Liao is a very peculiar country, with the demise of the Liao State, and then the disappearance of the Khitan people, the Liao State has also become a fascinating history.

From the founding of the country in 916 to the destruction of the state by Jin in 1125, it lasted for 209 years. During the strongest period of Liao, the territory stretched from the Sea of Japan in the east, to the Altai Mountains in the west, to the Erguna River and the Great Khing'an Mountains in the north, and to the Baigou River in the south of Hebei in the south.

In fact, before the founding of the country, the Khitan people, as a nomadic people in northern China, had already appeared on the stage of history. The Khitan people were initially subordinated to the Tang Dynasty and were established by the Tang Dynasty as the Songmo Governorate. The Khitan State was established in the Five Dynasties, and the fortune of the Khitan State was still in the late Tang Dynasty after the Five Dynasties, Liao Taizong accepted Shi Jingjiao's request and assisted him in establishing the Later Jin Dynasty to replace the Later Tang Dynasty, obtained the Sixteen Prefectures of Yanyun, and later established the Liao Dynasty. At this point, the Liao Dynasty had the capital to fight against the Central Plains, and the diplomatic relations with the Central Plains for the first time changed to the state of the Liao Dynasty being supreme and the Central Plains being subjugated. In the Northern Song Dynasty, the two sides resumed the situation of confrontation. After the alliance of the Yuanyuan, Song Liao coexisted peacefully for more than 100 years, and finally both died, and the group was destroyed by the Jin State, which came later.

The Khitan people were originally nomadic peoples, and while learning the advanced culture and technology of the Han nationality, in order to maintain their national character, they separated the nomadic people from the agricultural peoples, advocated the rule according to customs, and created a bicameral political system. It not only realized the practical needs of the centralized politics of the Liao Emperor, but also conformed to the traditional customs and political requirements of the people of all ethnic groups in Liao, and changed the dilemma that the northern nomads were either rapidly sinicized or forced to withdraw because they could not adapt to the farming culture after entering the Central Plains.

In terms of system, culture, technology, customs, etc., he frantically learned from the Central Plains, and at the same time had a high national consciousness, created the Khitan script, and preserved his own culture. There is an incident recorded in the notes of the Song people, the Song people sent an envoy to the Khitan, listened to the Khitan children in the Khitan language, and read the famous sentence of Jia Island in the Tang Dynasty: "The bird stays in the tree by the pond, and the monk knocks on the door under the moon." According to the Khitan language, it is translated as "the monk Menzi in the moonlight, water."

Crows sit in the trees by the pool. It can be seen that the development of literature and language in the Liao State at that time was an achievement that the northern ethnic minorities before the Khitan did not have.

From the beginning of the founding of the country, the Liao State has not been born in peace, and in 926, the Liao State destroyed the Bohai State and came into contact with the sticks on the Korean Peninsula. In 942, he gave 50 camels to Goryeo, but Goryeo Taizu did not want them, and the envoys sent by the Liao State were banished to an isolated island, and the camels sent by the Liao State were all starved to death. Since then, the Liao State has repeatedly attacked and harassed the border of Goryeo, in short, no matter what the relationship was yesterday, anyway, as long as there is an opportunity, he will go to Goryeo to train his troops. In addition to the Bohai Kingdom and the Goryeo Kingdom, the Jurchens in the northeast, the Liao State was directly regarded as slaves, scolding when they opened their mouths, beating them when they raised their hands, and finally forced those fierce Jurchens to rebel.

Compared with the east, the Liao State was much more friendly to those tribes and countries in the west, after all, the three generations up, all had a kinship, from the Ganzhou Uighurs east of the Green Mountains, the Western Uighurs and the Qarakhanid States west of the Green Mountains, basically all of them were close to the Liao Dynasty, and the relationship with the Northern Song Dynasty was relatively sparse. In addition, Persia and Dashi in West Asia also sent envoys to communicate in the early Liao Dynasty. Therefore, after the fall of the Tang Dynasty, the Western Regions, West Asia, and Eastern Europe all used the Liao Dynasty (Khitan) as the representative title of China. In the military books of Central Asia and West Asia, gunpowder and firearms passed down from China are also called "Khitan flowers" and "Khitan rockets". To this day, the Khitan is still used as the name of China in the language and writing of the Russian nation. Some people think that the Khitan is powerful and powerful, but in fact, such an understanding is more one-sided, because at that time, the land communication line between China and Europe, that is, the "Silk Road"

Completely Khitan cut off. Europe can only reach the Khitan through land transportation channels, so they have always considered the Khitan to be "China". At that time, Europe's navigation technology was still very backward and could not reach China from the sea, and the Khitan became their only channel to understand China. That's why West Asia and Eastern Europe mostly use Khitan as a synonym for China. However, in countries in other directions, although the Khitan military is strong, the international influence of the Song Dynasty is far greater than that of the Khitan. For example, Goryeo (the one that refused to accept 50 camels from Liao), Western Xia, Qingtang and Tibet, Cochin, Japan, India, and Southeast Asian countries...... Many of these countries paid tribute to the Song Dynasty and had close trade with the Song Dynasty, the currency of the Song Dynasty was also the local legal currency, and the merchants of many countries lived in China for a long time, and Kaifeng even had a special Jewish community. It can only be said that the Khitan and Song dynasties each opened a window to the world.

