Jao Tsung-I  Jao Tsung-I or Rao Zongyi (; 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 and Ji Xianlin were considered China's two greatest humanities academics by their contemporaries. Called the "pride of Hong Kong" by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, Jao has won many awards including the Grand Bauhinia Medal, the highest honour bestowed by the Hong Kong government. The Jao Tsung-I Petite Ecole of the University of Hong Kong, the Jao Studies Foundation, and the Jao Tsung-I Academy in Kowloon have been founded in his name. Jao was a native of Meixian, Guangdong. He was born in 1917 in Chao'an County (now Xiangqiao District, Chaozhou), Guangdong, into a scholarly Hakka family of Jiaying county, Guangdong ancestry. Jao grew up in Shantou, Guangdong. He also used the courtesy names Gu'an and Bolian, and the art name Xuantang. Largely home-schooled and self-taught, he wrote "The Scholastic Journals of Gu Tinglin" at the age of 14. Jao taught at several colleges in mainland China 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 was a highly versatile and prolific scholar. His research covered a vast range of humanities, including oracle bones, archaeology, epigraphy, folklores, religion, art history, musicology, literature, and Near Eastern Studies. Over his 80-year-long career, he published more than 100 books and about 1,000 scholarly papers.