Liang Siyong

Liang Siyong’s family’s ancestral home was Xinhui in Guangdong. Accounts of the date and place of his birth differ: a 2022 article in the Qilu Evening News gives October 7, 1904, in Macau; Academia Sinica’s website on the Shang royal tombs says he was born in Shanghai in 1904 and adds that some say he was born in Yokohama, Japan.⁠[1][2]

As a child he attended elementary school in Japan; after returning to China he studied in the preparatory programme of the Tsinghua School for study in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry. Accounts of when he entered and graduated differ: a 2022 article in the Beijing Evening News says he entered the Tsinghua School together with his elder brother Liang SichengLiang SichengLiang Sicheng (1901–1972) was a Chinese architect, architectural historian and architectural educator, the eldest son of Liang Qichao and the husband of Lin Huiyin. With Lin Huiyin and others he carried out extensive field surveys and studies of China’s historic buildings, pioneered architectural education at Northeastern University and Tsinghua University, and after 1949 led the design of the national emblem of the People’s Republic of China and of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, while putting forward plans for preserving the old city of Beijing.Open the full entry in 1915; the 2022 Qilu Evening News article says he graduated from the programme in 1923; Yang Qingyue of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences writes that he graduated from it in 1924.⁠[2][3][1][4]

A 2016 report in the Beijing Youth Daily states that Liang Sicheng learned the piano together with him.⁠[5]

On May 7, 1923, he and his elder brother Liang Sicheng were riding a motorcycle to a rally of Beijing students at Tiananmen marking the National Humiliation Day when, just out of the corner of Nanchang Street, they were knocked down by a car speeding towards them that belonged to Jin Yongyan, vice-minister of the army in the Beiyang government. Both were taken to the Peking Union Medical College Hospital; his face was covered in blood, but he had only skin wounds and was not seriously hurt, while Liang Sicheng suffered a spinal injury and a broken leg. The 2022 Qilu Evening News article states that he had planned to go to the United States that year and that the injury delayed his departure.⁠[3][1]

Yang Qingyue writes that he left for the United States in August 1924 and entered Dartmouth CollegeDartmouth CollegeDartmouth College is a private institution of higher education in Hanover, New Hampshire, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded by Eleazar Wheelock, it received a royal charter on December 13, 1769. The 1819 Supreme Court ruling in Dartmouth College v. Woodward preserved its private status. Alongside undergraduate liberal arts education, Dartmouth includes the Geisel, Thayer, Tuck and Guarini schools. It enrolled 7,273 students in fall 2025 and held a $9 billion endowment at June 30, 2025. Sian Leah Beilock, in office since June 2023, remained president as of October 2026.Open the full entry in Hanover, New HampshireNew HampshireNew Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordered by Quebec, Canada, to the north, Vermont across the Connecticut River to the west, Massachusetts to the south, and Maine and the Atlantic Ocean to the east; its capital is Concord. One of the original 13 colonies, it became the ninth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution on June 21, 1788, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 1,377,529.Open the full entry, to study history, and, drawing on the college’s general catalogue, that he graduated in early February 1926 as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honour society, with a Bachelor of Arts degree. The 2022 Qilu Evening News article says instead that he sailed for the United States in the second year after he recovered from his injuries.⁠[4][1]

On February 6, 1926, he registered at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry; in his first year his field was entered as anthropology, art and the history of religion together, and only when he registered for his second year in September 1926 did he settle on anthropology. Drawing on Harvard’s catalogues and the sixteen volumes of lecture and reading notes he left, Yang Qingyue writes that he took Earnest Hooton’s courses in physical anthropology and race mixture, Alfred Tozzer’s in primitive sociology and primitive religions, and Roland Dixon’s on the races and cultures of the Americas, of Middle and South America, of Oceania and of Asia and on the civilizations of China, India and Mesopotamia and on culture and environment, as well as the research seminar “Seminary: Field Methods in Archaeology”, for which he wrote “Field Method in China”, a summary of the field methods used by Aurel Stein and Raphael Pumpelly in their expeditions in northwest China.⁠[4]

