Zhang Zhenglang

Zhang Zhenglang
張政烺
Zhang, c. 1980s
Born	(1912-04-15)15 April 1912 Yatou, Rongcheng, Shandong, Republic of China
Died	29 January 2005(2005-01-29) (aged 92)
Occupation	Sinologist
Academic background
Alma mater	Peking University
Academic work
Discipline	Paleographer, textual historian
Institutions	Peking University, Zhonghua Book Company

Zhang Zhenglang (Chinese: 張政烺, 15 April 1912 – 29 January 2005) was a Chinese historian. Born in a small village in Rongcheng, Shandong, he attended school in Qingdao and Beijing before his acceptance at Peking University. He graduated from the university's history department in 1936, and was appointed as a librarian at the Academia Sinica's Institute of History and Philology. He successfully evacuated the institute's library following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, transporting it through Hunan and Yunnan to Nanxi County in Sichuan. He spent the remainder of the war writing articles on paleography and textual history at Nanxi, and was appointed to the rank of associate research fellow. He was offered a full professorship at his alma mater of Peking in 1946, and for a time simultaneously worked at Tsinghua. Despite attempts at support from the department's administrator, he was fired during the late 1950s Anti-Rightist Campaign, and worked for several years as an editor at the Zhonghua Book Company.

In 1966, he was appointed to a senior research fellowship, but was sent the same year to work as a pig farmer at a May Seventh Cadre School in rural Henan. Zhou Enlai's 1971 directives to produce a modern version of the Twenty-Four Histories allowed Zhang to return to work with Zhonghua, and he was assigned to edit the History of Jin. Following the discovery of many expansive manuscript caches in the 1970s, including the Mawangdui Silk Texts, he specialized in study of the I Ching. In 1979, he published an influential article connecting the previously-undeciphered numeral symbols on Zhou-era ritual bronzes to the hexagram forms used in the Mawangdui copy of the I Ching divination. Following a long period of illness and memory loss, he died on 29 January 2005. Although he never published a book, a compilation of a hundred of his academic articles titled the Zhang Zhenglang Wenshi Lunji (張政浪文史論集) was compiled by former colleagues and students shortly before his death.