362 LAND REFORMor gain office, and it would appear that many of them were reduced to difficult
economic circumstances and eventually lost status, their descendants showing
up on the military registers as soldiers or support taxpayers. Yet it is unrealistic
to expect that the yang 'an registers of kiju provide a satisfying description of the
pattern of landownership since the large estate owners and landlords described
in the work ofYi Kyongsik and many others simply do not appear, and one would
have to conclude that the yangban were exclusively dependent on official
salaries and bribes, but not landed property, whether inherited or purchased.
What about the pattern of inheritance? The Choson dynasty law code sug-
gests that property was divided among the sons in the latter Chason period, with
only an extra portion of about one-fifth the total granted to the eldest son, who
had responsibility for conducting ancestral sacrifice to the father.19 One might
therefore expect a perpetual reduction of large inheritances by this mechanism,
countering any trend toward the accumulation of gigantic estates.^20
On the other hand, if it were held that large landlords disappeared from Choson
society after the Imjin War, it would be almost impossible to understand the con-
cern of statecraft thinkers about the concentration of land in the hands of the
landlord class. There is no reason to deny the coexistence of fragmented hold-
ings and large estates, and large estates probably consisted of a collection of
scattered small plots cultivated by both slaves and commoner tenants before 1780,
and primarily commoner tenants after that date. If this pattern is correct, then
by the mid-nineteenth century the landlords remained in possession of a large
percentage of national wealth, while the smallholding peasants and tenants were
the victims of immiseration.
ProductivityKim Yongsop, Yi T'aejin, and other scholars have also assumed that an increase
in agricultural productivity generated by improvements in technique and tech-
nology coupled with the emergence of enterprising peasants created surpluses
that allowed upward social mobility in late Choson. Direct evidence about the
presumption of increased productivity would be desirable, but the available sta-
tistics are somewhat ambiguous. The wide variation in the fertility of the land
throughout the country makes an estimate of average production per acre com-
plex. From the beginning of the dynasty to 1430 the land tax was based on the
division ofland into three grades of fertility, but in 1430 it was pointed out that
only 0.1 to 0.2 percent of the land in Kyongsang and ChOlla provinces really
qualified as the best land, and only T to 2 percent of the land met the standards
for medium productivity. Since the other 98 percent of the land was graded at
the lowest level of fertility, it would probably make more sense to concentrate
on productivity of the poorest or lowest two grades of land in estimating aver-
age productivity for the nation.
Unfortunately, the estimates we have for productivity in early Choson are based