Zhao Yuanren

Also known as Zi Yizhong

Zhao Yuanren (Yuen Ren Chao), styled Yizhong, was born in Tianjin in 1892. After study in the United States he taught at Tsinghua from 1920, served as a tutor of the Tsinghua Research Institute of Chinese Studies from 1925 to 1929, and from 1928 led linguistic work at the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica, surveying dialects and phonology. He was also a composer: he set Liu Bannong's poem Jiao wo ruhe bu xiang ta, and in 1928 the Commercial Press published his songs as Xin shige ji. He later taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, and wrote A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1982.