He was sent by the museum to participate in a minor capacity in the excavations of the Western Xia tombs at the foot of the Helan Mountains, and whilst his new wife (Yang Shende 楊慎德) and children stayed behind at Yinchuan, he lived and worked at the excavations for seven years.
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By this time, he had become fascinated with the extinct and only semi-deciphered Tangut script, and in 1960 he decided to move to Yinchuan in Ningxia, the former capital of the Tangut Empire, to devote himself to Tangut studies, but his wife was unwilling to accompany him, so they divorced.
During 1989–1990 she spent a year at the Minzu University of China in Beijing, where she worked with Chinese Tangutologists, including as Shi Jinbo, Bai Bin and Li Fanwen.