Li Xueqin, who has died aged 85, was recognised, at home and abroad, as China’s pre-eminent historian.

The basis of his reputation was an extraordinary corpus of short essays on specific topics that ranged over almost all aspects of early Chinese culture – history, paleography, archaeology, textual history, excavated manuscripts, numismatics, and more, published in various journals and later collected together in more than 20 volumes.

His earliest research was on oracle bone inscriptions – divinations incised on bone and turtle shell from the Shang dynasty (c 1600-1050 BC). These inscriptions are still the earliest form of Chinese writing yet discovered.

Most were made on behalf of the Shang king, who divined continually about his planned activities, including warfare, the appropriate sacrificial offerings for the ancestral and other spirits, and the possibility or the cause of misfortunes falling upon his person, his family, his people, and his land. They illuminate a great deal about Shang history and society, but the information is very difficult to extract.

Fragments of oracle bones had been dug up by farmers and sold as “dragon bones” for use in traditional Chinese medicine until, in 1898, a scholar recognised that his prescription was incised with an ancient form of writing.

This led to the discovery of the last Shang capital and its excavation, beginning in 1927. Before this discovery, Chinese scholars had begun to doubt the entirety of the transmitted historical tradition. This issue – the relationship between the received history and archaeologically excavated materials including inscriptions and excavated texts – lay at the heart of Li’s research throughout his career, even when he did not address it directly.

An oracle bone created between 1600 BC and 1050 BC. The inscriptions are still the earliest form of Chinese writing yet discovered. Photograph: British Library

Although Li was known for his encyclopedic learning, he did not have much formal education. The son of Xu Zizhen and Li Feiran, he was born in Beijing, where his father was a nutritionist at the Peking Union Medical College. Because Li was sickly as a child, his father hired a teacher to educate him at home.

Having completed the primary school curriculum in two years, when he did go to school he was not interested in the classes, but he read voraciously, buying and reselling books at second-hand bookshops or saving his lunch money for them. This unfettered curiosity was his driving force throughout his life.

In 1951, having decided to study symbolic logic, he passed the examinations to enter Tsinghua University. A year later, after revolutionary reforms to the education system, Tsinghua became an exclusively technological university and symbolic logic was abolished as an academic field.

Li began spending his days in the Peking library, teaching himself to read oracle bone script. The librarian, Zeng Yigong, was also researching oracle bones and noticed the books Li was checking out. They began to work together to join oracle bone fragments into larger pieces.

The result was a temporary appointment for Li at the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Science and his first publication. Then, in 1954, Li joined the academy’s newly established Institute of History, as an assistant to the intellectual historian Hou Wailu. He remained there for 50 years.

Besides assisting Hou in writing a history of Chinese thought, Li continued to do his own research on oracle bone inscriptions and published a book on ancient geography based on the place names recorded in the inscriptions.

He also proposed a reordering of the chronological sequence of oracle bone inscriptions worked out by earlier scholars. This “new periodisation” assumed two lineages of diviners working simultaneously, rather than one, thus solving the problem of apparently retrograde divination styles that had been attributed to the ascension of a conservative school in a later period.

In 1973, Li was assigned to work on recently discovered ancient texts written on silk discovered in a tomb sealed in 168 BC at Mawangdui, Changsha, Hunan Province. They included two classics, the Book of Changes and the Laozi, as well as other unknown texts. This discovery was the prelude to later finds of even earlier manuscripts written on bamboo slips and the beginning of a new stage in Li’s research interests.

I first met Li in 1981. He had been invited to Cambridge by the historian Michael Loewe and was a visiting fellow at Clare Hall. I was teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and offered to take him to visit the collections of oracle bones in British museums.

This resulted in a collaborative effort to publish the British collections in China, so that they would become available to Chinese scholars. This was followed by other such projects, including one on selected bronzes in European collections for which we travelled together through western Europe.

In 1995, Li, by then the director of the Institute of History, was appointed to head a government-funded scheme, the purpose of which was to determine the precise chronology of the first three hereditary dynasties, the Xia, Shang and Zhou.

The project involved more than 200 archaeologists, paleographers and text specialists. At the end of the five-year period, dates were published; approximate ones for the Xia and beginning of the Shang, precise ones for the late Shang and Zhou Dynasties.

These were immediately criticised, especially by scholars who had proposed other sets of dates. Barely acknowledged, including by the Chinese press, was that the published results were qualified: two possible alternative dates to those deemed most likely to be correct were also given.

This was an implicit admission of the limitations of their research methods and evidence of the integrity of the effort. Perhaps the most significant result of the project was the contribution of major new funding in a field that had been dominated by rescue archaeology. This allowed laboratories to be updated and archaeologists to conduct planned excavations.

In 2003, Li returned to Tsinghua University, which was trying to restore its humanities programmes. Serendipitously, five years later, an alumnus donated a cache of ancient manuscripts brush-written on some 2,500 bamboo slips to the university. They were presumably looted from a tomb and then smuggled to Hong Kong. The slips were dated to around 300 BC, which was the most fertile period of the Chinese classical age.

Li’s background was ideally suited for him to take charge of the process of putting the bamboo slips in order, deciphering, transcribing and interpreting them. With full support from the university, he assembled a team of younger scholars.

They were backed up by graduate students, thus providing a training ground for future generations of scholars. So far, eight volumes have been published, including new versions of transmitted classics, previously unknown texts related to transmitted ones, and entirely new texts with previously unimaginable contents.

A number of Li’s articles were published in English translation in academic journals, as were two of his books, Eastern Zhou and Qin Civilizations (1985) and Chinese Bronzes: A General Introduction (2000).

Li is survived by his wife, Xu Weibao, whom he married in 1956, their sons, Jinyun and Tongyun, and grandson, Chengchun.

• Li Xueqin, historian, born 28 March 1933; died 24 February 2019