According to Xu Keqiao, an expert on Sino-Indian cultural communication at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a lot of what Chinese know about India's tradition and culture has come from Ji's study. Xu said Ji's translation from the original Sanskrit into Chinese poetry was a tremendous achievement.

In 2002, Ji was hospitalized due to health problems, but he continued writing and studying till his death on July 11, 2009, when he suffered a heart attack.

Humble spirit

Before he was hospitalized, Ji often got up at 4:30 a.m. every morning and had breakfast half an hour later. When his neighbors saw him strolling along the lotus pool inside the prestigious Peking University where he lived, he had already been awake for hours.

In Peking University, there is a well-known story about a freshman and Ji. On the first day the student entered the university, she came across an old man who looked like a campus cleaner and asked him to look after her luggage for a while. When she returned two hours later and the man was still there waiting with the luggage. At the ceremony to welcome the new students in the evening, the student found out that old man, actually Ji himself, was the vice president of the university.

Always dressed in a bleached khaki suit and a pair of cloth shoes, with an old leather satchel in his hand, Ji was a far cry from the feted academic. He even wrote three articles to ask people to remove all the titles behind his name. "I couldn't say that I did nothing, but what I did is far from deserving all those titles," said Ji during an interview with China Central Television.

In 1998, Ji published a book titled Memoirs From the Cowshed. Ji said that he wanted to record his experiences during the "cultural revolution" in the book to give the younger generations some references of that special period. "I am not saying those days were bad or not, just stating the facts," he said.

Many of his former students came to Peking University to mourn their mentor on July 13.

"He lived a very simple life," 73-year-old Chen Shiyue, Ji's former student, told Xinhua News Agency. "I still have the picture of the chair he sat in. It is almost broken but he never changed it. I am very lucky to become his student and be influenced by his spirit. It is the treasure of my whole life," Chen said.