[1] He studied in Christian missionary schools as a child and entered St. John's University, Shanghai in 1948.
[1] In July 1956, he transferred to the Institute of Archaeology, then under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (part of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences since 1977), and spent the rest of his career in field archaeology and research of the Shang and Zhou dynasties of ancient China.
[5] His excavation report of the Zhangjiapo cemetery, published in 1999, won the first prize of the Outstanding Research Award of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2002.
[2] Zhang was the co-principal investigator, together with Robert E. Murowchick of Boston University, of Investigations into Early Shang Civilization, a Sino-American joint field archaeology project initiated by Kwang-chih Chang of Harvard University.
The focus of the investigations is Shangqiu, Henan, an area sometimes buried under more than 10 meters (33 ft) of alluvium deposited by the Yellow River over the millennia.