Tung Tso-pin (20 March 1895-23 November 1963), leading authority on chia-ku-wen, the study of oracle bone and turtle shell inscriptions of the Shang-Yin period. He first suggested the systematic excavation of the Anyang site. He served as director of the Academia Sinica's institute of history and philology in 1950-54, during which time he also was a professor at Taiwan University. Tung's reconstruction of the Yin chronology was a major research achievement.

About the time that Tung Tso-pin was born into a storekeeper's family in the Nanyang district of southern Honan, the villagers of Hsiaot'un in the northern Honan district of Anyang found in their fields fragments of shoulder blades of oxen and turtle shells, some of which were inscribed with curious forms of writing. The peasants scraped off the inscriptions and sold these fragments to apothecaries as the medicinal dragon bones of the traditional Chinese pharmacopoeia. In 1899 a number of these bones and shells came to the attention of scholars, who realized that the inscriptions were in an early form of Chinese writing current during the Yin (Shang) dynasty and who began to collect them. The significance of this discovery was known to very few people, least of all to the small storekeepers of such a conservative town as Nanyang. When Tung Tso-pin was six sui, his father sent him to a traditional private school, where he learned to read and write. As he grew older, he was taught the Chinese classics. Because the family was poor, he had to help his father in the shop after school. His talent as a calligrapher must have been recognized during his childhood, for during the New Year holiday he sold paper scrolls calligraphed by himself to the townspeople, who pasted them over their doorways. When Tung was about 11 or 12, his interest in Chinese writing manifested itself in another direction. A seal engraver who lived across the street from the Tung family agreed to teach the boy his craft. Tung learned to engrave the seal characters on tiles, and by the time he was 14, he was engraving stone seals for customers at four copper coins per character. During this period, he developed what was to be an abiding interest in ancient Chinese writing. In 1910 Tung entered the Yuan-chung Higher Primary School, which boasted a modern curriculum. Unfortunately for him, his brother died the following year, and his father, needing help in the shop, took Tung Tso-pin out of school. The boy tutored children in his spare time to earn extra money, and in 1913 he began selling books in the family shop, an arrangement which enabled him to read new books without spending money. To improve his writing ability, he joined with some friends in organizing a literary society. They set up a monthly schedule of independent study and, with the help of older scholars, worked to improve their literary styles.

In the spring of 1915 Tung Tso-pin decided to resume his formal education. He passed the entrance examination for the teacher training school established by the county government. Before leaving for the county seat he cut off his queue. He was graduated the following year with highest honors and was asked to stay on as a teacher. Because his father had died in late 1915, Tung had to find someone to manage the family business before he could pursue his own career. In the spring of 1917, having been unable to find a manager, he sold the shop and went to Kaifeng, the provincial capital, to study at the Yü-ts'ai kuan, an institute for the training of government personnel. It was there that he learned of the existence of inscribed oracle bones and turtle shells. After graduation in 1919 Tung and some classmates founded a newspaper, the Hsin-jüjih-pao, and he served as its editor for two years.

Tung's thirst for knowledge led him in 1922 to Peking, where he spent a year auditing the classes of such philologists as Ch'ien Hsuan-t'ung (q.v.) at Peking University. He devoted some of his spare time to tracing on thin paper the ink rubbings in the Yin-ch'ü shu-ch'i ch'ien-pien [Anyang inscriptions], a work by Lo Chen-yü (q.v.) which had appeared in 1911. When Peking University established a research institute in 1923, Tung enrolled as a student in its sinology department. He studied philology, archaeology, ethnology, and history. To defray his living expenses, he served as editor of the Folksong Weekly. In the winter of 1924 he joined his teachers and fellow students in participating in the classification and cataloguing of the treasures of the imperial palaces in Peking.

In the spring of 1925 Tung accepted an invitation to teach Chinese at Fukien Christian University. That winter, he returned to Honan to become a lecturer at Chung-chou University in Kaifeng. He went to Peking in the summer of 1927 to accept an appointment as an executive secretary in the department of sinology at the research institute of Peking University. He remained there until August, when he and many other Peking University teachers and students left the old capital for Canton to protest the Peking government's attempt to amalgamate nine universities in Peking. At Canton, he joined the faculty of National Chungshan University and became a close friend of Fu Ssu-nien (q.v.), then acting dean of the college of arts and chairman of the departments of Chinese and history. Tung became a member of the institute of history and philology which Fu founded. In August 1928 Fu became director ofthe institute of history of the Academia Sinica. By this time, Tung had returned to Honan because his mother was ill and had taken a job at the Nanyang Middle School. During his summer vacation he visited Anyang and discovered that the villagers still were digging up oracle bones and shells from the Yin site and selling them. He suggested to Fu that the Academia Sinica sponsor a systematic excavation of the Anyang site. Fu agreed and appointed Tung editor of the institute of history and philology. Tung began field work on 13 October and continued digging until 30 October. This first systematic excavation of the Yin site yielded 784 pieces of oracle bones and shells. From then until the outbreak of the Sino- Japanese war, Tung participated in most of the 15 Anyang excavations, under the direction of Li Chi (q.v.). In November 1930 he took part in the Ch'eng-tzu-yai excavation in Shantung (for details, see Li Chi) which led to the discovery of the Lungshan culture. Tung became a full member of the research staff of the institute of history and philology in 1932. Tung Tso-pin's epochal Chia-ku-wen tuan-tai yen-chiu li was published in March 1932. In this work, he set forth ten criteria for dating a given piece of inscription within the Yin dynasty : genealogy of the Yin kings ; terms of address used by the divining king to his ancestor; name of the diviner; position of the pit in which the artifact was discovered ; the name of any foreign country mentioned in the inscription; persons mentioned in the text; events related in the text; grammatical construction; ideographical construction; and calligraphical style. By creating this classification system, Tung paved the way for scholars who wished to collate authentic biographical and historical information on the Yin rulers; to examine the institutional, calendrical, and geographical data of the Yin dynasty in chronological order; to date the other cultural relics that were discovered with the oracle bones ; and to establish the authenticity of information on Yin culture in ancient and more modern books.

