Life
Kim Ho-dong was born on 20 November 1954. He graduated from Seoul National University with a B.A. in Asian History and studied with Min Tuki. He earned his doctoral degree in Inner Asian and Altaic Studies from Harvard University, where he was a student of Joseph Fletcher, Jr. Omeljan Pritsak, Philip A. Kuhn, and Thomas Barfield were on his dissertation committee as well.
He served as a full professor in the Department of Asian History at Seoul National University from 26 November 1986 until his retirement on 29 February 2020. In recognition of his scholarly contributions, he was appointed as a distinguished (emeritus) professor at Seoul National University on 1 March 2018. He also served as the president of the Korean Association for Central Asian Studies from 2003 to 2006.
He held visiting appointments and research fellowships at LMU Munich (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, 1994), Harvard University (Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2000–2001), the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (2007–2008), and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2015–2016).
Currently, he is a member of The National Academy of Sciences, Republic of Korea within the Humanities and Social Sciences Division.
Works
Kim’s doctoral dissertation examined the Muslim uprising against Qing rule that broke out in Xinjiang in 1864. It was first published in Korean in 1999 and later in English as Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864–1877 (2004). In this book, Kim challenges the conventional view that the Xinjiang Muslim rebellion was inevitably crushed by the Qing army because of Qing military superiority or the inherent weakness of the Muslim forces. Instead, he argues that the outcome of the conflict was far from predetermined and that the rebels’ defeat resulted primarily from the political miscalculations of their leader, Yaqub Beg.
Afterward, Kim expanded his research beyond nineteenth-century Xinjiang to earlier periods of Central Eurasian history. His studies during this period, published primarily in Korean, covered a broad chronological range from the Tang dynasty's Jimi (loose-rein) system to the Moghul Khanate period, addressing various topics including nomadic sovereignty and the Muslim cult of saints. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, his research increasingly focused on the history of the Mongol Empire, on which he has continued to publish numerous articles.
Kim’s scholarship is characterized by a broad perspective on the Mongol Empire based on the use of sources written in multiple languages. In particular, his expertise in Classical Chinese and Persian, two of the most important languages for the study of Mongol history, has enabled him to move beyond the traditional division of the field into separate studies of the Ilkhanate and the Yuan dynasty. His work has contributed to the recent trend of emphasizing the unity and interconnectedness of the Mongol Empire. His article “The Unity of the Mongol Empire and Continental Exchanges over Eurasia” well represents this approach.
Kim also emphasizes the Mongol perspective in his studies, challenging earlier approaches to Yuan history that relied primarily on Chinese-language sources. By incorporating sources in other languages, he seeks to restore the Mongol perspective in the study of the Yuan dynasty. This approach is exemplified in his articles “Qubilai’s Commanders (Amīrs): A Mongol Perspective” and “Was ‘Da Yuan’ a Chinese Dynasty?” In the former, he argues that political power under Qubilai Khan was largely held by Mongols and that the role of Han Chinese in the political and military affairs of the Mongol Empire was limited, while in the latter he argues that Da Yuan referred not to a Chinese-centered dynasty but to the Mongol Empire (Yeke Mongγol Ulus) itself.
Kim co-edited The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire (2024) with Michal Biran, a work that brings together recent scholarship on the history of the Mongol Empire. He has also actively contributed to the translation and annotation of historical sources into Korean, most notably through his complete Korean translation of Rashid al-Din’s Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh (Compendium of Chronicles).
