In 2001 I embarked on my PhD research at Cambridge University in the UK. I spent 1 year in Seoul at Yonsei University's Korean Language Institute to master modern Korean for research reading purposes, and refined my knowledge of literary Chinese of the Tang era. During this phase, I also had my first taste of teaching with supervisions (small group teaching) for literary/classical Chinese and premodern history, and gained my first full time teaching job at Oxford University as a Departmental Lecturer in Classical Chinese.