Michael Aris

Aris died of prostate cancer on his 53rd birthday in 1999, in Oxford.

In 1997, Aris was diagnosed with prostate cancer which was later found to be terminal. Several countries, prominent individuals and organisations, including the United States government, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Pope John Paul II, made appeals to the Burmese authorities to allow Dr Aris a visa. The Burmese government would not grant him a visa to visit Burma, saying that they did not have the facilities to care for him, and instead urged Aung San Suu Kyi to leave the country to visit him. She was at that time temporarily free from house arrest but was unwilling to depart, fearing that she would be refused re-entry if she left, as she did not trust the junta's assurance that she could return.

After 1989, when his wife was first placed under house arrest, and until his death in 1999, he had seen her only five times, the last of which was for Christmas in 1995, after Suu Kyi had been released for the first time.

In 1976, Aris moved on to the University of Oxford and became a junior research fellow and a member of the university faculty at St John's College. In 1978, he obtained a Ph.D. in Tibetan literature from the University of London. Later at St Antony's College, Oxford, he became a senior research fellow at the Asian Studies Centre. In the last years before his death, he helped establish a specialist Tibetan and Himalayan studies centre at Oxford.

In 1972, Aris married Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he had met while at the university. They married in a Buddhist ceremony. After spending a year in Bhutan, they settled in North Oxford, where they raised their two sons, Alexander Aris and Kim Aris. During this time, he did postgraduate studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and obtained a PhD in Tibetan literature in 1978. In 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi returned to Burma at first to care for her mother but later to lead the country's pro-democracy movement. St John's College provided Aris with an extended leave of absence as a fellow on full stipend so that he could lobby for his wife's cause.

He was educated at Worth School in Sussex, and read modern history at Durham University, where he was a member of St Cuthbert's Society. After graduating in 1967, he spent six years as a private tutor to the children of the Bhutanese royal family.

Michael Vaillancourt Aris (27 March 1946 – 27 March 1999) was an English historian who wrote and lectured on Bhutanese, Tibetan and Himalayan culture and history. He was the husband of Aung San Suu Kyi, who would later become State Counsellor of Myanmar.