Kwang-chih Chang was born on April 15. 1931 in Beijing, China. When he started his early education, the Sino-Japanese war was going on. He was able to attend modern, Western-style schools. As he grew older, his political awakening caused his views to move far to the left. He became known as K. C. to his friends. In 1945 his eldest brother joined the Red Army and stayed in mainland China. Their father, Chang Wo-Chua, was a noted poet from Taiwan. In 1946, the family moved back to Taiwan. While at Jianguo School in Taipei, K. C. got involved with acting in plays and writing political essays. After he was blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer, he was arrested on April 6, 1949 and spent a year in detention.
It was during his detention that he would discover the course of his future research. He became very interested in the motives and principles governing human behavior. In 1950 he enrolled as a freshman student at National Taiwan University, in it's new Anthropology Department that had been modeled after Harvard's department. Professor Li Chi, considered the father of archaeology in China and trained at Harvard, became K. C.' s mentor. In 1951, K. C. was at Harvard, beginning his graduate studies. He spent time at Abri Pataud excavation in France with Professor Hallam Movius, Jr., a Paleolithic archaeology specialist. Four years later, he completed a bachelor thesis on Lungshan Culture. He earned a Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1961. He then took a teaching position at Yale University and by 1970 was Department Chair. In 1977, he moved back to Harvard to take a position as Professor of Anthropology, Curator of East Asian Archaeology at the Peabody Museum and at the same time was teaching in East Asian Languages and Civilization. He chaired Harvard's Department of Anthropology from 1981 to 1984.
K. C. wrote more than 350 publications. His first book, The Archaeology of Ancient China, published in 1963, was an exceptional work that gave the western world great insight into ancient China. In 1980, Shang Civilization, was published to much acclaim. K. C. worked to explain how Chinese civilization evolved. He later published The Chinese Bronze Age.
He had long wanted to do an archaeological excavation in China's Yellow River valley. Finally in 1988, communications opened up for such a dig. But in 1989, the trouble that erupted in Tiananmen Square caused talks to be postponed. Shortly after that, Chang was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. Though very ill, K. C. became Vice-President of Academia Sinica, Taiwan's leading research institution, in 1994.
K. C. was still married to Hwei Le Chang, a fellow student he had met in Taiwan, and they had a son, Julian and a daughter, Nora. Kwang-chih Chang died January 3, 2001.
Harvard Gazette Archives
2007 Kwang-chih Chang. Electronic document, http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/03.01/14-mm.html, accessed July 20, 2009.
The Biography. Chang, Kwang-Chih. Biography.com 13, Feb. 2000.
Chang, Kwang-Chih. The Archaeology of Ancient China. Yale University Press: 1963.
Murray, Tim. Encyclopedia of Archaeology, The Great Archaeologists. ABC-CLIO, Inc.: 1999.
Written by: Yuan Yuan Li
Rewritten by: Lillian Dolentz, 2009