Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions. Yu Hyongwon and the Late Choson Dynasty - James B. Palais

342 LAND REFORM

produced scholars and officials) would also receive land grants (albeit in larger

sizes than the commoner peasant), pay the land tax to the magistrates, but be

exempted from military service (myonbyong). Finally, princes and other royal

relatives and merit subjects would receive both land grants (sujon) and prebends

(sasejon). On the land grants they would be required to pay the land tax to the

magistrate but would be exempted from military service, just as in the case of

the land grants to the sadaebu. On the prebends they would collect the tax income

themselves (sikki seip), which was equivalent to a land tax exemption (myonse)

in the sense that they would pay the land tax to themselves rather than to the

magistrate, but military service would be levied on the land grants. Since prebends

entitled them to collect the land tax revenue from minjon or people's land, which

referred to the regular land grant (sujon) to the commoner peasant cultivator,

military service would be required of the commoner peasant cultivator, not the

princes or merit subjects themselves. There was no inconsistency here because

by the terms ofYu's system, land taxes and military service were not levied on

individual recipients but were tied to and determined by the nature of the land

grant. The above discussion is summarized in table 3:

MILITARY

Recipient

Commoner peasant

Sadaebu

Princes and

merit subjects

TABLE 3

SERVICE AND LAND/PREBEND GRANTS

Type of Grant Land Tax Mil. Service

land yes yes

land yes no (exempt)

land yes no

prebend no' yes^2

I Recipient receives equivalent of land tax from magistrate, i.e .. tax exemption.

2 But thc owner of the land, not the prebend holder, owes military service.

Yu asserted that although his proposal to provide princes and merit subjects
with both land grants and prebends appeared complicated and haphazard, it was
not only simple, fair, and equitable, but was also governed by a consistent logic
that determined "the relationship between [the type of) land and the type of
exemptions, whether exemption from military service or from the land tax." This
meant that exemption from military service was inseparably associated with land
grants to men of superior status, such as princes and merit subjects. Land grants
were also necessary because without them thc princes and merit subjects would
have difficulty in obtaining land for gravesites for their parents. Since a land
grant, by Yu's arbitrary definition, could not be associated with exemption from
the land tax, however, the additional award of a prebend, defined by Yu as a land
tax exemption, was the only justifiable way to provide the princes and merit sub-
jects with land tax income^96
Yu's adversary, by contrast, preferred the choice of either land grants or
prebends. He pointed out that in the case ofland grants, since princes and merit