Dong became a professor at
National Zhongshan University in
Guangzhou in 1927. Alongside
Gu Jiegang,
Rong Zhaozu, and
Zhong Jingwen, he co-founded the Folklore Society of SYSU, the first such folkloristics society in China. He visited
Anyang in the summer of 1928 and found that villagers were still digging up oracle bones and shells and selling them, as they had been since around 1895. Although many scholars assumed that thirty years of looting had already removed all valuable items, Dong's visit led him to suggest an archaeological dig. His university approved the dig and he supervised fieldwork in October 1928. This was the first systematic dig of the Anyang site. Some 784 items were uncovered. In March 1932, Dong's breakthrough work,
Jiaguwen duandai yanjiu li, was published. The work gave ten criteria for dating an inscription within the Shang dynasty. It also gave the genealogy of the Shang kings, terms of address used in the inscriptions, names of foreign countries used, grammatical constructions, and ideographic constructions. Publication of the inscriptions themselves was delayed due to wartime conditions and the arduous process of preparation. Dong finally able to published this important work in Hong Kong in 1941 as
Yinxu wenzi, jia pian [Texts from Yinxu, first collection]. He also worked out the dates of individual reigns and the rounds of ancestral sacrifice. Dong died in Taiwan on 23 November 1963. ==References==