Yang spent most of his life annotating the 6th-century geographic work Shui jing zhu.
However, when he learned that the descendants of Yang Shoujing had secretly sold some manuscripts, he committed suicide by hanging himself in 1936.
The Chinese government paid great attention to the protection of the manuscript as well as Yang Shoujing's precious book collection.
Scholar Fu Sinian negotiated on behalf of Academia Sinica and the Ministry of Education to purchase the manuscript from Yang's heir Yang Mianzhi for 3,000 dollars, and brought it to Hong Kong for safekeeping.
[2] The influential historian Gu Jiegang commented that the Shui jing zhu shu "brought to a point of culmination the textual research of The Classic of Waterways of the previous three centuries."