There are two words involved in this question, one is culture and the other is regional culture.

About 10 years ago, I heard a special lecture by Mr. Li Hao, which was about culture, and he gave it to a bunch of officials in Xi'an. The concept of culture that I am talking about today is a further understanding of what he said that time. In college, and all the doctors, from the aspect of "use", one is to avoid my weaknesses, and I am an outsider to theory. In addition, I think that today's universities also seem to be popular to talk about "use", but there are more aspects of employment. The phrase "apply what you have learned" should go a little deeper.

There is a kind of character in the countryside, there is one in every village, and whoever has a major event of a wedding or funeral will ask that person to coordinate and co-ordinate. That person is not necessarily the village chief, nor is he the person who reads the most in the village, but that person has prestige, and everyone is convinced, because he can do things. The word "culture" focuses on transformation, which is to dissolve, fully dissolve, and integrate. There are only concepts and concepts, just a lump of ink, not culture.

For example, in an illiterate village, there are very few people who can read and write, but the core of Confucianism, benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, faith, courtesy, righteousness, honesty and shame are very familiar. The "five constants" and the "four dimensions" are very open.

Mr. Liang Shuming's definition of culture is very good: "Culture is the way people live their lives collectively." A person's personality is called individuality, and the collective character of people in a region is called culture. What is the collective character? Shanxi people are different from Northeast people, Beijing people are different from Shanghai people, Sichuan people are different from Guangdong people, Shandong people are different from Henan people. Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Guangxi, where ethnic minorities are concentrated, are more prominent and more complex.

This is the culture I understand and recognize.

We also compare and see that Beijing is the capital, but the character of the people of Beijing does not cover other parts of China, and it cannot be covered. Nowadays, Guangdong is very rich, but can the Cantonese people buy off the Inner Mongolian people and sell them their character? Character is deeply rooted in the region. The country is easy to change, but the nature is difficult to change.

We have an old saying, "Ten miles are different customs, a hundred miles are different sounds", which refers to the charm of differences in Chinese culture. There is also a poem, "You live at the head of the Yangtze River, I live at the end of the Yangtze River, I think about you every day and don't see you, and drink the water of the Yangtze River", the words of the common people are called "I grew up drinking a river water", which refers to the things that are common and inclusive in culture. But if you think about it in detail, for example, along the Yangtze River Basin, Qinghai people, Sichuan people, Hubei people, Hunan people, Jiangsu people, and Shanghai people live up and down the Yangtze River, and the differences between them are obvious. Compare the Qinghai people, Inner Mongolian people, Shaanxi people, Henan people, and Shandong people along the Yellow River, what do they have in common? What are the differences? Can they replace each other?

There is a word in French novels called provincials. Some of us who learn to write novels also use this concept, which is a typical ignorance of Chinese culture. China's political center is in the capital, but culturally it has always been full of flowers and stars.

The first splendid peak of Chinese culture was the "Hundred Schools of Thought" during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, which produced a series of great figures and great university theories. At that time, there were many countries, and there were more than 800 at the most, but the total population was equivalent to today's Taiwan, but it was only more than 20 million people. At that time, there was no unified script, and the dialect was heavy, and it was very troublesome to communicate, but in this context, a great situation of bright stars appeared, and the height reached by the ideological and academic circles at that time, we have not surpassed it to this day.

The book "The Golden Branch" written by the Englishman Fraser also talks about regional culture. But he has a big clue, a main channel, combing all the way down from the source. It is impossible to sort out Chinese culture from such a perspective. We have things from the Yangtze River and the Yellow River, things from the Pearl River, things from the Liao River and Heilongjiang, things from the coast, Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, things from the Great Plains, and things from the deep mountains. In addition, we have traditional royal stuff. The emperor's things and folk things are not blended together, which is also our Chinese characteristics, just like food, there are court dishes, as well as local famous dishes, and local cuisines are much richer than court dishes.

I've read several pamphlets on the history of literature written by Americans, one called "America in the 1890s," one called "The Return of the Exiles," and one called "Gates of Eden," which are written chronologically. It is also not convenient to write a literary history of China from such a perspective. There is a sentence in Mr. Li Hao's book, "The relationship between man and land is the basic relationship in the evolution of history", which is very important and his academic experience.

Western culture is a river, and Christ's stuff is the mainstream. We are not a river, it is a bit like a botanical garden, with different varieties of trees in the garden. When looking at a botanical garden in the same way as a river, there is a problem of perspective.

The book is called "A Study of the Three Regional Literary Scholars of the Tang Dynasty", and this perspective is based on the characteristics of Chinese culture.