LATE CHOSON PROPOSALS 373statecraft thinkers at the tum of the nineteenth century, Tasan (pen name of Chong
Yagyong), was willing to challenge the status quo, at least in his writings. Kim
Yongsop has recently shown that Tasan changed his thinking on land reform
after his exile in 1801. His first programmatic thoughts on the land question writ-
ten sometime between 1793 and 1800 stated not only that the literal replication
of the Chou well-field system would be impossible, but also that the limited-
field system of the Han dynasty and the Northern Wei or Tang equal-field sys-
tem would not work either because Korean topography was broken up by hills
and cultivation was primarily wet-rice agriculture, in contrast to the flat land
and dry farming that characterized the Chou period. To adopt the well-field sys-
tem would have meant the abandonment of irrigated wet-field rice cultivation
or the reclamation of upland regions for farming, the kind of criticism that Yi
Ik had made. Yu, on the other hand, believed that the differences between wet
and dry agriculture could be ignored when instituting a program of national own-
ership and redistribution.^49
To achieve full and adequate registration of land to avoid the injustice that
had been wrought by underregistration or omission of cultivated land by the local
clerks, Tasan followed the recommendations ofYu Chib'il, governor of Hwang-
hae Province in 1708, and Sin Wan in 1709, for adoption of the "square land"
(pangjon) system of Chang Tsai in the Sung dynasty, and the use of the fish-
scale registers (orinda) to list all land parcels with accompanying maps of their
location to prevent false registration and omission,Y'
Otherwise, Tasan concentrated his attention on technological improvement,
seed selection, fertilization, weeding, better tools, labor saving, and borrowing
Chinese techniques. He obtained his knowledge from agricultural texts and the
reports of Koreans who had returned from China, and he wanted to publish tech-
nical manuals and distribute them to the rural areas for the peasants, promote
the spread of irrigation by building dams, poulders, and reservoirs, and intro-
duce water wheels for moving water around the fields. He hoped to raise the
status and prestige of the peasant to the level of the scholars, merchants, and
artisans, and encourage them to increase production and productivityY His inter-
est in technology and productivity might well be understood as a "modem" shift
to increasing general wealth and welfare, except that he would have had to grasp
some understanding of the need to transcend the traditional Physiocratic
approach to legitimate production.
Tasan's early skepticism about the obstructions to reproducing the well-field
system did not mean, however, that he was committed to the maintenance of
private property. On the contrary, he called for a system of state ownership and
the eradication of private ownership and the purchase and sale of land, positions
that were similar to those ofYu Hyongwon. He created a scheme based on the
communal ownership of land and distribution of wealth and the limitation of
the land tax to an optimum of one-tenth or one-ninth the crop under his com-
munity land (yo jon ) proposalY
He argued that a national program for the redistribution of land was certainly