He chose archaeology largely under his father’s influence: Liang Qichao believed that China should not let foreigners dig up its antiquities and carry them abroad, and that Chinese scholars should strive to build their own country’s discipline of archaeology; at the time archaeology was an unpopular, little-regarded field. An Academia Sinica digital-archives feature states that Liang Sicheng wrote to their father questioning whether his brother’s subject was of any use to the progress of the nation, that Liang Qichao answered by comparing the poets Li Bai and Du Fu with the statesmen Yao Chong and Song Jing, and that he regarded having Sicheng study architecture and Siyong archaeology as a way to win the Chinese nation worldwide renown in a specialised field of learning. The 2016 Beijing Youth Daily report states that Liang Qichao contacted the archaeologist Li Ji himself and paid out of his own pocket so that his son could take part in fieldwork. In December 1926 Liang Qichao wrote to tell his son that he had at once written to Li Ji, who was then excavating in Shanxi, to tell him of his son’s aspirations and circumstances; on the night of January 10, 1927, he wrote again, passing on what Li Ji and Yuan Fuli, just back from their excavation at Xiyin village in Xia County, Shanxi, had said in a talk at a tea party of the Tsinghua Research Institute of Chinese Studies — that they were archaeologists who had come to the field midway and that the one truly specialising in archaeology was still in America, Mr. Liang’s son — and urged him to work very hard to be worthy of the title, in words that translate as “China’s first specialist archaeologist”. The 2022 Qilu Evening News article gives the title in a slightly different word order. In the spring of 1927, learning that Sven Hedin was to lead an expedition to Xinjiang, Liang Qichao sought a place on it for his son and in April sent several letters urging him to set off for home; the plan came to nothing because he could not arrive in time for the departure.⁠[6][7][5][4][1]

At Harvard’s commencement on June 23, 1927, he was awarded the degree of Master of Arts (A.M.). He then returned to China, intending to join Li Ji’s excavation at Xiyin village; prevented by fighting from going to Shanxi, he stayed in Beijing to work on the archaeological material from Xiyin and also served as an assistant at the Tsinghua Research Institute of Chinese Studies.⁠[4]

The 2022 Qilu Evening News article gives a different account: in 1927 he returned briefly to China at his father’s request, followed Li Ji to the excavation at Xiyin village in Xia County, Shanxi, and was invited to be an assistant at the Tsinghua Research Institute, returning to the United States the following year to continue his studies; it dates his Harvard master’s degree to the summer of 1930.⁠[1]

In August 1928 he returned to Harvard to begin doctoral training; in December that year he completed an English paper, “Some Problems of Far Eastern Archaeology”, which systematically surveyed archaeological finds in Siberia, northern China, Indochina and elsewhere in the Far East, compared their stratigraphy, faunas and cultural remains, sought to identify the widest gaps in the material, and pointed out questions still to be tested and directions for future research. When his father, Liang Qichao, died in January 1929, he had only recently returned to the United States and could not go back to China to mourn him.⁠[4][1]

In the summer vacation of 1929, with scholarship support, he joined Alfred Kidder, the leading figure in the archaeology of the American Southwest, in excavating the Pecos site in New MexicoNew MexicoNew Mexico is a state in the Southwestern United States. Its capital is Santa Fe and its largest city is Albuquerque. It was admitted to the Union on January 6, 1912, as the 47th state, and had a population of 2,117,522 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry and took part in the second Pecos Conference. Yang Qingyue judges that this field experience in North America later gave him, when he faced the complex stratigraphy at Hougang in Yinxu, a modern scientific way of thinking and insight beyond that of antiquarians and explorers. The 2022 Qilu Evening News article states that while in America he took part in excavating ancient Native American sites.⁠[4][1]

He kept his registration at Harvard through the 1931–1932 academic year but never received a doctorate. Yang Qingyue writes that this fulfilled his father’s advice in a letter of July 10, 1925, in words that translate as “seeking learning is not seeking a diploma”. On his graduation from Harvard, Academia Sinica’s Shang royal tombs website and the 2016 Beijing Youth Daily report say that he graduated in 1930 and then returned to China, an Academia Sinica digital-archives feature says that he returned after obtaining his master’s degree in 1930, and Guo Dashun’s book on Hongshan and Niuheliang archaeology says that in early winter 1930 he had just graduated from Harvard’s department of anthropology.⁠[4][2][5][7][8]

