LAND REFORM: COMPROMISES 295
land and population statistics were not clearly known. The grades of farmland
and woodland [ch()nsikwal were abandoned and became private land [sajiinJ.^62
and the influential families and hereditary clans [si?jok] competed with one
another to accumulate large holdings [kyomhyongj. Their landholdings were so
great that they extended across the ch ()n and maek embankments Ii .e .. the terms
used to allude to Shang Yang's reform that expanded the land boundaries heyond
the 100 myo unit of the well fields] and [their holdings were so large that] they
had to use mountains and rivers to mark the borders of their lands. The common
people [yangminJ were all absorbed into their huge houses and as a result the
state gradually fell into decline.^63This paragraph, of course, mentioned several of the shibboleths of the well-
field idealists - private property, hereditary clans that were the antithesis of an
ideal sadaebu elite whose status was founded on virtue, and the conversion of
the peasantry from ordinary taxpayers supporting the state to the minions of an
aristocracy.
The analysis ofYi Chehyon, the famous fourteenth-century NeD-Confucian
scholar, differed in significant ways from this statement and from the opinion
of Cho Chun. To begin with, in contrast to Cho Chun's apotheosis of the early
Koryoland settlement, Yi emphasized the incomplete and flawed nature of land
relations in the tenth century. He noted how T'aejo was faced with a chaotic sit-
uation inherited from the late Silla dynasty and the disruptive rule of the suc-
cessor state ofT'aebong (founded by Kungye, under whom T'aejo or Wang Kon
first served). Lacking sufficient time for a more thoroughgoing and complete
land reform, T'aejo was only able to establish a system for the grant of kubun
land allotments.^64 King Kyongjong (r. 975-98 r) improved on T'aejo's system
somewhat by establishing the chonsikwa graded allotments of farmland and
woodland. "Even though the system had some crude and rough elements, it con-
tained within it the intention of the ancients for establishing a system of hered-
itary salary provisions [serok)."6s This comment indicates that Yi perceived
correctly that the main feature of the chonsikwa allotments was the provision
of support to officials rather than the guarantee of a basic plot to all peasants.
In other words, the chonsikwa system accomplished only half the objectives of
the well-field model, omitting provision of a basic land grant to commoner peas-
ant families. Furthermore, Yi argued that the ch6nsikwa system departed from
well-field or Chou principles in the method of taxation as well.
"As for such methods as the one-ninth 'aid' [chu) or the one-tenth tax [puJ,
which were the means by which [the ancients] provided superior treatment for
the men of superior virtue [kunja] and distinguished them from the small men
[soin, ordinary people, the equivalent of Mencius's :vain or 'men of the fields'],
there was no mention of this at all."66
Other sources in the Korvosa on early Koryo taxation were not in agreement
on this problem. An early Koryo source, for example, stated that the cho tax
rate on public land (kongjon) was set in 992 at a rate of one-fourth the crop.6^7