With the strength of the Liao State, the Liao State began to declare itself to be "Chinese" orthodoxy, the reason is: "The orthodoxy of the Liao State came from the Later Jin Dynasty, because the Liao army went south and won the jade seal of the Later Jin Dynasty, so the Liao State can inherit the unity of the Later Jin Dynasty, for the Northern Dynasty, the Song Dynasty for the Southern Dynasty, and the two are established as orthodoxy." After that, in the letter to the Northern Song Dynasty, the Liao State no longer called itself "Khitan", but called itself the "Great Liao State of the Northern Dynasty" to emphasize its legitimacy. Judging from the fact that many Liao Dynasty epitaphs have the words "Great Central" or "Nanzhan Buzhou" in front of the national name of Khitan or Liao, by the time of Liao Daozong, it had already regarded itself as China

While the Liao people called themselves "China", they still called the Song Dynasty "China", and while emphasizing that the Yi people understood etiquette as "China", they did not object to the Han people understanding etiquette as "China", and still called the Song Dynasty "China" while calling themselves "orthodox". The Liao people's "view of China" has the characteristics of Liao and Song Dynasty as China, Huayi understands etiquette as China, and "orthodox" and "unorthodox" are both "China". This "China view" of the Liao people is actually a "China view" of "pluralism and unity."

However, for the orthodoxy of the Liao Dynasty, the Northern Song people at that time disdained it. Ouyang Xiu's "History of the New Five Dynasties" included the Liao Dynasty in the "Four Yi Appendix".

Since the formation of the Qin and Han dynasties, the question of "orthodoxy" has become an eternal topic in traditional Chinese political theory. Whether a dynasty is "orthodox" or not determines its legitimacy in ruling China. Among the orthodox disputes of the past dynasties, the "orthodox" controversy of the Song, Liao, and Jin dynasties is particularly eye-catching. During their reigns, the Liao and Jin dynasties struggled to establish their own legitimacy. In the early period of the Liao Dynasty, they regarded themselves as foreign countries and had no orthodox concepts. After arriving in Liao Xingzong, the sinicization of the Liao State deepened and began to try to establish its own orthodoxy. The controversy lasted for decades and was inconclusive until the end of the Yuan Dynasty, in the third year of Zhizheng (1343), when Prime Minister Tokhtar finally adopted the first view, ordering that "each of the three kingdoms should be orthodox, and each should have its own era name." So the Yuan Dynasty revised the "History of the Song Dynasty", "History of Liao" and "History of Jin", which were listed as official histories. However, the order did not put an end to the controversy, and the group of scholars and scholars in the south adhered to the position of exclusive Song orthodoxy, the most famous of which was Yang Weizhen, who wrote the article "Orthodox Debate", insisting that the Song dynasty should be respected exclusively, while the Yuan dynasty inherited the orthodoxy of the Song dynasty. In the Ming Dynasty, scholars and doctors could not tolerate the state of the coexistence of the three histories of Song, Liao and Jin, thus setting off a movement to reconstruct the history of Song, Liao and Jin and respect the orthodoxy of the Song Dynasty.

In several Song histories cultivated by scholars in the Ming Dynasty, Liaojin was included in the "Yifu", saying that "the first king was strict with the system of five suits, so he was careful to distinguish between Huayi." The Yuan people are Liao, Jin, and Song as the three histories, and they are named in foreign countries, and they are not systematic, and they are hereby dethroned. "It is believed that not only the Liao and Jin are not orthodox, but also the Yuan is not orthodox, and that the Ming Dynasty should directly inherit the orthodoxy of the Song Dynasty. Liao, Jin, and Western Xia, like the Western Xia, were all listed as Yidi foreign countries attached to the Song.

In the Qing Dynasty, these Liao, Jin, and Yuan were not orthodox and were scolded as "madness": "Since the beginning of history, there has never been such a person who is mad and heartbroken." Its books can be burned, and its boards can be axed. ”

With the fall of the Liao State, the Khitans gradually integrated into other ethnic groups, and a small number evolved into today's Daur and Yunnan themselves. From a regional point of view, the main part of the Khitan people in the Mongolian and Yuan dynasties are still distributed in their hometowns, that is, Chifeng City, Tongliao City, Liaoning and Jilin in present-day Inner Mongolia. However, with the progress of the Mongols' wars such as breaking the Western Xia, destroying the Jin, descending to Goryeo, Ping Dali, dying the Song Dynasty, and the Western Expedition, some of the Khitans were conscripted and sent out to conquer the above-mentioned areas, and began to spread throughout China, and even as far as Korea, Central Asia, and West Asia.

After research, experts have come to the following conclusions and analogies: when the Mongols in the Yuan Dynasty established the Mongol Empire across the Eurasian continent, they fought for many years, and the Khitans, who frequently used troops, were conquered and dispersed to various places, and some maintained large ethnic groups, such as the Daur ethnic group, which survived as a nation, and some were assimilated by the locals. The latter is the most difficult to find, because the Khitan people have maintained the "exogamy" system for more than a thousand years, so the Khitan people in the pure sense no longer exist. After constant migration, separation

Separated and merged, most of the Khitans melted like ice thrown into the sea, and they were named "descendants in the molecular sense" in a technical term.

Time passes, time flies, that heroic, strong, and has a bright and magical brilliance of the country, has disappeared in the sky of history like a meteor, and now can only be through the pieces of exquisitely made, vivid and expressive, full of smart feeling, vivid and bizarre cultural relics from the history shuttle, to find the former Khitan.