1I8 SOCIAL REFORM
government. Many of their sons, however, were taking the civil service exam-
inations as a means of gaining high office so that by the end of the fourteenth
century about 40 percent of regular officials had passed the examinations.
When the Choson dynasty was founded in 1392, many of the Koryo elite, gen-
erally referred to as yangban, made the successful transition to the new dynasty
by standing for the civil service examinations. By the tum of the sixteenth cen-
tury, if not earlier, the examinations became virtually the sole route to high office
under a vastly strengthened central bureaucracy. Many of the old families thus
retained their power and influence, but they were changed somewhat in nature
because scholarly performance became a necessary means to that end. In short,
they became the kind of bureaucratic/aristocratic hybrid that had been created
in T'ang China. The difference was, however, that the dynasty lasted until 19IO
and the yangban, or certain sublineages within that group, did not disappear and
merge into the vast mass of commoners. Instead, they continued to dominate
Choson government and society virtually until its demise in 1910.^2
Like the T'ang dynasty, the Choson dynasty faced the problem of dealing with
elements of hereditary aristocracy while it was adopting the institutions of cen-
tralized bureaucracy and reaching an accommodation with a hereditary elite,
the yangban, who wanted to perpetuate its power and position despite the desire
of some kings to reduce or eliminate that power. There has been considerable
debate about whether the early Choson government was able to do that in the
fifteenth century. I believe not, but even those who do think that the old Koryo
aristocracy was brought to heel would not question the predominance ofthe yang-
ban (or its leading elements) as a privileged and hereditary aristocracy by the
seventeenth century; they simply explain it as a development of a second wave
of inherited privilege among the yangban following the deterioration of the more
egalitarian spirit of the early fifteenth century.
SLAVES AND SLAVE SOCIETYOne significant difference between the seventeenth-century yangban and the
T'ang aristocrats was that the yangban calculated their power and wealth not
only in office-and landholding, but in their ownership of slaves. Not only in
that century, but for many more centuries before (possibly as far back as the
tenth century in the Koryo dynasty) Korea was a bona fide slave society with
30 or more percent of its overall population and approximately two-thirds of its
capital population slaves, most of whom were under yangban masters. T'ang
society had its bondsmen and a hierarchy of inferior status positions, but no one
calls T'ang a slave society.
The emergence of hereditary slavery and the expansion of the slave popula-
tion in the tenth century was not checked by the influence of either Buddhism
or Confucianism through the end ofthe Koryo dynasty, and when the Neo-Con-
fucian intellectual movement overwhelmed the Buddhists at the tum of the fif-
teenth century, it was not accompanied by any serious attacks on either slavery