This talk is part of the Jonathan Spence Memorial Series

Event Time

Thursday, August 20, 2026

Registration
18:30-19:00

Presentation and Q&A
19:00-20:30

Location

Yale Center Beijing 
36th Floor Tower B of IFC Building 8 Jianguomenwai Avenue Chaoyang District, Beijing (Yong'anli Subway Station, Exit C) 

Registration and Fees

Please click “HERE” to register. Please send an email to yalecenterbeijing@yale.edu if there are any problems. If you encounter any payment issues, please attach a screenshot that identifies the issue. 

Ticket: RMB 30 for members of Yale community and Yale or non-Yale students (must submit valid .edu email address to qualify); RMB 60 for regular admission. This price includes snacks.

*The registration fee is non-refundable. Unless due to a force majeure reason, Yale Center Beijing will not refund any part of the registration fee if a participant fails to attend the event.

Walk-ins will not be accepted.

The event will be in Chinese.

Note: Seats are available on a first-come-first-served basis.

The Event

Jonathan Spence PhD ’65, the late Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University, often placed the everyday lives of ordinary people within their broader historical context, revealing the complexities of an era through seemingly mundane details of marriage, family, and livelihood.

On August 20, as part of Yale Center Beijing’s Jonathan Spence Memorial Series, Guogang Zhang, Distinguished Professor of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Tsinghua University, and Chang Xu, Professor at the School of History, Beijing Normal University, will discuss Professor Zhang’s book The Tang Family: Life, Livelihood, and Family Ethos, drawing on four decades of scholarship. Focusing on the changing roles of women in marriage and family life, the two scholars will offer a closer look at the lived experiences of ordinary people in the Tang Dynasty. Through these intimate details of daily life, the conversation will illuminate how society functioned at the grassroots level and what life was really like beneath the grandeur of the Tang Dynasty’s golden age.

Speakers

Guogang Zhang
Distinguished Professor of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences & Professor of History, Tsinghua University

Guogang Zhang is Distinguished Professor of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor in the Department of History at Tsinghua University. His research focuses on the history of ancient China, the history of Chinese-Western cultural relations, and related fields. He was a Humboldtian Fellow in Germany and spent nearly a decade conducting research and teaching across Europe. In 2004, he joined Tsinghua University, where he served as Head of the Department of History.

Professor Zhang has published numerous acclaimed books, several of which have been translated into English, Korean, and Arabic and widely circulated internationally. His major works includes Foreign land in imagining: “Journey to the West "on the Silk Road (Chung Hwa Book Co. H.K., 2025), Civilization: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Western Exchange (Dayou Press, 2024), Zizhitongjian and The Rise and Fall of Empires (Zhonghua Book Company,2023/2016), The Tang Family: Life, Livelihood, and Family Ethos (Zhonghua Book Company, 2025), The Tang Bureaucracy: Official System and Institutional Operations (Zhonghua Book Company, 2026).

Chang Xu
Professor, School of History, Beijing Normal University

Chang Xu is Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the School of History, Beijing Normal University. She serves as Director of the Chinese Society for the History of Wei-Jin Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Chinese Tang History Society. She is also an editorial board member of History of the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern, Sui and Tang Dynasties, a reprinted journal published by Renmin University of China, and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, Zhejiang University. Her research focuses on unearthed documents and the history of the Han and Tang dynasties. She has published more than 80 academic papers, with her recent research concentrating on the collation and restoration of bamboo and wooden slips from Zoumalou, local administration and social governance, the history of ancient capitals and Chang’an studies, and interdisciplinary research on Han-Tang culture drawing on both historical and literary sources.