Li Fang-Kuei was born on 20 August 1902 in
Guangzhou during the final years of the
Qing dynasty to a minor scholarly family from
Xiyang, a small town in
Shanxi roughly south of
Yangquan. Li's father Li Guangyu () received his
imperial examination degree in 1880, and served in minor official posts in the late 19th to early 20th century. Li was one of the first Chinese people to study linguistics outside China. Originally a student of medicine, he switched to linguistics when he went to the United States in 1924. He earned a BA in linguistics at the
University of Michigan in 1926 after only two years of study. He then did graduate study under
Edward Sapir at the
University of Chicago, where he was Sapir's first graduate student. From Sapir he learned phonetics, field methods, and
American Indian languages. Sapir also encouraged him to study East and Southeast Asian languages, leading to his work on Thai and Sino-Tibetan. Li was also a student of
Leonard Bloomfield at this time, from whom Li learned
Germanic linguistics and
textual analysis. Li also studied
Indo-European linguistics, especially Greek and Latin, from
Carl Darling Buck at Chicago, and in 1928 Buck secured a 6-month fellowship at
Harvard University for him, where he studied Sanskrit and Tibetan. Li conducted field studies of the indigenous languages of the Americas. His first exposure to fieldwork was his study of the
Mattole language of northern California. He received an MA in 1927 and a PhD in 1928. His dissertation
Mattole: An Athabaskan Language was published in 1930. Following the completion of his PhD, Li traveled to Europe during 1928–1929 with letters of recommendation from
Franz Boas, and visited linguists there including
Walter Simon. Li also spent 3 months in 1929 in Canada's
Northwest Territories, living on an island in the middle of the
Mackenzie River conducting fieldwork on the
Hare language. In 1949, he became professor of Chinese at the
University of Washington, where he taught from 1949 to 1969, after which he taught at the
University of Hawaiʻi until his retirement in 1974. In 1977, he published a comparative
reconstruction of
Tai languages, the result of more than forty years of research. He also worked at
Academia Sinica, now in Taiwan, in 1973. Li died in
San Mateo County, California, survived by his wife Xu Ying () and their daughter Lindy Li Mark, a professor of anthropology who taught at
California State University, Hayward and the
Chinese University of Hong Kong, as well as their son Peter Li and daughter Annie Li. His alma mater
Tsinghua University began to publish his complete works in 2005. ==Selected works==