Jao Tsung-I

He died on 6 February 2018, at the age of 100 (101 by East Asian age reckoning).

In August 2017, the Hongkong Post issued a set of six special stamps featuring Jao's paintings and calligraphy.

In 1959, he published Yindai zhenbu renwu tongkao (殷代貞卜人物通考; '"Oracle Bone Diviners of the Yin Dynasty"'), which earned him the Prix Stanislas Julien from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1962. In 2000, he was awarded the Grand Bauhinia Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the Hong Kong government.

Jao taught at several Chinese mainland colleges before moving to Hong Kong in 1949. In the following years, he taught at the University of Hong Kong, the National University of Singapore, Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica in Taiwan, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, École française d'Extrême-Orient, École pratique des hautes études of Paris, and Yale University in the US. He was also honorary professor at several prestigious Chinese universities including Peking University, Fudan University, Nanjing University, and Zhejiang University.

Jao Tsung-I or Rao Zongyi (Chinese: 饒宗頤; 9 August 1917 – 6 February 2018) was a Hong Kong sinologist, calligrapher, historian and painter. A versatile and prolific scholar, he contributed to many fields of humanities, including history, archaeology, epigraphy, folklores, religion, art history, musicology, literature, and Near Eastern Studies. He published more than 100 books and about 1,000 academic articles over a career spanning more than 80 years.

Jao was born in 1917 in Chao'an (now Xiangqiao) into a scholarly Teochew family of Hakka ancestry.