(Daliao Imperial Palace)
The nineteenth year of the calendar, 969 AD.
Shangjing, Daliao Imperial Palace.
The hall is golden and brightly illuminated.
It was pitch black, but at this time, it was like day.
Above the throne of the golden luan, a middle-aged man who was drunk in the sky snored like thunder and was sleeping heavily.
This person was none other than the fourth emperor of the Liao Dynasty, Emperor Muzong of Liao.
The emperors in Chinese history, roughly speaking, there are about 400 people, and it is difficult for Yelü Jing to rank on merit, but on special, he is a very beautiful landscape among many emperors.
The emperor ruled for 18 years, not long or short, but almost half the time he only did two things a day.
One comes to drink, the other comes to sleep.
Raise a glass and drink, then drunkenly snor, wake up and drink again, drink and fall back to sleep.
As a result, the emperor was awarded two titles in the long river of history.
First: the most drinking emperor in history.
Second: the most sleepy emperor in history.
And now, the life of this strange emperor is coming to an end.
At night.
The moon is round and the fog is thick.
Outside the sleeping hall, several figures were creeping slowly.
They were not generals who planned mutinies, nor were they powerful ministers who plotted against them, on the contrary, they were the most ordinary beings in the entire Liao Dynasty.
Three attendants, two cooks.
They were unarmed, with only a knife that had become too blunt to be blunt enough to cut meat.
Tonight, they are going to do something earth-shattering—the execution of the king.
(Jeroboam image)
The drunken emperor was very harsh on his attendants, and the front-line service personnel were slightly negligent, ranging from scolding to torturing.
Even if you work in white, you can endure being cleaned up, but now your life is going to be lost, and the big guys really can't stand it.
They sneaked into the palace, blew out the candles, and then there was a very small whisper, followed by the sound of tables and candlesticks falling over, accompanied by a very violent crash.
Then, from the large palace, there was an incomparably harsh shout of killing and the sound of weapons colliding, and finally a terrible howl.
By the time the candle was re-lit, the Emperor had been assassinated.
The emperor died, but it did not cause much waves throughout the Liao Dynasty.
On the contrary, both the courtiers and the people, when they heard the news of Jeroboam's death, breathed heavily.
Three-legged frogs are not easy to find, and there are still many two-legged emperors.
The courtiers met overnight, and after deliberation, it was decided to establish Emperor Sejong's son, Yelü Ruan, and the niece and son-in-law of Emperor Yelü Jing, yelü Xian as emperor. (Liaojingzong)
And from this moment on, a new era is about to begin.
Looking at the ancestors of this dynasty, almost all of them can be called the generation of the Ming Emperor, and they all have a common feature, that is, they are very capable of fighting.
Successive emperors have been looking north to the Central Plains, hoping that through their own efforts, they can greatly expand the territory of Daliao.
Emperors with ambitions and strong external expansion, although essentially for the sake of the development of the dynasty, they forgot a very important truth, that is:
The vast territory may not necessarily represent the strength of the dynasty, and the development of a country is inseparable from perfect systems and policies.
Even if you can lay a large territory, but you can't hold it, what is the use?
Previously, the Liao Dynasty had frequent civil wars, serious internal friction, frequent changes in the imperial throne, the emperor was diligent on the battlefield, and political affairs were not repaired, which hindered the development of the Liao Dynasty to a certain extent.
Others didn't understand, but Jeroboam understood it all too well.
(Jeroboam image)
He knew that if he wanted to put the Liao Dynasty among the great powers, it must be reformed.
How to change it?
Abandoning the old Khitan system of self-imposed self-imposed, imitating the Han system in the Central Plains, and establishing a perfect political system.
We are still nomadic, but we are going to be empires.
The first step in the reform is to reuse Han officials.
We know that the Liao Dynasty was a nomadic regime established by the Khitans.
The Khitan nobles, who relied on seniority or were born into the royal family, had no real talent and practical learning, but firmly controlled the various important official positions of the Liao Dynasty.
To put it bluntly, the prince has high-ranking officials, and the cold door does not enter the army.
Yes, it is not only the talent that is most important in the 21st century.
In that distant 10th century, talent was also the foundation of a dynasty.
So are there talents in these Khitan nobles?
Of course there are, but not many.
In order to attract more talents, it is necessary to open up the policy so that han students and Han chinese have the same opportunity to enter the DPRK as officials.
(Khitan nobility)
These things seem easy to do, but they are hard to do.
The Central Plains regime in the north despised the steppe civilization, believing that the Khitans were indigenous barbarians and uncivilized, while the Khitans also looked down on the Sinicization system, believing that it was just a bunch of poor and rotten Confucian research.
However, yelüxian was able to carry out drastic reforms under such sharp contradictions, reuse a large number of Han officials, and integrate the Sinicization system, which is a great feat.
Of course, there is no point in embarrassing blowing, and history is studied, not touted.
The regimes that had emerged in the northern steppes, whether it was the Liao, Jin, Western Xia, or the Mongol Empire, had only one way to become strong, and that was Sinicization.
When they were strong, they were like the Central Plains Dynasty, imitating the Central Plains, building capitals, building palaces, selecting officials, formulating laws and systems, developing science and technology, and promoting culture... The list goes on.
The "Sinicization" here is not to live like the Han people, or to turn themselves into Han people, but to learn and improve the systematic and systematic systems of the Central Plains regime.