In addition to his field work in connection with the Anyang excavations, Tung directed the T'eng-hsien excavation in Shantung in the autumn of 1933, planned the repair project for the Chou-kung ts'e-liang t'ai, and investigated the foundation of the old Soochow wall in 1936. In the spring of 1935 he began the arduous task of preparing the Anyang oracle bone inscriptions for publication. By the spring of 1937 the manuscript had been sent to the Commercial Press in Shanghai. Publication was suspended, however, when the Japanese invaded Shanghai in August. In 1940 Tung sent another copy of his manuscript to the Hong Kong printing plant of the Commerical Press. The printing and binding of this long-awaited book, the Yin-cKü wen-tzu, chia p'ien [texts from Anyang, first collection], were completed in the autumn of 1941. By then, the Japanese had occupied almost the entire coast of China, and the books could not be shipped to the interior. When Hong Kong was occupied later in the war, the books were either lost or destroyed. Not until 1947 was the book finally published for general circulation.

During the war years, Tung moved with the institute of history and philology from Nanking to Changsha to Kweilin to Kunming to Nanhsi. Because Fu Ssu-nien was occupied with other tasks, Tung administered the affairs of the institute. He also continued to do research on the Yin calendar. He had begun this work about 1931, the year he had written "Pu-tz'uchung so-chien-chih Yin-li" [the calendar of Yin as glimpsed in oracle bone texts]. In 1943 he completed the Yin-li-p'u [the calendar of Yin]. When this product of over a decade's labor appeared in 1945, it was hailed as a monumental achievement.

In 1946 Tung returned with the institute of history and philology to Nanking. He then accepted an invitation to lecture on chia-kuwen and chin-wen [bronze inscriptions], and in January 1947 he embarked from Shanghai on his first trip abroad. He served as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and gave lectures at Yale University. He was elected in absentia to the Academia Sinica in March 1948. Late that year he returned to China by way of Hawaü and Japan. Almost immediately he set to work on the evacuation to Taiwan of the institute of history and philology. He moved to Taipei as the Communists came to power on the mainland, and he became professor of ancient Chinese writing and history at Taiwan University. In the summer of 1950 he and several of his friends founded the academic journal Ta-lu tsa-chih. After Fu Ssu-nien's death in December 1950, Tung succeeded him as director of the institute of history and philology. That winter, Tung published "Wu-wang fa Chou nien yueh jih k'ao" [the day, month, and year of Chou Wu-wang's attack on the last king of Shang], which placed the date of this invasion, a subject of controversy for more than 2,000 years, at 1111 B.C. His Hsi-Chou nien-li p'u [the calendar of Western Chou] appeared in 1951. In 1953 the Yinch'ü wen-tzu,yueh p'ien [texts from Anyang, second collection], was published. Tung was honored for these and other scholarly achievements in 1954, when the ministry of education awarded him a prize and a medal.

Tung resigned from the institute of history and philology in August 1955 and took a leave of absence from Taiwan University so that he could accept an invitation to do research at the institute of oriental culture at Hong Kong University. In 1956 he became honorary professor of history at Hong Kong University and professor of history at the Ts'ung-chi Academy. The following year, he also taught at New Asia College. While in Hong Kong, he completed his Chung-kuo nien-li tsung-p'u, a much-needed reference work in Chinese and English on the chronology of Chinese history. In the winter of 1957 he delivered a paper entitled Chung-kuo shang-ku-shih nien-tai [the most ancient period of China's history] at the Ninth Pacific Science Congress in Bangkok. He returned to his post at Taiwan University in the autumn of 1958. The following spring, the institute of history and philology celebrated his sixty-fifth sui by issuing a festschrift. In August 1960 he was appointed research professor of chia-ku-wen at Taiwan University, a post he held until his death on 23 November 1963. Tung was survived by the child of his first marriage, Yu-ching (1932-); by his second wife, nee Hsiung Haip'ing, whom he had married in 1935; and by the five children of his second marriage: Hsiao-min (1936-), Hsiao-hsing (193 7-), Hsiaop'ing (1939-), Hsiao-i (1944-), and Hsiao-wu (1946-).

Scholars agree that Tung Tso-pin's most important contributions to historical knowledge were his studies of oracle bone inscriptions. He discovered five stages in the evolution of the chia-ku-wen and two schools of calendrical construction during the Yin dynasty, thus facilitating the dating of individual inscriptions. He increased modern knowledge of ancient Chinese writing by identifying and interpreting individual characters in the chia-ku-wen. He compiled the ritual calendars of many Yin kings, reconstructed the astronomical calendar of the Yin dynasty, and correlated the Yin calendar with the record of lunar eclipses. Furthermore, he worked out a complete system of ancient Chinese chronology which must be taken into account in any study of the Yin and Chou civilizations. Tung Yuan-feng T. T'ien-chi