Yang Lien-sheng

Yang Lien-sheng (; July 26, 1914 – November 16, 1990) who often wrote under the name L.S. Yang, was a Chinese-American sinologist and professor at Harvard University. He was the first full-time historian of China at Harvard and a prolific scholar specializing in China's economic history.

Positions and honors Harvard University: Far Eastern Languages and Cultures Department (later renamed the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures), Associate Professor (1947 - 1958) Harvard University Professor Department of Far Eastern Languages and Cultures(1958 -1980); Harvard Yenching Chinese History Professor (1965 -1980) Harvard University Professor emeritus (1980 -1990) Elected Academician, Academia Sinica (1959)

Career Yang entered Tsinghua University in 1933 and studied in the department of economics, graduating in 1937. As an undergraduate, he would have preferred to study liberal arts, but because of his father's preference, he entered the department of economics. He nonetheless studied with the eminent historian Chen Yinke, who supervised his thesis. Other professors and influences included Qian Mu, Lei Haizong, and Tao Xisheng in Chinese studies, and in English, Ye Gongchao (George Yeh).

In 1940, Yang started graduate work at Harvard University, receiving his M.A. degree in 1942. Charles Gardner provided not only practical help, but moral support. He then assisted Y.R. Chao in a wartime language program for the United States military, and collaborated with Chao on the Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese (Harvard University Press, 1947), noted as one of the first dictionaries of whole Chinese words rather than Chinese characters. In 1946, he received his PhD degree for his doctoral thesis, “Notes on the Economic History of the Chin Dynasty." (晉書·食貨志譯注). After becoming assistant professor in 1947, in 1958 he became full professor. He taught many graduate students who went on to careers in the field, including Yu Ying-shih, Kao Yu-kung, Chang Fu-mei, Chang Chun-shu, and Rulan Chao Pian.

Personal life and friendships Yang's interests were wide and deep. As a student in the 1930s at the Beijing Normal University High School, he was known for the strength of his poetry and style of painting, which went beyond the amateur level, and he excelled at the board game weiqi. He and a band of friends formed an opera school and performed traditional Peking opera. Even after he retired, Yang and his Tsinghua classmate Ho Ping-ti sang arias together after a dinner at Ho's home at the University of Chicago.

Friendship and hospitality were important parts of his life. His modest home in Cambridge was the site for many dinners for Chinese students and visiting scholars. Yang worked very hard to maintain relations with old friends in Taiwan and, after relations with the People's Republic resumed, with scholars there. Hu Shih, the leading scholar in the New Culture Movement which dominated Chinese cultural life starting in the 1910s, was an especially close friend and colleague. Their initial exchange of views on Chinese poetry grew into a wide exploration of Chinese culture. He died at his home in Arlington, Massachusetts, in his sleep on November 16, 1990.

Selected works Yang, Liansheng (1914-1990 WorldCat Authority Page Books

Representative articles