Sinica (then located at Beijing). From this point on, he performed field studies of several Tai languages (including the Zhuang people's Longzhou and Wuming dialects), while at the same time conducting deep investigations into Old Chinese and Tibetan. Li's revisions of Bernhard Karlgren's reconstructions of Middle Chinese and Old Chinese were widely used by students of ancient Chinese from their publication in the 1970s until the late 1990s. Li taught Chinese language and linguistics at Yale University in 1938–39, and after World War II taught at Harvard University from 1946-48. During the same period he was working on a dictionary at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, followed by another year teaching at Yale from 1948–49, where his students included Nicholas Bodman. 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 Hawaii 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. Tsinghua University, his alma mater, began to publish his complete works in 2005. Selected works Li Fang-Kuei (1933). "Certain Phonetic Influences of the Tibetan Prefixes upon the Root Initials". Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology 6.2: 135–157. --------- (1956a). "The Inscriptions of the Sino-Tibetan Treaty of 821–822". T'oung p'ao 44: 1–99. --------- (1972), "Language and Dialects in China". Free China Review XXII, No. 5. translation of . --------- (1979) "The Chinese Transcription of Tibetan Consonant Clusters". Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology Academia Sinica 50: 231–240. --------- and W. South Coblin (1987). A study of the old Tibetan inscriptions. (Special publications 91.) Taipei: Academia Sinica. Interviews conducted by Ning-Ping Chan and Randy La Polla, with an Introduction by George Taylor. See also Karlgren–Li reconstruction of Middle Chinese References Further reading Mah Feng-hua 馬逢華 (1988), "Daonian Li Fanggui xiansheng" 悼念李方桂先生 ("Remembering Mr. Li Fang-kuei"), in Zhuanji wenxue 25.2: 110–114. Xu Ying 徐櫻 (1994). Fanggui yu wo wushiwu nian 方桂與我五十五年 (Fang-kuei's Fifty-five Years with Me) (Beijing: Shangwu