ro8 EARLY CHOSON DYNASTYLandownership and Social Stratification
Shikata Hiroshi, one of the first scholars to study Choson society based on house-
hold registers (hojok) in the twentieth century, examined a few villages near Taegu
in Kyongsang Province from 1690 to 1858, and the results of his research trans-
formed the view of late Choson society when he concluded that the percentage
of what he defined as yangban households increased steadily from 8.3 to 65.5
percent.^36 This established the basis for the thesis of rapid upward mobility after
1600 and stimulated Kim Yongsop to find an economic explanation for the phe-
nomenon.
One of the results of Kim's research, however, was that despite his search for
the basis for upward mobility, he found that the economic fortunes of yangban
as a whole had probably declined severely by the late seventeenth century. While
the yangban kiju (or landowners in Kim's view) listed in the yang'an registers
he studied were generall y better off than commoners and slaves, not all of them
were, and in all but one district about half or more of the yangban were below
the poverty line. Some commoners held more land than some yangban, and in
some districts, some slaves held more than a number of yangban and com-
moners)7
Because he demonstrated that the status hierarchy was not fully consonant
with the ownership hierarchy, his findings undermined the earlier facile suppo-
sitions that all yangban were large landlords and all large landlords were yang-
ban. Nonetheless, most of the larger landlords were yangban, and most of the
yangban were the largest landlords, which is sufficient to demonstrate that by
1690, the first year of Shikata's Taegu statistics, 8 percent of the registered kiju
in his small sample composed a rural yangban/landowning elite, and they owned
most of the land in the village. Since these statistics did not reveal any of the
large landed estates that one would expect from the literature, and since the kiju
may well have included tenants of large landlords, it would be safe to assume
that Kim's samples must have grossly underrepresented the concentration of land
and wealth in the hands of the large landlords at the time.
The Growth of Agricultural ProductionEven though the fragmentation of landholdings caused by an increase in the pop-
ulation presumably should have caused the immiseration of the peasantry and
massive downward, rather than upward, mobility, Kim Yongsop saw the situa-
tion as providing opportunities to more enterprising cultivators to accumulate
wealth through increased effort. Kim, Yi T'aejin, and a number of scholars have
suggested that improvements in agricultural technology and techniques provided
the main catalyst toward a significant increase in agricultural production and
the creation of a surplus that stimulated market activity and the overall growth
of the economy. The verification of this hypothesis, however, is not so easy