CONFUCIAN STATECRAFT 39
able to maintain success in the examinations for more than three consecutive
generationsY
Ho's view of rapid mobility in China has, however, becn severely challenged
by Hilary 1. Beattie's study of one county in Anhwei Province in the same period.
Beattie shows that a few lineages were able to maintain their grip on status and
prestige for hundreds of years because of the wealth gained from landowner-
ship and rent, and not from success in the examinations or officeholding espe-
cially because so few people in the area had achieved those goalS.^38 A similar
phenomenon might well have been at work in Choson Korea to explain why
local yangban families (often referred to as hyangban) were able to retain sta-
tus even though their sons did not pass the examinations or hold office, as Song
June-ho has argued. Nevertheless, the situation with respect to examination suc-
cess and officeholding was different for Korea because the country was so small
and the perpetuation of yangban domination over the examinations and high office
was so prominent.
Edward W. Wagner surveyed the family backgrounds of the 14,600 passers
of the munbva examinations throughout the five hundred years of the dynasty
and found a singular "concentration of 'examination power'" that became more
prominent toward the end of the dynasty as the more successful clans "squeezed
out" competing clans of lesser stature. Of the 750 clans represented among the
passers of the munkwa, the highest level civil examination, thirty-six clans that
averaged one passer every five generations produced 53 percent of the total. Per-
haps as many as 80 percent of the passers had another degree-holding relative
within a span of eight generations, and yet some families could not produce a
passer even after ten generations. While some sublineages were enormously suc-
cessful, others were not. Thus, while the examination system weakened the hered-
itary aspects of yangban status and precluded any possibility of the formation
of a caste system on the one hand, the growing domination of a few sublineages
in the compctition for civil degrees preserved the maintenance of those yang-
ban families in spite of the meritocratic potential of the examinations.^39
Yi Songmu also took exception to the view of Ch'oe Yongho that the early
Chason examination system opened opportunities for commoners (or yang'in)
very widely. Despite the lack of legal prohibitions against them, they lacked the
economic resources of the yangban families, found it difficult to obtain books,
and had to study at a local elementary school (sodang) or official school (hyang-
gyo) where the facilities and teachers were inferior and the quality of the schools
had declined rapidly. The sons of yangban, by contrast, were sent to private
schools or educated by tutors. Commoners were also faced with obstacles in
qualifying for the examinations because they had to present household regis-
ters and personal letters of guarantee and recommendation from officials in the
locality and capital.
He also thought that Ch'oe was too constrained by reliance on legal regula-
tions, and that his citation of about a dozen commoners or slaves who passed