Li Fanwen was born in
Xixiang County,
Shaanxi in November 1932. After leaving school, he worked for several years before going to
Beijing to study
Tibetan at the
Central College for Nationalities, from which he graduated in 1956. He stayed on at the college as a research student in the History department until he graduated in 1959. By this time, he had become fascinated with the extinct and only semi-deciphered
Tangut script, and in 1960 he decided to move to
Yinchuan in
Ningxia, the former capital of the
Tangut Empire, to devote himself to Tangut studies, but his wife was unwilling to accompany him, so they divorced. In January 1972, when Premier
Zhou Enlai visited the
National Museum of Chinese History and was informed that only a handful of old scholars could read the Tangut script, he instructed Wang Yeqiu (), director of the State Bureau of Cultural Relics, to assign young scholars to study Tangut before all knowledge of Tangut died out. In response to this, Wang Yeqiu asked the Ningxia authorities to train people in the Tangut language, but there was nobody who could teach the language in Ningxia, so in May 1973, Li Fanwen was sent to Beijing to study under
Luo Fuyi (), the son of
Luo Zhenyu, the founding father of Chinese Tangut studies. By late 1992, the new draft of Li Fanwen's Tangut-Chinese dictionary was almost complete, but he was not satisfied with the system of phonetic reconstruction that he was using, so after the Taiwan Tangutologist
Gong Hwang cherng came to see him, he decided to use Professor Gong's system of phonetic reconstruction instead. The dictionary was now complete, but technical and financial issues delayed its publication until 1997. Originally, Li Fanwen had hoped to computer typeset the Tangut text, but eventually he had to abandon this plan, and the Tangut text in the 1997 edition was laboriously inserted using photocomposition. The dictionary comprised exactly 6,000 Tangut characters, and these 6,000 characters were later used as the source for the
Mojikyo set of Tangut characters, which have since been widely used by Tangutologists for typesetting Tangut text. In 2002, the dictionary won the
Wu Yuzhang Prize for Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2008, a revised and expanded edition of Li Fanwen's Tangut-Chinese dictionary, with 6,074 entries, was published. The new edition was computer typeset using a Tangut font developed by Jing Yongshi (). In addition to his work on Tangut language, Li Fanwen has also published a comprehensive history of the
Western Xia and a study of the Song dynasty Chinese dialect spoken in the north-west of China. Li Fanwen currently holds professorships at
Beijing University,
Nanjing University,
People's University,
Capital Normal University,
Shaanxi Normal University and
Fudan University, and is the honorary head of the Ningxia Academy of Social Sciences. In 2013 Li Fanwen won the
Prix Stanislas Julien for his Tangut-Chinese dictionary. ==Works==