212 SOCIAL REFORMor official agency that owned the slave could confiscate the property. It was the
lack of opportunity for the accumulation of wealth rather than any legal prohi-
bition that probably constituted the main problem for Korean slaves, but the
situation improved in the late Choson period as more slaves were able to accu-
mulate land. [0
Yet despite the relatively liberal legal privileges of the Korean slave, Koreans
from the Koryo period on, and probably earlier as well, described slaves as chat-
tel property. Willingness to acknowledge the humanity of slaves in certain
instances did not destroy that fundamental distinction between slaves and non-
slaves common to other societies as well: the slave could be bought and sold
where the nonslave could not. Nonslave is a better term to use than freeman,
because other types of people in the category of base persons in Korean soci-
ety were subjected to restrictions on freedom but were not bought and sold as
slaves were. In the Korean situation, people used the terminology of chattel prop-
erty to describe slaves, and ultimately one of the important questions in the atti-
tude toward slavery was whether it was morally proper to treat human beings
as objects of purchase and sale. 1 1
Of course, many scholars prefer to avoid defining slavery simply as chattel
property, or objects subject to purchase and sale. They usually stress the over-
whelming power of the master in commanding or disposing of the slave, the sub-
jugation of the slave and his physical labor to the whim of the master, or the loss
of basic humanity attendant upon enslavement - Orlando Patterson's social death
of the slave. 12 While the cruel and arbitrary treatment of slaves was also an impor-
tant factor in the history of antislavery movements because it goaded and chal-
lenged men of humanitarian feeling, the crucial issue is the conversion from ad
hoc humanitarian protest against occasional cruelty to the condemnation of slav-
ery as an institution that robs humankind of its dignity and humanity.
KIJA AND THE ORIGINS OF SLAVERY IN KOREAThe legitimacy of slavery as an institution seems never to have been questioned
in Korea because it was supposedly introduced in remote antiquity by the myth-
ical Kija, a Chinese sage-hero who was granted ancient Choson as a fief during
the early Chou period, migrated there, and introduced fundamental institutions
of governance. The earliest accounts simply state that Kija enacted a penal code
of eight provisions, one of which provided that thieves would become the slaves
of the families they had robbed.
The compiler of the prologue to the addendum on slavery in the treatise on
punishments in the Koryosa (History of the Koryodynasty) added a twist to Kija's
law for the enslavement of thieves by claiming that it marked the origin of hered-
itary slavery in Korea, which he praised because it had benefited society "by
ensuring a strict [distinction] between inner and outer [males and females], a
[hierarchicalJ grading of noble and base [kwichon1, and a [strict1 practice of
rites and righteousness." 13