PART II
Social Reform: Yangban and Slaves:
Introduction
Yu Hyongwon's magnum opus, the Pan 'gye surok, was a monstrous treatise
designed to rectify the manifold and serious problems facing Korea in the mid-
dle of the seventeenth century. Like the great Confucius himself, aspiring tutor
and adviser to kings, Yu designed his masterwork as a program of policy and
action for the king and sought throughout its pages to defend it as both practi-
cal as well as purely logical. Although he covered the gamut of administrative
and social problems that existed in his time, he always sought to focus his atten-
tion primarily on the most fundamental problems of his society.
One of the central issues in the Pan' gye surok derived from the nature of the
Choson dynasty's structure, the fusion of a centralized bureaucratic government
apparatus with a powerful tradition of inherited status in general, in particular
a semiaristocratic ruling class at the top and hereditary slavery at the bottom.
The principles of social and political organization under centralized bureaucracy
on the one hand and hereditary aristocracy and slavery on the other were fun-
damentally different and often in conflict. Hereditary aristocracies valued fam-
ily connections, personal ties, and inherited privilege and status, while
bureaucratic states favored broadening access to political power, impersonal tech-
niques of selection and evaluation, and a leveling of society save for the bureau-
cratic elite.
YANGBAN: THE ARISTOCRATIC
AND BUREAUCRATIC TRADITIONS
As we will see, Yu was greatly upset by the domination of his society by the
yangban, the group that he regarded as a hereditary aristocracy, but it would be
mistaken to assume that his solution to the domination of Choson society was
to destroy the yangban and shift to an efficiently organized and ascetic central-
ized bureaucracy in which status and privilege would be abandoned in favor of
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