LATE CHOSON PROPOSALS 371
Furthermore, the plight of some tenants had increased because they now had
to pay the land tax and supply their own seed.^46
In short, Yi was undoubtedly inspired by Yu's Pan' gye surok, but it did not
mean that he was bound by the obligations of discipleship to parrot Yu's belief
in the advantages of state confiscation of private property in mechanical fash-
ion. If anything Yi's proposal was more conservative than Yu's because he
refrained from using force or coercion to limit maximum holdings and achieve
redistribution. He proposed allowing tenants to buy more land not because he
believed that private ownership was the foundation of incentives for profit max-
imization and increased production, but rather the most feasible and practical
means for rectification of the maldistribution of wealth.
KING CHONGJO'S REQUEST FOR ADVICE, 1797-98
In the face of a series of crop disasters in 1792, 1794, 1797, and 1798, King
Chongjo put out a number of requests for recommendations for solving the prob-
lems of the land system as a whole. In 1797 and 1798 sixty-nine memorials were
submitted in response to that request, and although most memorials were from
scholars from the countryside and only a few high officials dared to risk their
careers by making serious suggestions, the respondents included some of the
leading reform thinkers of the day, including Pak Chiwon, So Yugu, and Tasan.
Almost all of them adopted what amounted to Yi Ik's position: that the well-
field system could not be restored, but that some form of limited land tenure
was by far the next best remedy. By that time majority reform opinion had vir-
tually abandoned any notion of a literal resuscitation of the well-field model,
but while the Border Defense Command signified its admiration for the limita-
tion of landownership, it rejected even that as impractical.
Kim Yongsop has pointed out that these proponents of a limited-land system
suggested liberal limits that were far too high to be effective because they were
afraid that more restrictive limits would provoke active resistance by landown-
ers and landlords. One man recommended a limit of 10 kyol of land (i.e., from
24.5 acres for first-grade kyol to 100 acres for sixth grade), another proposed a
limit of 150 turak (i.e., majigi) equivalent to 18-4 acres of first grade kyol.
Early in 1799 King Chongjo agreed that land limitation was hardly practical,
especially because it had not succeeded in China either; in the 1,600 years since
the end of the Han dynasty a land limitation or distribution system had only been
practiced for two hundred years. Emperor Hsiao-wen of the Northern Wei had
instituted the equal-field system (in 485), but in his view only with respect to
land already possessed by the people, and Emperor Tai-tsung of the Tang had
modeled his kubunj(JIl rotating land grants and permanent grants (seopchon) on
thc Northern Wei model, but by the ying-hui era (650-56) the land had already
been taken over by large landlords. He thought that it would be impossible for
any land distribution scheme to work in Korea because a grant of I kyol for each
farmer would have required 6,360,000 kyO[ for distribution even if all civil and