Soyoung Choi

Project: The Ilkhanate and Tibet

I finished my doctoral coursework in February, 2013. My master’s thesis was on the relationship between Tibet and the Hülegü Ulus(Ilkhanate). In this thesis I posited that Hülegü and his descendants maintained their Tibetan fief for almost fifty years and supported monastic orders belonging to them in many ways, which caused conflict with Qa’ans. To demonstrate this, I analyzed several Tibetan, Persian and Chinese sources. In this analysis, I discovered that several Elite Mongols of Persia migrated to Tibet on the IlKhan’s order, in the mid-13th century. According to the Tibetan sources, for example, Kukuchu, one of the four chiefs of the keshig of Hülegü, moved from Persia to Tibet to administer the Tibetan fief of the Hülegü Ulus. There might be many other unknown migrations of people (culture and materials) throughout the Empire as the “Mobility, Empire and Cross-Contacts in Mongol Eurasia” project emphasizes.

In the Project, using mainly the Persian and Tibetans sources, I would specifically like to study ‘the new elites’ of the Hülegü Ulus and Tibet, and the migration between these two areas. This can be compared to other varieties of elite migration in the Mongol world, e.g. between Koryo and the Qa’an Ulus or between the Hülegü Ulus and the Qa’an Ulus.

Previous works

• “The Royal Authority and the Changes of the Tibet Policy in the Early Yung cheng Reign”, SNU Papers on Asian History, vol.36, 2012

• “Tibet and the Hulegu Ulus”, Joong ang a si a Yeon gu (The Study of the Central Asia), Korean Academy of Central Asian Studies, vol.17-1, 2011

• “Describing the Mongols in the Modern Ottoman Historiography”, SNU Papers on Asian History, vol.34, 2010

Education

• Doctor of Arts, Seoul National University (South Korea), Department of Asian History with a specialization in Central Asian History, September 2010-

• Master of Arts, Seoul National University (South Korea), Department of Asian History with a specialization in Central Asian History, 2010