Background
Yang Bojun was born in September 1909 in Changsha, Hunan province. He was the eldest son of Yang Shugu (杨树穀), and was also known as Yang Dechong (杨德崇).
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Yang Bojun
Edit Profile杨伯峻, 春秋左传注
Education
In 1926, he passed the examination to enter the Chinese department of Peking University, where he studied under prominent scholars such as Qian Xuantong, Chen Yuan, and the philologist Huang Kansas He graduated in 1932.
Career
The work took him more than twenty years to finish. His commentaries of the Analects of Confucius and the Mencius are also highly influential. In 1953, Yang became an associate professor at the Chinese department of Peking University.
He began writing Lunyu Yizhu (论语译注, "Translation and Annotation of the Analects"), which was published in 1958 by Zhonghua Book Company.
Yang was transferred to Lanzhou University in remote Gansu province, where he continued to teach in the Chinese department. In Lanzhou he wrote Mengzi Yizhu (孟子译注, "Translation and Annotation of the Mencius"), which was published by Zhonghua Book Company in 1960.
In 1960 he moved back to Beijing to work for Zhonghua Book Company, where he edited the Book of Jin, and began working on Chunqiu Zuozhuan Zhu (Annotated Zuo Zhuan). Zuo Zhuan was the most monumental work of the Thirteen Classics, comprising almost 200,000 characters of Old Chinese.
Foreign the annotation Yang studied many related works including the Shiji, Gongyang Zhuan, and Guliang Zhuan.
He also consulted older commentaries and notes on the Zuo Zhuan by scholars such as Hong Liangji, Liu Wenqi (劉文淇), Liu Shipei, and Zhang Binglin, as well as oracle bone records and bronze inscriptions. Many of his notes were destroyed during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), which he only partially recovered from memory. The book was finally published in 1981, more than 20 years after he started the work.
A revised edition was published in 1990.
