The historian Li Hsiao-ti has died at the age of 72, shortly after being elected an academician of Taiwan's Academia Sinica — a coincidence of timing that has deepened the sense of loss in academic circles.

Li was known for reconstructing city life, consumption, entertainment and fashion in the Ming and Qing periods from primary sources. He is credited with bringing the register of everyday life and the senses into a field long centred on political and institutional history.

His best-known works address the pleasure quarters and garden culture of Jiangnan cities in the late Ming, and the experience of watching opera. He read the leisure and tastes of urban residents out of literati collections, jottings and opera scripts.

His approach can be summarised as cultural history from below: narrating an era not through dynastic change and institutional reform, but through the eyes of the person seated in the theatre and the person choosing goods at the market.

He spent much of his career at the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica and trained several generations of scholars. Volumes he helped edit are standard references in Ming-Qing cultural history in both Chinese and English-language scholarship.

Funeral arrangements and memorial events are to be announced by his family and institution.