper ore.

Copper was becoming a very, very valuable commodity,

with the advent of electricity copper was in high demand.

Getting it out of the ground though

in this unforgiving landscape was be no mean feat.

They needed investors

with very deep pockets and they found them.

In 1905,

a group called the Alaska syndicate was formed.

And it's members included

two of the richest and most famous bankers in the world,

the guggenheim brothers and jp Morgan.

They pooled their vast resources

to begin the process of developing the mines.

Soon the bonanza mine was connected to a processing mill

and the kennecott copper mine was in full operation.

So, these cables here you see

run about 4.5 miles up the Ridge land behind us

to the mines themselves.

Bringing those buckets loaded

with 500 to 600 pounds of copper ore.

You would have one bucket coming down these lines

every 52 seconds.

So, in less than a minute

you would have to be able to dump that ore,

get it back on the line

in just enough time to catch the next one as it came off.

From here, the ore needed to be sorted.

And this is where the vast height and slope of the building came in.

You put the ore at the top, you crush the big pieces,

and then you let gravity carry it down level by level,

one crushing machine to another until it's reduced to a fine sand.

When this building was in operation,

the noise here would have been deafening.

There was lots of equipment, crushers, different machinery

that was separating all that copper ore.

But excavating and processing the ore

wasn't the biggest challenge facing the Alaska syndicate.

There was no railroad at that time,

but the buildings and everything were operating

before that railroad came in.

So all that equipment was bought in by hand essentially.

We're just under 200 miles to the coast from here.

So, you can imagine trying to bring all that equipment in...

By either dog sled, pack horses.

It's amazing that they could even get that here.

Guggenheim and Morgan

desperately needed a railroad to get the copper to market.

They didn't start construction on the railroad till 1907,

part of that was they couldn't actually find anybody to build it.

Nothing of the scale or this terrain had ever been done before.

It was a monumental engineering challenge.

And it's pinnacle

was how to cross the mighty copper river.

If your idea of a river is something like the rivers you see

in most parts of the world,

you have no idea what rivers in Alaska are like.

The most infamous crossing was just below the miles glacier.

So, this glacier was not only dumping out

millions and millions of gallons of water,

but in the warmer seasons it was dropping...

Huge icebergs in to the river that would then flow down.

If one of those hits a pier, which is supporting the trusses,

your whole bridge comes down.

So, to build that

was almost impossible really by those standards at the time,

they didn't think it could be done.

It costed well over million dollars to build that one bridge alone.

Yet, the million dollar bridge, as it was famously coined,

was just a fraction

of the overall cost of building the railroad.

The Alaska syndicate thought it worth the investment,

but they weren't alone.

While the Alaska syndicate

is busy building their own route up to their mines,

there was another group that claimed to have rights

to also build a route.

It got very heated.

It turned out that the syndicate,

they didn't want anybody else building a railroad line.

They were armed, they wanted to keep them out.

One member of the syndicate crew

hid behind a Boulder and really like a sniper,

he shot three men from the other team.

Dubbed the keystone canyon affair,

it made national headlines.

Jp Morgan and the guggenheim brothers

were incredibly famous in American culture.

I mean, today you'd almost look at somebody

like a Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, they were celebrities.

And it was a huge scandal legitimately,

it was cold blooded murder.

And in Alaska the syndicate was viewed

very suspiciously from that point on.

Yet this scandal didn't stop them.

Having fended off the competition and completed the railroad,

it seemed that nothing could stand in the way of guggenheim and Morgan.

When the railroad came in in 1911

they had enough ore stocked up

so they could fill that very first train,

send it out with $250,000 worth of copper ore.

The mine was running

as one of the most profitable in the world.

So, this building here was the ammonia leaching plant

used to extract all that,

those little pieces of copper ore that were left.

And with this building

they were running at about 92% efficiency.

That's even by today's standards is unheard of.

There were some years

where they made $32 million in that year alone.

By 1916, the price of copper was climbing

and these mines were running around the clock,

three shifts,

trying to get as much copper out of these mountains

and in to the ships and on to market as they could.

Yet, kennecott's fortunes were tied to the global market,

and with the great depression came plummeting copper prices.

