I also like history, those people and things in the past. In the long river of history, there are too many things that can be learned from history, so there is an allusion about Wolong being imprisoned for using the past to satirize the present. But the reality is that most people have not been exposed to enough history, so that they will make mistakes again and again in the present.
It has been more than ten years since I was exposed to history since I was a child, and I have only started to write now when I entered society. I also want to try to leave these words and write them for the history of history.
This book is basically based on historical data, adding personal writing and analysis, as well as some evaluations of the system at that time.
The Song Dynasty was an extremely contradictory dynasty.
It was very rich - so rich that its GDP once accounted for more than half of the world at that time, and Kaifeng and Lin'an were the most prosperous super cities on the earth at that time; it was very weak - so weak that even "county-level regimes" like Xixia could ride on its head, and eventually perished at the iron heel of Mongolia. It is very civilized - so civilized that the emperor could not fight back when being scolded by civil servants; it is also very aggrieved - so aggrieved that it wants to use "year coins" to buy peace and "profess one's vassal" in exchange for survival.
But this is what the Song Dynasty really looked like.
This book starts from the morning in 960 AD when Chen Qiaoyi was "forced" to put on a yellow robe, and goes all the way to 1279, when the sea outside Yashan swallowed up hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians. Three hundred and nineteen years, eighteen emperors, countless ruthless men, fierce men, deceitful men, and saints——
This is not a boring history textbook. There are no obscure classical Chinese texts here, no chronology that makes people doze off, only living people, absurd or tragic events, and a complete story of an empire struggling to move forward amidst glory and humiliation.
