Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) — The Library & Archives has obtained the personal papers of Li Jianglin, a historian and renowned contemporary Tibetan scholar. Born into a Communist Chinese revolutionary family in 1956 in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, Li studied in the United States in the late 1980s, earning a master's degree in Jewish history from Brandeis University and a master's degree in librarianship from Queens College in New York. She began conducting independent research on Tibet in 2004.
Over the following two decades, Li traveled often to India, Nepal, and ethnic Tibetan areas in the People's Republic of China to undertake fieldwork. She also interviewed the Dalai Lama as well as other prestigious political and religious leaders in the Tibetan communities in exile on multiple occasions. She published extensively on the history of modern and contemporary Tibet, including Tibet in Agony: Lhasa 1959 (Harvard University Press) and When the Iron Bird Flies: China's Secret War in Tibet (Stanford University Press). Li passed away from illness at her home in Georgia in 2024.
The Li Jianglin Papers include hundreds of hours of audio and video interviews, letters and correspondence with the Dalai Lama and other prominent Tibetan figures in China and in exile in India, research materials on the history and politics of Tibet, photographic images related to Li's multiple field trips to Dharamsala and Tibetan refugee camps across the Indian subcontinent, and artifacts and souvenirs given by the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile.
These historical materials provide unique insight into controversies surrounding the Sino-Tibetan relationship, the Tibetan government-in-exile and the Tibetan diaspora, and how the Dalai Lama — as the top leader of the Tibetans — perceived his nation's future and its complicated relations with the People's Republic of China.
