He attended the prestigious Suzhou High School, whose teachers included famous scholars Lü Shuxiang and Ch'ien Mu, one of the greatest historians of modern China.
[3] In 1941, Yang's book-size Introduction to China's High Antiquity was published as part of the seventh and last volume of the Debates on Ancient History.
[4] Yang is generally considered a member of the Doubting Antiquity School, as he argued that the pre-Xia dynasty history recorded in ancient texts was "historization" of prehistoric mythology, a position that is widely accepted by today's historians.
In 1960 he was made the deputy head of the history department of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, but returned to Fudan University in 1970.
In 1980, a greatly expanded second edition was completed, with major revisions based on new archaeological discoveries made during the intervening decades.