He returned to China in the summer of 1930 and joined the archaeology section of the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica; he at once threw himself into the institute’s archaeological programme in the Northeast, first excavating the Angangxi site in Heilongjiang. In the autumn of 1930 he excavated the microlith-bearing sand dunes at Angangxi and found a black sand layer lying over a yellow sand layer, with all the cultural remains in the black layer; a 2016 China News Service report states that this was the first excavation of microlithic remains by scientific methods in the history of Chinese archaeology.⁠[4][2][8][9]

He then moved on to Rehe, where he had planned to excavate a Neolithic site south of the town of Linxi, but the temperature dropped below freezing and the site’s black sand layer had frozen as hard as stone, so he abandoned the excavation and carried out a survey instead. He kept at the survey for 38 days, covering more than a thousand li and collecting Neolithic material at Chabuganmiao, Linxi, Shuangjing, Chenjiayingzi and Chifeng. He attached great importance to the finds at Shaguotun, regarding the southwest of the Northeast as the zone of contact between the microlithic cultures north of the Great Wall and the painted-pottery cultures south of it.⁠[8]

In the spring of 1931 he took part in the fourth season of excavation at Yinxu in Anyang, Henan, at Xiaotun and Hougang. The 2022 Qilu Evening News article states that he worked with Wu Jinding in this season and that on April 16 the two left Xiaotun, he choosing the Hougang site and Wu the Sipanmo site. Academia Sinica’s website states that a theory that Yinxu had been flooded, the “Yin Ruins Flood Theory”, was put forward during the first stage of excavation under Dong Zuobin and was also held by Li Ji in the second and third seasons, and that in the fourth season he found architectural remains, restored the building foundations of Yinxu and rejected the theory entirely.⁠[5][1][2][4]

The Chengziya site in Licheng County, Shandong, was discovered and identified by Wu Jinding and first excavated in 1930, over one month, by six people including Li Ji, Dong Zuobin, Guo Baojun and Wu Jinding. In the autumn of 1931 the Shandong Society for the Study of Ancient Sites carried out a second excavation, from October 9 to 31, led by him and Wu Jinding, with Wang Xiang and others; Academia Sinica’s website says that he directed it. Late in the excavation a sudden rainstorm filled the trenches, and he and Wu Jinding went into waist-deep water themselves to bail them out with the labourers, so that the excavation finished on schedule.⁠[1][10][2][5]

The culture of the Chengziya site was at first called the black-pottery culture and, on his proposal, was later named as a whole the Longshan culture. Han Jianye writes that soon after the Chengziya excavation he also placed the Liangzhu culture, because of its black pottery, within the Longshan culture. The 2016 Beijing Youth Daily report states that the Chengziya excavation report he wrote was the first large field-archaeology report published in China and that archaeologists’ classification of Longshan culture types still derives from ideas he put forward more than half a century earlier.⁠[1][11][5]

In November 1931 he excavated Hougang at Gaolouzhuang in Anyang, dividing the deposits into layers by the texture and colour of the soil, and identified layers of the Xiaotun (Shang), Longshan and Yangshao cultures lying one above another — the three-layer stratigraphy of Hougang — from which he concluded that the Shang culture of Xiaotun was later than the Longshan culture and the Longshan culture later than the Yangshao culture; a 2016 China News Service report states that while excavating Hougang he already applied typological principles to the pottery of Xiaotun, marking the first formation of the typological method in Chinese archaeology. Li Yongdi writes that this discovery firmly established the relative ages of the Yangshao, Longshan and Shang cultures. The 2022 Qilu Evening News article states that from the oracle bones, building boards and rammed earth that were found he concluded that the Chengziya culture passed directly into the Shang culture, and that with convincing data he also corrected Johan Gunnar Andersson, who had confused the two Neolithic cultures of Yangshao and Longshan and concluded that the coarse pottery was earlier than the painted pottery. Academia Sinica’s website says that the discovery of the three layers at Hougang set a model for Chinese archaeology.⁠[4][9][10][1][2]

In the spring of 1932 he fell ill while working in the field; without timely treatment he kept working until he developed a high fever and was admitted to the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, where it was found that his illness had become acute pleurisy; he was then confined to bed for two years.⁠[6][4][2]

