POST-IMJIN DEVELOPMENTS 107expected to see some large holdings even within one district. On the other hand,
if the kiju were cultivators rather than owners, then many of those cultivators
could have been either tenants or slaves of a single owner whose name might
not even be mentioned.
If, on the other hand, the kiju were really owners, then Kim's statistics would
show that very few households held more than one kyol, most were less than .5
kyol (50 pU), and over half, sometimes two-thirds of the householders were below
the poverty line of .25 kyat (1.25 acres on average)Y Not only would the aver-
age holdings per family have declined considerably from the fifteenth century,
but a great differentiation of ownership would have occurred within each of the
three major social status categories (yangban, commoners, slaves) as well.
Fragmentation, however, did not mean the disappearance of hierarchy in the
structure of ownership. According to the scheme of stratification devised by Kim
Yongsop, the richest 10 percent of the population of these five districts owned
40 to 50 percent of the land. The next group of mid-sized landholders who con-
stituted 15 percent of the registered kiju (not the population, since only male
heads of households are listed, and landless laborers, whom Kim guessed must
have constituted 30 percent of the male population, are not even mentioned)
owned 25 percent of the land; the smallholders or "small households" (soho)
(defined by Kim as those owning between .25 and .50 kyollhousehold) who con-
stituted 20 percent of the registered kiju owned slightly less than 20 percent of
the land; the poorest 50 to 60 percent of the kiju (owning less than .25 kyat per
household) held only 10 to 20 percent of the land registered."
Kim also claimed that the average holding of the cultivating landowners was
reduced in size. According to the statistics of these five areas in the late seven-
teenth and early eighteenth centuries, 66 to 83 percent of the registered kiju in
all the areas studied held either small parcels (0.25-0.50 kyol), and 43 to 68 per-
cent held less than 0.25 kyol (1.25 acres), below the level of subsistence.^34
Even if the kiju in the yang 'an registers are not owners as Kim claimed, how-
ever, evidence from other sources is sufficient to show the progressive diminu-
tion of average holdings to the end of the dynasty. The breakdown of land
ownership in 191 I, for example, shows that in the southern three provinces, 55
to 63 percent of the population owned less than 0.25 kyol (1.25 acres), 8 I to 85
percent owned less than 0.5 kyol (2.5 acres), while only 4-4 to 7.3 percent owned
more than I kyol (5 acres).35
In the middle of the seventeenth century when Yu Hyongwon began to write
his solution to the problems of land distribution and taxation, the fragmenta-
tion of private ownership had long been under way, but ifYu's testimony is to
be believed, the main problem afflicting the peasants of Korea at that time was
not simply the reduction of the average size of land parcels held by all culti-
vators, but the concentration of land in the hands of large landlords and the dis-
parity in wealth between large landlords and slaveholders versus sharecroppers,
slaves, and landless laborers.