Li Fang-Kuei (Chinese: 李方桂, Cantonese: Lei5 Fong1 Gwai3 [lej˩˨ fɔŋ˦ gʷaj˧] , Mandarin: Lǐ Fāngguì [li˨ faŋ˦ gʷej˥˩]; 20 August 190221 August 1987) was a Chinese linguist known for his studies of the varieties of Chinese, his reconstructions of Old Chinese and Proto-Tai, and his documentation of Dene languages in North America. Biography Li Fang-Kuei was born on 20 August 1902 in Canton (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 jinshi 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 gained 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 American Indian languages. 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, in 1928-29 Li traveled to Europe with letters of recommendation from Franz Boas, and visited linguists there including Walter Simon. Li also spent 3 months in 1929 in the Northwest Territories of Canada, living on an island in the middle of the Mackenzie River conducting fieldwork on the Hare language. After his fieldwork on Hare, in 1929 he returned to China and, along with Y.R. Chao and Luo Changpei, became a researcher at the Institute of History and Philology () of the Academia