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Ji Xianlin, One of the Country's Greatest Scholars

Du Lijun takes a look at life of this iconic scholar who had such a great impact on society and generations of scholars.

Ji Xianlin returned to China in the summer of 1946, after 11 years of studying in Germany. He was 25 years old.

When he set foot on the motherland, he immediately knelt down, scooped up some soil, and kissed it. He whispered, "My hometown, now I finally have returned."

Ji Xianlin was hired by Peking University, one of the top universities in the country and established an Eastern Languages Department there.

During the next 42 years, he spent most of his time and effort on academic research. In 2001, before his 90th birthday, he donated all the materials he had collected, including manuscripts, books, letters and photographs, to the university library.

In a previous interview, Ji said:

"I have been back to China for more than 50 years. And now I have come to the conclusion that I did the right thing. Maybe if I stayed in Germany, I would have written more books. But I belong to China. I can't abandon my country for my research."

Ji Xianlin was born in 1911 and entered Tsinghua University to study German. In the autumn of 1935, he attended Gottingen University in Germany for further study. During the next 11 years, he studied Indian culture and learned Sanskrit, Russian and Arabic.

Ji Xianlin was China's greatest scholar of ancient Indian languages and culture. He not only discovered Buddhism's migration from India to China, but also highlighted the spread of paper and silk-making from China to India. He even translated the "Ramayana," one of the two major Indian Sanskrit epics into Chinese by retaining its poetry format.

He also wrote seven books about India. His "Ji Xianlin Collection" consists of 24 volumes and is a comprehensive summary of ancient Indian languages and culture.

In China, 60 is usually the age for people to retire. But Ji Xianlin was still at the peak of his career when he was 80. He wrote two of his most important books, "The History of Sugar" and "Fragments of the Tocharian Maitreyasamiti-Nataka," in the 1990s.