In 1932 his excavation report “Prehistoric Sites at Angangki, Heilungkiang” appeared in the Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, volume 4, part 1, pages 1–44. In 1934, though still ill, he finished his report on the survey of the Neolithic cultures of Rehe; at that time he learned that the Japanese Society for East Asian Archaeology, following close behind the Japanese army, had excavated the Hongshanhou site at Chifeng, and he was deeply moved.⁠[12][8]

In 1934, on the instructions of Li Ji, Dong Zuobin and him, Wang Xiang and Qi Yanpei went from Jinan to survey Rizhao, Jimo, Zhucheng and other counties. That year, having recovered, he went to Anyang to direct the excavation of Xibeigang; Academia Sinica’s website states that these excavations uncovered ten royal tombs of Shang kings and thousands of burial pits.⁠[10][2]

Xia Nai first met him at Anyang; the two then went through the war together, passing from teacher and student to comrades fighting side by side. In 1935 his elder brother, Liang Sicheng, also visited the Shang royal tombs at Xibeigang; Yang Qingyue’s article prints a photograph of the two there that year.⁠[13][4]

In 1935 he published “Xiaotun, Longshan and Yangshao”, analysing the relationship of the three cultures; he held that the earliest phase of the Longshan culture predated the painted-pottery culture of the Yangshao period and that the Xiaotun culture of Yinxu derived from the Longshan culture. The 2022 Qilu Evening News article states that these conclusions were highly influential at the time and are still esteemed by archaeologists today.⁠[1]

In the summer of 1936 he led Liu Yao (Yin Da) and Qi Yanpei in excavations at Wawucun and Dagudui near Liangchengzhen in Shandong, directing the work at both places in the early stage of the excavation.⁠[10]

During the war against Japan he moved from place to place with the Institute of History and Philology. An Academia Sinica digital-archives feature states that in 1941 he and his family moved with the institute to Lizhuang in Sichuan, after which his stomach and lung troubles never let up; he suffered for years from stomach and lung illness, and Yang Qingyue writes that he again fell seriously ill at Lizhuang. Academia Sinica’s Shang royal tombs website states that in Sichuan the institute was on top of a mountain and that he would climb up on Mondays and come back down on Saturdays, so absorbed in his work that he did not notice the time passing.⁠[2][7][13][4]

Though ill, he kept working on the Xibeigang excavation report and completed a first draft of its first seven chapters and two tables; later he went to Chongqing for surgery.⁠[2]

In 1941, when Xia Nai, back from his studies abroad, reached Lizhuang and was asking a porter the way, Liang heard him from inside a window, looked out and called to him that he was back. On October 15, 1941, he wrote to Wu Jinding and Xia Nai, joking with Xia in the letter. In 1942 the institute’s director, Fu Sinian, wrote several times to Zhu Jiahua, acting president of Academia Sinica, asking that the matter be brought through his connections to Chiang Kai-shek’s attention so that the state would pay twenty to thirty thousand yuan of the Liang family’s medical costs, writing that if anything happened to him it would be the greatest blow to the future of Chinese archaeology; Fu also called an institute meeting, which devised a way of setting aside part of the income of the institute’s clinic to help the family. Fu Sinian praised him as putting public duty before private concerns in everything even amid such poverty, and in a letter of April 2, 1942, to Zhu Jiahua, Ye Qisun and Wang Jingli wrote that although his health was poor he was full of vigour (both in translation).⁠[4][7][13]

After the victory over Japan in 1945, Su Bingqi, back in Beiping from Kunming, went to see Liang Siyong. Su recalled that Liang said he had read Xu Xusheng’s book on the legendary age of ancient Chinese history, in which Xu proposed a theory of three ancestral groups, and that he had a three-group idea of his own, though he did not go into its details at the time.⁠[8]

In 1948 he and his elder brother Liang Sicheng were both elected to the first class of academicians of Academia Sinica.⁠[5]

On June 20, 1949, he wrote inviting Xia Nai, then teaching at Zhejiang University, to come north, in words that translate as “The fate of an invalid seems settled; from now on I can only see to odd jobs for you brothers. Come, come, come quickly.”⁠[13]

On August 1, 1950, the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences was formally established, with Zheng Zhenduo concurrently its director and him and Xia Nai its deputy directors. By then he could run the institute largely only from his sickbed, drawing up long-term plans and directing fieldwork and laboratory research, and writing the day’s tasks on slips of paper to deal with one by one; based in Beijing, he handled contacts, formalities and funding, going again and again, ill as he was, to the Academy, the Ministry of Finance and other departments to secure money for excavations, and dividing the work with Xia Nai, who led excavations in the field.⁠[14][6][13]

