Jao Tsung-I
| The Honourable Jao Tsung-I GBM |
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| Born |
9 August 1917 Chaozhou, Republic of China |
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| Other names | Rao Gu'an 饒固庵 | ||||||||||||||||
| Alma mater | Jinshan Middle School | ||||||||||||||||
| Occupation | poet, calligrapher, linguist, paleographer, historian, writer | ||||||||||||||||
| Title | Professor of the University of Hong Kong, University of Singapore, Yale University, Academia Sinica, Chinese University of Hong Kong | ||||||||||||||||
| Parent(s) | Rao E 饒鍔 | ||||||||||||||||
| Awards | 1982: D.Litt (HKU) 1997: Life Achievement Award (HKADC) 2000: GBM |
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| Chinese name | |||||||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 饒宗頤 | ||||||||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 饶宗颐 | ||||||||||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
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| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Ráo Zōngyí |
| Wade–Giles | Jao2 Tsung1-i2 |
| IPA | [ɻǎu tsʊ́ŋ.ǐ] |
| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Yale Romanization | Yìuh Jūng-yìh |
| Jyutping | Jiu4 Zung1-ji4 |
Jao Tsung-I (Chinese: 饒宗頤; pinyin: Ráo Zōngyí; born 9 August 1917) is a Chinese-born Hong Kong scholar, poet, calligrapher and painter. A versatile scholar, he contributes to every field of humanities, including archaeology, literature, philology, musicology and history. Currently he lives in Hong Kong. He has two daughters.
Born into a wealthy family in Chaozhou of Hakka Mei County, Guangdong ancestry, Jao is largely an autodidact. He began to publish scholarly works at a young age. Later he was invited to work as lecturer and researcher at different colleges in the mainland. He moved to Hong Kong in 1949. During the following years, he taught in the University of Hong Kong, while learning Sanskrit from the Indian diplomat and China expert V. V. Paranjpe, who in turn learnt ancient Chinese from Jao. In 1959, he published Yindai zhenbu renwu tongkao (殷代貞卜人物通考 "Oracle Bone Diviners of the Yin Dynasty"), which later earned him the Prix Stanislas Julien from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
From 1963 onwards, he travelled to different countries to research and teach, including India, France, Singapore, United States and Japan. Currently he is the Wei Lun Honorary Professor of Fine Arts and Emeritus Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Many of his works are pioneering. For instance, he is the first scholar to render the Babylonian epic Enûma Elish into Chinese, after learning the Akkadian language from Jean Bottéro while he was a visiting scholar in Paris (see his work Jindong kaipi shishi 近東開闢史詩 "Creation Epic of the Near East"), and the first one to make a comparative study of the oracle bone script and the Indus script (see his essay Tan Yindu Hegu tuxing wenzi 談印度河谷圖形文字 "On the Indus Valley Pictorial Characters").
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