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HKU Chair Professor of Humanities Frank Dikötter has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Leiden University, the Netherlands’ oldest university, in recognition of the tremendous importance of his work for scholars in the area of the history of the Chinese Republican period and for both the scholarly and social significance of his work on the history of the People’s Republic of China under Mao.  Professor Dikötter was presented with this honour at Leiden University’s Dies Natalis celebrations on February 8, 2017.

Professor Dikötter joined the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong in 2006. He is the author of the internationally-acclaimed People’s Trilogy about the Great Leap Forward (Mao’s Great Famine, 2010), the initial years of the People’s Republic (The Tragedy of Liberation, 2013) and the Cultural Revolution (The Cultural Revolution, 2016). The People's Trilogy is based on painstaking archival research by Professor Dikötter in dozens of party archives, most of which had hitherto never been seen by historians, whether local or foreign. The first part of the trilogy, Mao’s Great Famine, won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2011, the most prestigious British award for non-fiction.