K'o Shao-min (1850-1933), historian and classical scholar, known for his monumental history of the Yüan dynasty, the Hsin Yuan-shih.

A native of Liaohsien, Shantung, K'o Shaomin was the son of K'o Heng, a historian who wrote supplementary notes to the seven tables in the Han-shu which were known as the Han-shu ch'i-piao chiao-pu. K'o Shao-min's mother, Li Ch'ang-hsia, was the daughter of Li Ch'ang-po and was known as a poet. K'o Shao-min's precocity attracted the attention of Li Tz'u-ming (ECCP, II, 493), who recorded his impressions of K'o's early writings in his diary on 5 October 1872. K'o is said to have been a serious student of mathematics and traditional medicine, as well as of classical studies.

K'o Shao-min enjoyed a smooth and prosperous career both as a scholar and an official. He became a chü-jen in 1870 and a chin-shih in 1886. For a short time, he was at the Hanlin Academy. Between 1901 and 1906 he twice held the post of commissioner of education, first of Hunan and then of Kweichow. During this period, he also served in the Imperial Academy of Learning (Kuo-tzu-chien) and in the Hanlin Academy, where he achieved the rank of sub-expositor. Subsequently, he was sent to Japan to study that country's educational system, and upon his return in 1909 he was appointed to the ministry of education. He also became associate dean of classics and then acting chancellor of the Ching-shih ta-hsüeh-t'ang, the predecessor of Peking University. In December 1911, when the Ch'ing court was on the verge of complete collapse, the regent, Prince Ch'un, appointed K'o and 11 other popular and respected officials to visit their respective home provinces in a last attempt to win popular support for the tottering dynasty.

As an elder statesman loyal to the Ch'ing, K'o Shao-min declined all political appointments offered him by the republican government, including membership in the National Assembly. However, he agreed to take part in compiling the history of the Manchu dynasty. Thus, in 1914 he joined the Ch'ing-shih-kuan [Ch'ing history bureau] headed by Chao Erhsun (q.v.). Among other things, he completed the treatises on astronomy, calendrical reckoning, and portents. After Chao Erh-sun's death in September 1927, K'o Shao-min became head of the Ch'ing-shih-kuan and supervised publication of the Ch'ing-shih kao, which appeared in 1928.

Because Japanese scholars held him in high esteem, K'o Shao-min was appointed in May 1925 as China's chief delegate to the ill-fated Sino-Japanese Joint Committee on Oriental Cultural Studies, which was to be financed by the reimbursement of the Japanese portion of the Boxer Indemnity Fund. Many meetings were held, but all adjourned in disagreement. In December 1929 the National Government ordered the dissolution of the committee.

During the Ch'ing period, many prominent scholars had devoted themselves to the study of the history of the Mongol (Yüan) dynasty. However, they produced works which were fragmentary or inadequately documented, and they neglected non-Chinese source materials. In any case, their works did not in any sense supersede the standard Yüan-shih, a hurriedly compiled work of the early Ming dynasty which had been accepted as one of the twenty-four dynastic histories despite the fact that it was riddled with errors, some of them ludicrous. K'o Shao-min therefore spent nearly 50 years studying Chinese, Japanese, and European materials and writing a completely new history of the Yüan dynasty which, when published for the first time in 1922 as Hsin Yüan-shih consisted of 257 chüan. This monumental work was well received in Japan, and, on the recommendation of Yanai Wataru, Tokyo Imperial University in 1923 awarded K'o an honorary D.L.H. degree. Somewhat earlier, Hsü Shih-ch'ang (q.v.), who had received the chin-shih degree in the same year as K'o Shao-min and who belonged to the same poetry society, by an executive decree of December 1919 formally accepted the Hsin Yüan-shih in manuscript as one of the standard histories, thus increasing the total number from 24 to 25. K'o Shao-min received less favorable criticism from contemporary Chinese scholars. Ch'en Yüan (q.v.), for example, expressed the opinion that K'o Shao-min should have written a commentary to the original Yüan-shih instead of a new history. Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (q.v.) criticized K'o for arbitrarily selecting some documents on a given topic and rejecting others which disagreed, without interpreting or even mentioning the contradictions. The latter criticism was partially answered, however, by K'o Shaomin's Hsin Yüan-shih k'ao-cheng [evidential basis for the new history of the Yüan dynasty], published in 1935.

K'o was also interested in the Ku-liang, the commentary to the Ch'un-ch'iu which had been least studied by Ch'ing scholars. He therefore wrote the Ch'un-ch'iu Ku-liang-chuan chu [annotations to the Ku-liang commentary on the Ch'un-ch'iu], which was published in 1917 and reprinted with corrections in 1935.

K'o's poems were collected and published in 1924 as Liao-yüan shih-ch'ao [selected poems from the smartweed garden—smartweed (liao) being a pun on the name of K'o's native district]. In style they were held comparable to those of Wu Wei-yeh (ECCP, II, 882-83) and Wang Shih-chen (q.v.).

After the death of his first wife, K'o Shao-min married the third daughter of Wu Ju-lun (ECCP, II, 870-72), an accomplished scholar with whom he had exchanged poems. K'o died in 1933, at the age of 83.