Dong Zuobin

Dong Zuobin or Tung Tso-pin (1895–1963) was a Chinese archaeologist. He was a leading authority on the oracle bone and turtle shell inscriptions of the Shang dynasty (1600-1046 BC). In 1928, Dong supervised the first archaeological dig of Anyang, the Shang capital. Dong was a professor at National Taiwan University and director of the at Academia Sinica from 1950 to 1954. Dong's construction of a Shang chronology was his most important research achievement.

Early life Dong was born 20 March 1895 to a shopkeeper's family in Nanyang in southern Henan Province. His talent for calligraphy and writing were already noticed when he was a child. As a result, he was employed by a local seal engraver when he was about 11 or 12. As his father needed help in the shop, Dong could not begin formal education until 1915. In 1922, Dong went to Beijing to audit classes at Peking University and enrolled the following year. He visited Anyang in the summer of 1928 and found that villagers were still digging up oracle bones and shells and selling them, as they had been since around 1895. Although many scholars assumed that thirty years of looting had already removed all valuable items, Dong's visit led him to suggest an archaeological dig. His university approved the dig and he supervised fieldwork in October 1928. This was the first systematic dig of the Anyang site. Some 784 items were uncovered.

In March 1932, Dong's breakthrough work, Jiaguwen duandai yanjiu li, was published. The work gave ten criteria for dating an inscription within the Shang dynasty. It also gave the genealogy of the Shang kings, terms of address used in the inscriptions, names of foreign countries used, grammatical constructions, and ideographic constructions. Publication of the inscriptions themselves was delayed due to wartime conditions and the arduous process of preparation. Dong finally able to published this important work in Hong Kong in 1941 as Yinxu wenzi, jia pian [Texts from Yinxu, first collection]. He also worked out the dates of individual reigns and the rounds of ancestral sacrifice. Dong died in Taiwan on 23 November 1963.