Che Hongcai

Che Hongcai was born in 1936 in Hailun, in Heilongjiang Province in northeast China. In 1957 he enrolled as an English major at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute, now Beijing Foreign Studies University.

In 1959 the Chinese Foreign Ministry sent him to the Cultural Institute of Kabul University in Afghanistan to study Pashto, one of Afghanistan's national languages. He studied there until 1963, becoming one of the first Chinese specialists in the language.

After returning to China in 1963, Che helped establish the Pashto service of China's national radio. He then taught at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute, the predecessor of the Communication University of China. When the Cultural Revolution began he was sent to Tangshan in 1968, where he did farm work and military drills.

In 1975 the State Council approved a programme of foreign language dictionaries, and in 1978 the Commercial Press asked Che to compile a Pashto-Chinese dictionary. With the help of his student Song Qiangmin and a former Kabul classmate, Zhang Min, he had produced about 100,000 cards filling more than 30 filing cabinets by 1981, roughly 70 per cent of the work. In 1982 university authorities moved him on to study the creation of an international journalism major, and the dictionary stalled.

In 1989 the Foreign Ministry posted him as a diplomatic interpreter, first to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan. According to the Communication University of China, he was among the last group of embassy staff to leave Afghanistan during the civil war. When he returned in 1993 he discovered that both the publisher and the university had forgotten the dictionary.

Che retired in 1995. In 2000 the university invited him back to teach Pashto when it resumed enrolment in the subject, and in his sixties he built the curriculum and wrote teaching materials, training many of the Pashto specialists later working in Chinese diplomacy and international broadcasting. After finishing his teaching in 2008 he restarted the dictionary on his own, learning to use a computer, and delivered the completed draft to the Commercial Press in April 2012. Editors at first had no record of the project until they found the original 1978 document.

The Pashto-Chinese Dictionary, with more than 2.5 million characters and about 52,000 entries, was published by the Commercial Press in 2014, according to his university (some sources give 2015). It was the first large bilingual dictionary between the two languages.

Che was a member of the Communist Party of China, and his university described him as modest, indifferent to fame and a man of his word, who held to the belief that the needs of the country came before his own wishes. Details of his family life have not been widely published.

Che Hongcai died of illness in Beijing on the afternoon of October 11, 2026, aged 90, after treatment failed. The Communication University of China announced his death in an obituary notice on October 12, describing it as a great loss to the university and to China's research and teaching of less commonly taught languages.

A memorial and farewell ceremony was scheduled for 10am on Tuesday, October 13, 2026, in the Lan Hall of Babaoshan Funeral Parlour in Beijing.

Che is regarded as one of the pioneers of Pashto studies in China. His dictionary, completed more than three decades after it was commissioned, filled a gap in Chinese reference works and became a symbol of scholarly perseverance in China, where his story was widely reported.

His honours included the Sayed Jamaluddin Afghan Medal, presented in 2015 by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in recognition of his 36 years of work on the dictionary and his contribution to cultural exchange between China and Afghanistan, as well as a lifetime achievement award for teaching less commonly taught foreign languages in China and recognition as one of the 2014 Chinese Cultural Figures.