During the two Song Dynasties, China once again appeared in the situation of "the parallel establishment of the southern and northern dynasties", and in the north and west of the two Song Dynasties, there were many powerful regimes such as the Liao State, the Western Xia, the Jin State, and the Mongol Kingdom, and in the process of opposing them, although the Northern Song Dynasty and the Southern Song Dynasty were in a military inferior position for a long time, the Central Plains civilization was respected in these regimes.
The Khitans, Jurchens, and Dangxiang peoples, who had been in slavery or even primitive societies for a long time, learned the civilization creation system of the Central Plains after seeing it, and used the Song Dynasty as a model to develop their own civilization. They all invented their own scripts on the basis of Chinese characters, although these characters look strange and have long been abolished or lost, but they were also once shining stars in the Central Plains.
Among these ethnic groups, the cultural development of the Khitan people is rapid, and compared with the Western Xia and Jin Kingdoms, the Khitan people have a natural advantage in learning from the Civilization of the Central Plains, that is, they have the Sixteen Prefectures of Yanyun. Most of the people living in this land are Han people with a high degree of civilization and engaged in farming, and the Khitan people have set up a special "southern official" in order to rule this area, and implement the policy of "governing the Khitan with the state system and treating the Han people with the Han system", which is probably the earliest "one country, two systems".
The Khitan people respected the civilization of the Central Plains in their hearts, for example, there is such a record in the "History of Liao":
Shi Taizu asked his attendants, "The king who has been ordained, when the heavens worship God." Those who have great merit, who desire to worship, why first? "It's all about the Buddha. Taizu yue: "Buddha is not Chinese religion", (Yelü) Double said: "Confucius the Great Sage, respected by all the worlds, yixian." "Taizu Dayue, that is, the construction of the Confucius Temple, the Emperor And crown prince Spring and Autumn Interpretation."
From the above record, we can see that as early as the founding of the Liao Taizu Yelü Abaoji, it was already determined to determine Confucianism as the development direction of Liao culture. After the fall of the Liao State and the Later Jin Dynasty, not only did they seize the land of the Later Jin, but also transferred the books, sharp tools, etc. stored in the imperial palace for thousands of years to the Liao State, which became the blueprint for the development of civilization in the Liao State.
After the Liao and the Northern Song Dynasty signed the "Alliance of Liaoyuan", the two countries dissolved their long-standing hostile relations and began to have deeper exchanges, and they could more easily learn culture from the Song Dynasty. Hong Mai once wrote in his Yi Jian Zhi: "When the Khitan children first read books, they first used the colloquial sayings to reverse their words and learned them, so that those who used two or three characters for one word. For example, the two sentences 'Birds stay in the trees by the pond, and the monk knocks on the door under the moon' are read in the clouds' when they are read: "The monks in the moon are playing, and the old crows are doing in the books under the water'. It can be seen that the poems of the Tang Dynasty poet Jia Dao were once used as children's enlightenment books in the Liao Kingdom, which also reflected the Respect and Yearning of the Liao State for the Culture of the Central Plains.
Su Shi once drank with the emissaries of the Liao State, during which the envoys of the Liao State actually said a sentence in the Northern Song Dynasty, "Drinking bitterly from now on, the moonlight in Xixuan will come new", Su Shi was stunned on the spot, stunned, stunned, and excitedly said: "Isn't this a poem I wrote?" Have they all spread to your Liao kingdom? ”
The Liao state itself once developed a high degree of civilization, but unfortunately its writing and language disappeared with the demise of the Liao state, and now we can see almost all the Khitan script from stone carvings and other inscriptions, and their deciphering has become a complex and difficult task.