Jao Tsung-i (9 August 1917 - 6 February 2018), styled Gu'an, Bolian and Bozi and known by the sobriquet Xuantang, was born in Chao'an, Guangdong (now Chaozhou) and was among the most wide-ranging Chinese scholars of modern times, widely honoured as Jao Gong. His father Jao E was a noted Chaozhou scholar and merchant whose Tianxiao Lou library, the largest in the region, held close to 100,000 volumes; the young Jao grew up among them. At fourteen he completed A Study of Gu Tinglin, which caused a stir, and at eighteen he finished his father's unfinished Chaozhou Yiwenzhi, or Catalogue of Chaozhou Literature, published in the Lingnan Journal, marking his entry into scholarship. He never attended university yet became a self-taught master whose work covered oracle-bone studies, Dunhuang studies, bamboo and silk manuscripts, palaeography, history, ci poetry, religion, art history and East-West cultural exchange; he is often paired with Ji Xianlin as Jao in the South, Ji in the North. He settled in Hong Kong in 1949 and from 1952 taught in the Chinese department of the University of Hong Kong, rising from lecturer to senior lecturer and professor and teaching bibliography, philology, the Chu ci and Six Dynasties literature until 1968. He then taught at the National University of Singapore, and from 1973 served as chair professor of Chinese at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, remaining an emeritus professor after retirement. After retiring in 1978 he spent a year as a visiting professor in the religious studies section of the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes in Paris, and he also taught at Sun Yat-sen University and researched in India and France. Jao published more than eighty books and hundreds of papers, including Dunhuang Baihua, the twenty-nine-volume Dunhuang Calligraphy Series, the Xuantang Collected Works and his Twentieth-Century Academic Anthology. His 1959 Oracle-Bone Diviners of the Yin Dynasty is a landmark of oracle-bone scholarship, and he also wrote on ci poetry and Dunhuang art. In 2000 he received the Grand Bauhinia Medal; he was also a member of the Russian Academy of Eurasian Sciences and received the Prix Stanislas Julien of the Academie francaise, and in 1982 the University of Hong Kong awarded him an honorary doctorate of letters. A painter and calligrapher who had studied Ren Yi's works in his youth, he was known in later years for lotus and landscape paintings. In 2011 he was elected the seventh president of the Xiling Seal Society. He died in Hong Kong on 6 February 2018, aged 100.
Jao Tsung-i was a self-taught master of Chinese learning whose work spanned oracle-bone studies, Dunhuang studies, history, ci poetry and art history, with more than eighty books to his name, and was widely honoured as Jao Gong. Based in Hong Kong for decades as a researcher and teacher, he helped make the city a centre of international Sinology. In later years he was also renowned as a painter and calligrapher and promoted cultural exchange between China and the West. His death was regarded as a major loss to Chinese scholarship and art.
Achievements
- 1982 · Received an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Hong Kong
- 2000 · Awarded the Grand Bauhinia Medal by the Hong Kong SAR government
- 2011 · Elected the seventh president of the Xiling Seal Society