[2] Born into a wealthy banking family in Tianjin, he was sent to Merton College, Oxford to study Classics in 1936.

[4] Yang and his wife returned to China in 1940, and began their decades long co-operation of introducing Chinese classics to the English-speaking world.

Working for the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, a government-funded publisher, the husband and wife team produced a number of quality translations.

He also translated Aristophanes's Ornithes, Virgil's Georgics, La chanson de Roland and Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion into Chinese.

[5] However, Yang and his wife Gladys were imprisoned for four years as "class enemies" in 1968 during the Cultural Revolution.