Biography
Qiyu Yang is a historian of early China whose research examines how knowledge was organized and reclassified from the Warring States through the early imperial period. Drawing on a large body of excavated manuscripts discovered over the past fifty years, he studies tomb texts that preserve administrative records, medical recipes, ritual instructions, and philosophical writings in shared contexts.
His work shows that these forms of knowledge originally coexisted in practice, rather than as separate disciplines, and that later canonical traditions emerged through processes of selection, reorganization, and marginalization. He is particularly interested in how societies negotiate forms of knowledge that resist stable classification and how boundaries of legitimate knowledge are continually redefined.