His death was attributed only to "illness" in a report by state broadcaster CCTV.

Born in Hefei in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui, Yang moved to the United States in the 1940s to pursue higher education.

He later held various teaching positions in the country, obtaining US citizenship before reportedly giving it up in 2015.

Yang shared his 1957 Nobel prize with his colleague Tsung-Dao Lee for their joint work in upsetting the principle of conservation of parity as a fundamental law of nuclear physics.

He is also regarded for the Yang-Mills theory -- a mathematical framework for describing the way force-carrying particles interact -- developed in the early 1950s alongside US physicist Robert Mills.

In his later years, Yang taught at Beijing's elite Tsinghua University, where he made "important contributions to cultivating and recruiting talent and promoting international academic exchanges", Chinese state news agency Xinhua said.

Yang's first wife, Chih Li Tu, died in 2003. In December of the following year, the then 82-year-old married graduate student Weng Fan, then 28.