They were born in the steppe, based on alliances, considered themselves tribes, they had brave warriors, strong war horses, and weapons smelting technology far beyond the Central Plains regime, but they had no fixed place, no discipline and system, and the grassland was not so much their home as their penal colony.
(Khitan culture)
And now, Jeroboam has changed all that.
He made the Liao Dynasty perfect and more cohesive, and made this steppe civilization officially become an indestructible and powerful empire.
Reform, Shunaisei, Re-reform, Reintroducation.
Yerushalayim has been working silently for a long time.
The gentleman hides the instrument in his body and waits for the time to move.
Ten years of grinding a sword, now that the sword blade has become a sword, it is time to strike!
The smoke of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms has dissipated, and on the northern plains, a new dynasty is waiting for Yerushalayim.
This dynasty is the Northern Song Dynasty.
Zhao Guangyi, the second emperor of the Northern Song Dynasty, was a very idealistic person, or rather, he was a very idealistic person.
The emperor believed that the mountains and rivers and the five mountains of Kyushu should have been the land of the Northern Song Dynasty, and the Liao Dynasty forces on the grassland were stubborn and vulnerable, and as long as they moved their fingers, they could easily overthrow it.
(Portrait of Zhao Guangyi, Emperor Taizong of Song)
Song Taizong wanted to fight, not only to clean up the Liao Dynasty, but also to take back the long-lost Yanyun Sixteen Prefectures.
Roughly in the north of today's Beijing, north of Shanxi, and north of Hebei, the land is full of ravines and mountains, which was originally the best barrier that nature gave to the Northern Song Dynasty.
But now this land is in the hands of the Liao, as if they have been choked by their throats.
Without the return of Yanyun Sixteen Prefectures, how can we talk about the unification of the world?
The emperor said that it must be taken back.
When all was said and done, Emperor Taizong of Song personally led 100,000 elite troops to attack the Liao.
And Yelü Xian, the Liaojing Sect who was far away in Shangjing (the capital of the Liao Dynasty), had been waiting for this day for a long time.
On the one hand were the Northern Song infantry that ended the great division of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, and on the other side were the invincible Khitan cavalry that swept across the grasslands.
The war is about to break out, who can win the final victory?
If it is a TV series, or a book review, in order to satisfy the appetite of the audience and friends, the story will end here.
But history tells us the answer.
In this battle, the entire Song army collapsed and the whole army was destroyed, and the 100,000 Song army was beaten by the 50,000 Liao army.
Song Taizong, who was personally in command, saw that the war situation was unfavorable, and in a hurry, he found a donkey cart and fled with the donkey cart.
Since the place of battle between the two armies was at the Sorghum River (present-day Xizhimen, Beijing), the name of Song Taizong's "Sorghum River Car God" did not go away.
(Battle of the Sorghum River)
Before Emperor Taizong of Song ascended the throne, he did not experience too many wars, and most of the territory of the Northern Song Dynasty was either laid down by Chai Rong of the Later Zhou Dynasty or earned by Zhao Kuangyin, who usurped power and established himself, and his role has always been the position of mayor of Kaifeng (the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty).
It is longer than governing the country and security, and shorter than facing the enemy on the battlefield.
The emperor took his shortcomings to touch the long road of Yerushalayim, and failure was inevitable.
After the war, some people rejoiced and some people were sad.
The sad person is the "donkey cart driver" Song Taizong, and the person who rejoices is naturally the Liaojingzong Yelüxian of Wenzhi Martial Arts.
This emperor repaired the country's government internally, resisted strong enemies externally, reformed and forged ahead, and recruited talents from all over the world.
Like all the good emperors of the past, he was a wise man, but also a talented man.
He not only stabilized the Liao Dynasty, which had been in turmoil for many years, but also laid a solid foundation for the overall prosperity of the Liao Dynasty during the later Liao Dynasty.
Gong is better than Wenjing, and only then can Kangxi be kang.
This is my most sincere evaluation of this emperor.
Of course, when it comes to Jeroboam, we have to mention the name of a woman.
This woman is the iron-blooded empress with a unique legendary history in the history of the Liao Dynasty, Xiao Yanyan.
(Portrait of Xiao Yanyan)
During the 13 years of Emperor Jingzong's reign, this Han empress, as the emperor's most solid right and left hand, also made a contribution to the revitalization of the Liao Dynasty.
Qinser and Ming, Queen Of The Ming Dynasty.
The legendary imperial couple joined forces to create a myth in the northern steppe that could never be replicated.
The fourth year of Gan Heng, 982 AD.
According to the chronology of the stem branch, it is the year of the noon.
This year, the holy Roman Emperor Otto II of Europe finally suffered at the Battle of Calabria - he was beaten by the Arab army of the Byzantine Empire.
In the Central Plains Dynasty, Zhao Guangyi, who had suffered a defeat in battle, was in a good mood and had just been crowned the new king of the vassal state of Goryeo.
In the northern grasslands, a generation of British lords Liao Jingzong Yelüxian finally fell and completed his life journey.
The emperor finally came to an end, and everything changed its face.
The old era is about to pass, and the new era is coming.
The Northern Song Dynasty, the Great Liao, their real story, has only just begun.
Moving forward! Don't stop!
Victory belongs to those who persist to the end in the long river of history.