In 1938 management prepared to shut down operations.

The management knew

that things were probably going to end up closing down

in the foreseeable future,

but they didn't tell the men that

because they were afraid that if they started warning people

that things were going to start closing down,

work production would start to decline.

So, to try to maximise the amount of work

they could get out of these men,

they didn't tell them until 24 hours

before that last train was going to leave,

if you were not on that train, you were gonna get left behind.

Almost overnight this place became a ghost town.

Today, kennecott lives on through hiking trails and guided tours,

which preserves it's enduring legacy.

All that copper that was produced here

was used to create copper wiring,

to electrify the east coast, shell casings during the world war.

Very crucial impact on the United States and the world.

On Scotland's shetland isles is a place that time forgot twice.

As you approach these islands from the south,

you can see the remnants of a very large stone building.

It's reminiscent of a castle but that's not even the half of it.

The stone walls suggest a structure that's hundreds of years old,

but at it's feet is something far older.

You wind up in these circular rooms,

all made out of blocks piled up precariously

but there's no mortar in use here.

And it feels as if, if you knock one stone

over that the whole thing

is gonna come crumbling down around you.

They really blend in to the earth, they are part of the land.

It's a very organic form of building and it really stands out.

The mixture of the old and the ancient

suggests this place had a long history.

But one more clue might reveal how it became abandoned.

Slightly further away from the main building

are these shallow channels cut in to the ground.

Inside the smallest remains lies the answer to this mystery,

and it's a story of greed and bloodshed.

These men were highly advanced.

They were pushing the limits of the known world

and they could be extremely violent.

Archaeologist dr val Turner

knows the legend of this ruins unscrupulous former owner.

This is the laird's house

and it became the home or the possession

of Patrick Stewart,

who was the Earl of orkney and shetland.

Patrick was the son of Robert Stewart,

a man with connections.

He was the half-brother of a queen

with one of the most tumultuous reigns in history,

Mary queen of Scots.

Because the lairds here in shetland

were so far from royal authority,

their power was untrammelled.

And that meant when they got out of line

there was nobody to discipline them.

And these guys got out of line.

Patrick ruthlessly exploited this power and freedom.

And as lord of shetland

he was notorious for being barbarous,

rapacious, womanising, intimidating, letting off criminals and murderers.

He found the perfect spot to build a monument to his conquest,

to Mark his spot.

I think his quality of life would have been very good,

because I mean, we see it as bare walls,

but it would have had ornate paintings,

hangings, tapestries.

It would have been quite cosy and warm.

And, of course, he would have had servants

and people working for him as well.

But in the late 19th century,

it emerged that the laird wasn't the first person

to recognise the value of this bay.

In 1897 there was a huge storm.

And it lashed away at the edge of the coast.

And a few days later...

Somebody walking along the shore noticed

that there were the edges of...

What looked like buried buildings poking out.

The storm uncovered dwellings that predated the laird's house

by at least 1,000 years.

They were arranged in a circular pattern

and made of layered stone.

But they also partitioned these houses

in to a number of cells or rooms.

And the local people would have taken refuge

in these wheel houses from the harsh

weather coming off of the sea,

possibly from their harsh neighbours,

and it would have created a feeling of community.

The wheel houses were built by early settlers of shetland

known as the picts.

The picts were a native Celtic tribe from the iron age,

who managed to make the journey all the way from mainland Scotland

to the shetland islands.

That kind of journey

would take a tremendous strength of will

and a tremendous strength of arms.

It's 100 miles to the nearest mainland,

and it's pretty much a one-way journey,

because the way the currents work

once you get here it's going to be almost impossible

for you to get back to the mainland.

Evidence of even earlier structures suggest that defence

had long been a priority on these rugged islands.

So, this is the base of a massive tower.

And while that's the inner face,

just wait till you see where the outer face is.

There's a cell which is in between the two walls.

And the outer face is right here.

So, all of that is the base of the broch.

Two thousand years ago, this tower stood 40 feet tall.

It had four levels for people, animals, and a central hearth.

It was one of hundreds that lined the shetland coastline,

a few still survive intact.

All over the north of Scotland and the isles,

there are these towers called brochs.

