REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH 345
because it had to include educated and morally cultivated men who would pro-
vide a pool of leadership, not only as officials but also as leaders of the com-
munity and guides for the common people. A ruling class consisting only of
officials would rule out economic support for the nonofficial scholarly, moral,
and community leaders who were part of a true sadaebu class. It had to have
some ascriptive qualities over and above the narrow functional and utilitarian
definition of service for the state.
On the other hand, ascriptive characteristics could not be carried to extremes
lest they result in the formation of a hereditary status elite that was completely
dissociated from true virtue and functional merit. Yu hoped that a proper bal-
ance could be struck by imposing limitations on the economic support to be pro-
vided to princes and merit subjects (and sadaebu as well). He remarked, for
example, that the sase or prebendal grant was a vestige of the ancient feudal
system ofr/51t (), '00 a type of fief granted from conquered territory or confiscated
land, but that in adapting this model to the present, care had to be taken to limit
the number of generations that the prebend could be inherited. If the state failed
to take back the prehend from the original recipient (upon his death'?) and allowed
his descendants to inherit it without any generational limit, the state would soon
run out of land.
Yu noted that the few feudal nobles tolerated in the Han and Chin dynasties
(third century A.D.) were not permitted to have hereditary holdings or prebends
for the most part. Even in the case of exceptions, inheritance was limited for
one or two generations, and at times the prebend might even be confiscated for
cause. Since ad hoc confiscation was more appropriate to a feudal age than a
centralized bureaucratic one and would do harm to both upper and lower classes
alike, Yu felt that it would be preferable to set up a systcm of prebends for princes
and merit subjects regulated by law and designed to accommodate private and
public interests alike. '0'
Yu also argued that prebends (sase) were preferable to the practice of outright
grants of private land by the throne (sajon) to princes and merit subjects that
could be inherited without interference by the heirs of thc recipients. "Once this
path were opened, there would be no way to rectify later evils. The destruction
of the Koryoland system came about because of this.",o2 In other words, royal
land grants to princes and merit subjects were too dangerous because it opened
the door to the hereditary transfer of land to descendants and weakened the state's
control over land and taxes.
Yu did not comment directly in this section on the problems of his own dynasty
created by the land grants to merit subjects in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies. Yi Sangbaek, for example, attributed the failure of the early Chos<1n land
settlement to the excessive granting of hereditary merit subject lands, and Edward
Wagner showed how the political domination of the merit subjects remained a
problem through the fifteenth century to the purge of 15 I 9. '01 Yu did. however,
discuss a major prohlem of the seventeenth century, the palace estates (kung-
bang) of the princes and princesses, located usually along the coast in southern