Proving The Source Of Historical Data From The Book Of "The Khitan National Records"

Liao dynasty had been the steppe empires of the ethnic minorities which rose in northern China and played an important role in Chinese history. There was little quantity of books about the history of Liao Dynasty. The representative books belonged to"The Khitan National Records"including"Liao Shi"."The Khitan National Records"was a historical book whose main topic was about the process of the Khitan people establishing their country, having distinctive writing characteristics and high-level historical value.Through having analyzed the historical source from this book systematically, such as the emperor biographies of taizu and shizong, we could find its most important historical data deriving from the book of"ZiZhiTongJian","New history of the five dynasties"and some other relevant documents in Song dynasty and Yuan dynasty.There had been some researchers arguing that the author of"The Khitan National Records"was a high-level historian, but some others considered his works was being copied from other historical books mechanically, the writer of which had not the historian basic quality. The reason why the situation happened was that the book was not written by one person, lots of people that had different levels involved compiling it. If the above statement was not wrong, it was unbelievable that the author of book belonged to Yelongli in Southern Song dynasty.The people thought it was not the direct historical data from the book of"ZiZhiTongJian"and"New history of the five dynasties"through the process of researching on"Liao Shi". Under the conditions of describing briefly in the current version of"Liao Shi", the historical value of relevant statements in"ZiZhiTongJian"and"New history of the five dynasties"was no worse than"Liao Shi"which was written with the materials that the history ministers left in the period of the Five Dynasties. It was believable because that the temporal persons stated the temporal things.That was the reason why the statements from"The Khitan National Records"which was born from the book of"ZiZhiTongJian","New and Old history of the five dynasties"was coincidence with"Liao Shi", which was better than it occasionally.