You can keep your children safe, your babies safe

from other tribes

and you can sleep in comfort

knowing that nobody's going to sneak up

and cut your throat in the night.

But a new threat

would soon come across the stormy seas to shetland.

A 1,000 years ago, strangers landed on the shoreline.

Britain has had a long history of invasion,

but these men were special breed of professional plunderers.

They were highly skilled, had complete mastery over the sea.

These invaders were vikings.

When the vikings arrived

in this part of the shetland islands,

it's possible that the picts were still here,

still living in their traditional wheel houses.

But vikings did things differently.

The viking long houses are rectangular.

The area here is where people lived.

And there were benches on either side of the living,

feasting area,

which people would have sat on in the day,

but then at night

there would have been skins on the benches

and they would have been where people slept as well.

If we look at the foundations of this long house.

It reminds us of beowulf

where hrothgar lived with his sword veins.

It reminds us of a smoky night

where grendel creeps in through the door.

This wasn't just one hut, this was a settlement.

One of hundreds that would lead

to the vikings conquering two thirds of britain.

So, using these incredible long ships

and their navigational skills,

they actually travelled

as far as the coast of North America.

They also raided and eventually settled

all along the coast of Western Europe,

and then they travelled up the rivers as far as Moscow.

We don't know what happened

to the native population of shetland when the norse came.

It could be that instead of keeping the locals as slaves

or marrying the local population, could be they killed them all.

The last excavation of jarlshof took place in the 1950s,

since then it has become

one of shetland's most cherished artefacts,

but the fate of the native picts remains a mystery.

So, what happened to the vikings here in the shetland islands?

In some ways they never went away.

The viking norse

were happy to leave behind their descendants,

who still live there

as proud descendants of vikings today.

And people feel a very strong affinity with vikings.

And, of course, there's a big viking festival

in shetland every January.

At this fire festival,

shetlanders take to the streets

with flaming torches and burn a viking long boat.

And jarlshof remains the most extensive norse site

visible in britain today.

High in the Swiss mountains sits a pretty alpine village.

But for those in on the secret, it's anything but.

The Swiss alps are beautiful.

It's lush, it's manicured.

You can wonder across a Meadow here

and you see what look like totally innocuous little cottages.

They could be summer huts,

they could be storage barns for farming, and so on.

The reality though is completely unexpected.

So, this isn't just a hut or an animal shelter,

this is actually a camouflaged Cannon,

10.5cm canon that can turn 360 degrees

to be able to shoot down in to the valley

or all the way around.

And there's four of these in the village up here.

The little kind of hut is just there for disguise.

It's for display purposes only,

and underneath it is a serious amount of weaponry.

You start to realise,

no, this is not your average bucolic Swiss pasture,

this is a killing field.

Someone's taken a lot of time to hide this military site.

This hidden emplacement is just the tip of the iceberg.

Another innocuous looking building nearby

conceals an even bigger surprise

and explains the real reason behind the disguises.

This isn't a barn, this is actually a bunker,

concrete bunker, that's part of the fortress.

One of the largest fortresses ever built

in Switzerland is right here.

Masterfully hidden from view.

Behind the set dressing

of the cottages and the stable blocks,

inside the mountain, that's where the action is.

They dug the fortress into the solid mountains.

We're talking about five miles of tunnels,

it could hold around 500 troops.

Basically two storeys

of fortifications built in to the side of a mountain

with 60 feet of rock

between the lower storey and the upper storey.

This is fortress furggels.

A battleship hidden inside the belly of a mountain.

Built from 1939,

this was Switzerland's response to an increasingly volatile Europe.

This thing is not just a fort, it's an ensemble of facilities.

You've got the fortifications,

you've got rooms for storage of munitions,

you've got barracks for the Garrison.

Dr erich breitenmoser is now the fort's proud owner

and enjoys showing off it's incredible array

of facilities and weaponry.

Here we are in the sleeping quarters for the soldiers.

This room and the one next door

would house 120 soldiers for sleeping.

Troops could live here

completely shut off from the outside world

for as long as six months.

And, of course, no fort is complete without a good armament,

and this place was bristling with good guns.

We have four 10.5cm guns, which are up in the village,

and then we have four 15cm guns.

