Tian Yingguihang
Background
Tian Yingguihang was born and raised in Henan Province, China. She first encountered the Lusophone world when she had an opportunity to travel to Macau in 2014. Being fascinated by the diverse culture in Macau, she soon went to Macau University of Science and Technology to study Portuguese language as her undergraduate major. In her junior year, she was an exchange student studying at the University of Minho, Portugal. That experience nourished her initial interest in Portuguese history and the Lusophone world.
After graduation from Macau, she came to Singapore to pursue M.A. studies at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, NUS. In the final semester of her M.A. programme at NUS, Tian completed a supervised research project titled "Polygamy in Portuguese Timor and Independent Timor-Leste", which focused on the first half of the 20th century (1910-40) as well as post-2002 independent Timor-Leste as the research time period, examining the percentage of married women in polygamous marriages and exploring factors that explained the regional and temporal variation in polygamy.
Dabbling in historical demography locates her research interests. Before rejoining NUS, she soon did her second M.A. degree in Population and Sexual and Reproductive Health at Mahidol University, Thailand in order to develop her skills in demography and quantitative research.
Asian Languages
Tian is a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese and an advanced learner of Portuguese (one of the official languages of Macau and Timor-Leste).
Research Interests
Tian is interested in women history in the Lusophone world. Her current research compares demographic shocks and changing sex ratios in Portuguese Asia: Goa, Macau and Timor. She looks at the colonial and post-colonial census data, colonial government bulletin, newspapers, and other archives to develop the research by using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods.