Professor Li Fanwen, an authority on the research of the Xixia (Western Xia) civilization, will publish his latest research, "The General History of Xixia" this year.

Li's monumental works include "Xixia-Mandarin Dictionary," "Northern Chinese Dialects in Song Dynasty" and "Studies on Identical Sounds," reported Xinhua news agency.

Xixia, an ancient kingdom that existed a thousand years ago in the northwest part of the country, disappeared mysteriously, leaving a question mark in the history of world civilization.

The Xixia kingdom, established by a Dangxiang clan in the 11th century, was short-lived, with a history of only 190 years, before the fierce Mongolian army troops razed it.

For nearly half a century, Li has worked on a series of academic books about Xixia.

"The General History of Xixia" synthesizes a great amount of unearthed relics and archaeological records.

According to Li, it will be a milestone in China's research on Xixia studies and will play an important role in international studies of the mysterious kingdom.

Li has spent 40 years studying the ancient kingdom. His love for the "words from heaven" began in 1955, when he was an undergraduate at the Central China University for Nationalities and happened by chance to come across some Xixia characters while reading a piece of ancient relic paper.

Despite opposition from his relatives and wife - who eventually divorced him - he carried on his life-long journey in the barren and desolate western part of China.

In 1972, encouraged by the late Premier Zhou Enlai, who was interested in Xixia studies, Li began to stay at excavation sites day and night to keep up with the continuous flow of firsthand information.

He spent seven years near the mausoleums, scrutinizing 3,270 tombstones. He made more than 30,000 notecards during the seven years that weigh more than 300 kilograms.

Afterwards he devoted his time to the compilation of the 1.5-million-word "Xixia Mandarin Dictionary."

The dictionary's 800,000 characters were finished under oil lamps in tents near the mausoleums.

For the phonetic notation of the dictionary, he scaled mountains and crossed streams to visit the posterity of the Xixia people.

Nowadays, Li still travel to Taiwan Province, Japan and Russia, collecting historical records and exchanging information with his overseas counterparts.

In order to popularize knowledge on the Xixia civilization, Li is planning to publish a simplified Xixia-Mandarin Dictionary.

The universities of Beijing, Nanjing and Fudan have invited the scholar to tutor graduate students.

Li said he will choose one of them to "pass my knowledge on."

"The cultural legacy must be preserved, and I will devote my life to Xixia research." Professor Li declared.

(Eastday.com.cn 07/20/2001)