It was the most heavily armed fortress in Switzerland.

They would tell you,

you know, how to set up the gun and then give the command to shoot.

Ready, shoot, and the guy would pull the thing over there,

boom, phew, the shot would go off

and make the whole mountain shook like an earthquake

when they shot the gun.

Trained soldiers would use manuals and instruments

to expertly calculate the trajectory of the shell,

but back in the day it was far from an exact science.

They always waited until the call came back

of where they hit the target to see how accurate they were.

One day no radio message came back, so they waited.

So, in...

So, when a phone call came in from Liechtenstein

in the town of malbun,

they said there was a bomb that hit right in front of the village.

What happened?

So, obviously somebody made a mistake

so they found out that the fellow here

did the wrong calculations

and we almost had war with Liechtenstein.

Swiss neutrality is legendary,

but what distinguishes Switzerland from other neutral countries

is Switzerland's policy of armed neutrality,

meaning, you know, don't mess with us.

But in the early 1940s,

two of Europe's dictators

were planning to carve up the country

and share in the spoils.

Early in world war ii,

Italian dictator Mussolini and German dictator Hitler

actually concocted a plan,

operation Tannenbaum or 'Christmas tree',

in which Italian forces

would invade Switzerland from the south,

German forces from the north,

they would partition the country between them.

The fort was a crucial link

in Switzerland's national fortification chain,

built in anticipation of an access invasion.

Switzerland had sort of decided early on

that it was going to use its geography

as a key part of its defence.

They were going to retreat in to the mountains

to a sort of hidden fortresses,

and that was like the ultimate defence of the country.

But as a neutral country,

building a heavily armed fort of this size

was treading a fine line.

They're not supposed to be doing any military engineering,

but what they do do is carry it out very, very quietly.

This place was very secret.

In fact, I've known people worked here,

they wouldn't be able to tell their wives

where they went to work.

This wasn't the only reason for secrecy, though.

An important factor as well about this place

was you could catch the enemy by surprise.

If your guns are hidden in the mountains,

then all of a sudden there's massive firepower

that they weren't expecting.

There's no better example of how the Swiss plan to control

the only serviceable routes through the country

with fortifications than this one.

They can watch, see the Germans coming up

from the rhine valley down there, from lake of constance

or from this side here...

From the San Bernardino mountain pass from Italy.

So, they would be protecting this whole area here

from then being able to go in towards the Zurich over there.

These hidden mountain forts

were Switzerland's ace up their sleeve,

but they had other cards to play too.

They also had the entire population armed for battle

in the event that the Germans or Italians invaded,

all Swiss males were armed and trained with rifles

and they would turn out to defend their country.

Once the world war ii ended and Switzerland survived unscathed,

they didn't reveal or even disarm fort furggels.

Their attention instead turned to a new

and potentially even more destructive menace.

The cold war immediately Springs up,

so all of these world war ii era forts

were maintained and upgraded for the event of a Soviet invasion.

The fortress itself was then adapted with nuclear filters and so on.

And the unique position of the fortress

made it an ideal nuclear shelter.

Have to be able to live here independently,

that means you can't be depending

on a water line coming from some place

'cause they cut the water off,

so they had their own spring in the mountain

that fed these tanks.

The Swiss took this nuclear threat so seriously

that fort furggels was still top secret in the 21st century,

well after the cold war had ended.

The fortress was decommissioned in 2002

and the secret that was hidden beneath this village

could be finally revealed.

With declassification,

the fort lost its military significance,

but just before it closed down, one final shot was fired.

The last time it was ever used,

one of the canons was actually fired off to get rid of avalanches.

Today, the fort is occasionally opened up

for small groups to explore these fascinating relics.

Nowadays, you can wander around

and you can see the barracks and the field hospital

and the ammo storage rooms,

and you can see the canons in their turrets.

The constant cold temperature here

now attracts new and interesting tenants.

Lot of people are enquiring about rooms

like this for storage, wine, be a great wine storage, cheese.

I had a guy here for cheese storage.

Fortress furggels' purpose

evolved to match Switzerland's perception

of what posed the greatest threat.

A peaceful furggels full of wine and cheese

is good news for everyone.

(Music)

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV