REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH 323standard measures was followed later, from the Hsia through Chou dynasties.
Even Lord Shang in the Ch'in state that eventually unified China saw fit to stan-
dardize weights and measures even though he made no attempt to preserve the
specifications of the ancients. After the fall of the Chou, the Former Han dynasty
maintained its own sets of standards in copper and bamboo, but unity was lost
after the fall of the dynasty and problems were created by the existence of dif-
ferent standards of weight and measure. Yu believed that the key to restoring
those standards was to cast weights and measures primarily in copper, store them
in the palace, and distribute copies to the provinces.3^1
Yu himself defensively asserted that he was not a rigid fundamentalist in deriv-
ing certain ideas for land reform from classical models, but rather that he based
his proposals on what we today would call the use of both reason and empiri-
cal investigation. He pointed out that in the seventeenth century Koreans were
used to subdividing the basic unit of grain volume, the sljm (s/ik in Sino-Korean
pronunciation, shih in Chinese), into 15 rna! (tu in Sino-Korean pronunciation),
but he preferred to use a scheme based on the decimal system. He proposed that
the term kok (hu in Chinese) would replace the sam and would consist of 10 mal
instead of the fifteen in a sam, and he justified this substitution on the basis of
the ease of calculation in a decimal system. Since the kok had not been used for
srlm in ancient China and began only in the nefarious Ch'in dynasty. one might
conclude that Yu was opting for rationality over historicallegitimacy.34
Yu has also become famous for his plan to eliminate the Korean kyN-hu sys-
tem and replace it with the Chinese kyang-nn'o units of areal measurement. The
kyong and myo were units of land area (100 myo = I kYrlng) based on a standard
linear foot, but the kyo! and pu were by Yu's time terms for land area based on
a standard unit of grain volume produced by different areas of land depending
on the fertility of the land. He pointed out that his contemporaries were reluc-
tant to abandon the kyol-bu system because they mistakenly believed it had orig-
inated in the Samhan period (ca. the third century B.C. to the fourth century A.D.
in the southern part of the peninsula), but he had discovered that the term kyo!
could not have been in use even by the early KoryC) period because the term kyong
was still in use in the reign of King T'aejo, the founder of Koryo (r. 918-943),
and the cadastral survey of 949 determined grades of land on the basis of a stan-
dard linear foot and standard units of area with variable tax rates to adjust for
differences in productivity, suggesting that the k\'ang-mu system was still in use.
If a kyol-bu system had been in use, a progressive tax system would have func-
tioned by keeping the tax rate constant and varying the size of the kyo! and pu
according to the fertil ity of the land. Yu concluded that the kVrl!-bu system must
have been established relatively late in the middle of the Koryo period, certainly
not by the ancient Chinese sages, and even if it had been established in the Samhan
period, that was certainly not the essence of sage wisdom: "We should only he
discllssing whether [the kyol-hu systemJ is proper or not. What difference does
it make if it began in the Samhan period?"1)
Yu believed that the kyi5ng-mu system was easier to implement, less suscep-