The reluctant master Ji Xianlin

Premier Wen Jiabao visited Beijing's No 301 Hospital on Saturday to pay his respect to a very dear friend. Unfortunately the Premier was unable to offer his last goodbye in person.

Ji Xianlin, dubbed by many as the "master of Chinese culture" had died three hours earlier of heart attack. He was 98.

Premier Wen said he had planned to celebrate Ji's 98th birthday next month and was looking forward to discussing many different issues.

Ji's wise counsel was always in big demand over his 70-year academic career.

He was one of China's greatest scholars of history, ancient languages and culture.

Ji repeatedly asked the media to stop calling him a "maestro in traditional Chinese culture" but despite the protests, the "master" title stuck.

On his way to becoming a cultural icon, Ji personally taught more than 6,000 students and about 30 of these young people went onto becoming ambassadors serving across the four corners of the globe.

According his students and colleagues, China's academic giant was always an amiable old man who wore bleached khaki suits, soft cloth shoes, and carried an old-fashioned schoolbag.

They also remember his utmost respect for people, his humility and his tenderness for little animals, especially cats.

Ji spent his last moments in No 301 hospital, Beijing, with his son Ji Cheng accompanying by his side.

"Ji's leaving is the ending of an era," says Zhao Rengui, professor of Beijing Normal University. "There are fewer and fewer masters accomplished like him nowadays."

Son to an impoverished rural family in Linqing, Shandong province, Ji was admitted to Tsinghua University in 1930 and majored in Western literature.

Five years later he went to Gottingen University in Germany as an exchange student, majoring in Sanskrit and lesser-known ancient languages like Pali.

He would spend more than 10 years in Germany and received his PhD in 1941.

In Germany, Ji met Irmgard, his friend's landlord's daughter, who helped him type his dissertation, because he could not afford a typewriter. The two soon fell in love but Ji was already married in China and made the hard decision to give up the relationship and returned to China in 1946.

In his book Ten Years in Germany (Liude Shinian), he wrote of the relationship. When he re-visited Gottingen in 1980, he tried to find Irmgard but failed.

In 2000, a Hong Kong reporter, who was making a documentary of Ji, went to the city and found the lady, who was still single. The typewriter she used to help Ji was still on her desk.

On his return in 1946 he became a professor at Peking University and soon founded the department of Eastern languages in the university.

During the "cultural revolution" (1967-77), he spent five years translating the 2.8 million-word ancient Indian epic Ramayana from Sanskrit into Chinese.

On January 26, 2008, the government of India awarded Ji the Padma Bhushan, one of the country's top civilian awards.

In 1978, Ji became vice president of Peking University and director of the Chinese Academy of Science's Research Institute on South Asia. He also served as chairman of various professional organizations, including the Chinese Foreign Literature Association, the Chinese South Asian Association and the Chinese Language Society.

Ji published 11 academic books and over 200 papers in more than 10 academic fields, including Chinese cultural research, comparative literature, and Sanskrit.

Ji maintained that "Cultural exchange is the main drive for humankind's progress. Only by learning from each other's strong points to make up for shortcomings can people constantly progress, the ultimate target of which is to achieve a kind of Great Harmony."

In 2003 Ji moved into No 301 hospital because of health problems, but continued reading and writing there.

The day before his passing he was talking to an editor about new book plans and wrote in calligraphy.