He died of a heart attack in Beijing on April 2, 1954. Accounts of his age differ: the 2022 Qilu Evening News article, Peng Xiaojun, an Academia Sinica digital-archives feature and a 2016 People’s Daily article give it as 50, while a 2014 article in the China Science Daily states that his daughter regarded his death at only 49 as the result of overwork.⁠[1][13][7][15][6]

In his memorial article Xia Nai wrote, in words that translate as “Mr. Liang was the core of the leadership, and now this ‘core’ is gone.”⁠[13]

His unfinished draft of the Xibeigang report was taken to Taiwan, where Gao Quxun edited and completed it as the Houjiazhuang series (English title Hou Chia Chuang), published in several volumes.⁠[2]

Liang Qichao had nine children, three of whom became academicians: Liang Siyong’s elder brother Liang Sicheng, Liang Siyong himself and their younger brother Liang Sili. Liang Sicheng once said that their father’s approach to learning had a particularly great influence on him and Liang Siyong. The 2016 Beijing Youth Daily report states that, with Liang Sicheng studying architecture, Liang Siyong archaeology and Liang Sizhong military science, Liang Qichao’s second wife, Wang Guiquan, remarked with amused pride, in words that translate as “What an amusing lot my sons are: Sicheng builds houses, Sizhong blows them up, and when the houses fall down and are buried, Siyong goes and digs them up.”⁠[5][6]

His daughter, Liang Boyou, wrote a book about him, published by the Forbidden City Publishing House; on September 21, 2016, a memorial symposium for Liang Siyong and the launch of the book were held in the Jingsheng Studio of the Palace Museum. A 2016 People’s Daily article states that the book runs to 250,000 characters with 200 illustrations, recounts his life in his daughter’s voice and includes recollections by a number of archaeologists and tributes from members of the Liang family, and that Liang Sili wrote its preface at the age of 89. The 2014 China Science Daily article states that in Liang Boyou’s eyes her father was a man who threw himself into his work without regard for himself, and remained so even after falling ill; he often worked in water with his trousers rolled up, at great mental and physical cost.⁠[16][9][15][6]

His writings include the English paper “Some Problems of Far Eastern Archaeology” (1928), “Prehistoric Sites at Angangki, Heilungkiang” (1932), the report on the Neolithic cultures of Rehe (1934), “Xiaotun, Longshan and Yangshao” (1935) and the Chengziya excavation report, of which he was the principal author; the results of the Xibeigang excavations were edited by Gao Quxun into the Houjiazhuang series. A collection, Liang Siyong’s Papers on Archaeology, also survives.⁠[4][12][8][1][5][2][6]

Academia Sinica’s website calls him one of China’s first generation of modern archaeologists and says that Xia Nai, Liu Yao (Yin Da), Guo Baojun, Shi Zhangru and Gao Quxun all received his influence and training in the excavations at Yinxu. Guo Dashun calls him one of the most influential archaeologists in China; Yang Qingyue writes that he became one of the most important founders of Chinese archaeology; the 2016 Beijing Youth Daily report calls him one of the pioneers of modern archaeology in China, whose work raised the scientific standard of Chinese excavation and brought it into the scope of modern archaeology. The 2016 People’s Daily article states that he has been called the first Chinese to receive formal Western training in archaeology. The archaeologist Zhang Zhongpei said of him, in words that translate as “Mr. Liang Siyong was a ‘giant star’ of Chinese archaeology, the most important of its founders, and still more one of the most important founders of archaeology in the People’s Republic of China.”⁠[2][8][4][5][15][9]

The 2022 Qilu Evening News article quotes Li Ji’s assessment that he was an archaeologist trained in fieldwork who had made a special study of archaeological problems of East Asia and elsewhere, and who in two years had made extremely important contributions to the organisation and methods of the archaeology section; the article judges that in field archaeology he filled the gap left by older archaeologists such as Li Ji and Dong Zuobin. A 2026 Xinhua report, looking back on several generations of Chinese archaeologists, names Li Ji and Liang Siyong before Xia Nai and Su Bingqi.⁠[1][17]

Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica: Official website: https://www1.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]