Hsiao Li Lindsay, Baroness Lindsay of Birker

The Right Honourable The Lady Lindsay of Birker
Born	Li Yueying 17 July 1916 Taiyuan, Shanxi
Died	25 April 2010 (aged 93)
Spouse(s)	Michael Lindsay, 2nd Baron Lindsay of Birker
Parent(s)	Colonel Li Wenqi

Hsiao Li Lindsay, Baroness Lindsay of Birker (17 July 1916 – 25 April 2010), was a British peeress who supported Chinese Communist resistance to the Japanese occupation of China during the Second World War.

Hsiao Li was born Li Yueying in Taiyuan, Shanxi. Her father, Colonel Li Wenqi, was a rich nonconformist Chinese landowner who refused to bind her feet. She took part in student demonstrations at Taiyuan Normal University and was blacklisted by the authorities. She then fled to Beijing, where she changed her name. In Beijing, she entered Yenching University, where she met Professor Michael Lindsay. Lindsay was using his protected status as foreign citizen to smuggle radio and medical supplies to the communists, who were resisting the Japanese occupation. He needed a native speaker of Chinese to help him and Hsiao Li agreed to assist him. The couple were married on 25 June 1941.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Lindsay found himself a citizen of an enemy state and thus liable for arrest. The Japanese authorities soon came to arrest the couple, but they managed to escape. For the next four years, the pair worked behind enemy lines, with Hsiao Li teaching English to the troops. Two children were born to them during their 500-mile journey on foot to the communist headquarters in Yenan: Erica, born in a hut in the mountains in 1942, and James, born in a hospital cave in Yenan in 1945.

After the war, in 1945, Hsiao Li's father-in-law, Sandie Lindsay, was elevated to the peerage as Baron Lindsay of Birker. Hsiao Li and her husband moved to Britain, where they lived with his parents, Sandie and Erica Lindsay, and then to Australia, where he worked at the Australian National University. Another daughter, Mary, was born in 1951. The next year, her husband succeeded his father as 2nd Baron Lindsay of Birker, and Hsiao Li becoming the Baroness Lindsay of Birker. Lord Lindsay's career brought them to Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1959, where they remained after his retirement in 1975. The same year, Lady Lindsay became a United States citizen.

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