CONFUCIAN STATECRAFT 41tors. Birth into a yangban family still guaranteed major advantages from that
family's position, wealth, political power, and prestige. It enabled individual mem-
bers to receive an excellent education, pass the examinations, gain the highest
positions in the state bureaucracy, and receive privileges or exemptions from
certain rules of punishment and service both civil and military. They could inter-
marry with members of other yangban families, and support themselves in high
style by incomes from landholdings, rents from tenants and slaves, government
salaries and emoluments, and possibly by interest on loans as well, but not by
merchant activities, at least at the beginning of the dynasty. Therefore, the rad-
ical program of some of the Neo-Confucian ideologues to replace aristocrats
with bureaucrats untainted by inherited status and prestige was not achieved.
Slaves
Hereditary slavery was another crucial feature of Korean society at the end of
the Koryo dynasty. It is highly likely that Koryo had been a slave society with
a slave population of over 30 percent, probably since the eleventh century, if
not earlier. Even though some reformers in the late fourteenth century did attempt
to reduce the number of slaves by freeing commoners who had been illegally
enslaved, the Neo-Confucian reformers did not make the cessation of inherited
slavery or the manumission of slaves part of their reform platform. When slav-
ery was carried over into the early Choson dynasty, it did not constitute a fail-
ure to fulfill part of the Confucian reform program because it had never been
part of that program.
Nonetheless, when Yu Hyongwon took up the question of hereditary slavery
in his masterwork in the seventeenth century, he made clear that he felt that the
neglect of this question at the beginning of the fifteenth century constituted a
major omission.
Land Reform: The Kwajon System
Another major feature of the new dynasty was the system of prebendal land allot-
ments called kwajon established to provide financial support for the king, the
central government, and the ruling class. Yi Songgye provided for this between
1388 and 139 I, after he seized power at court and just before he established the
Choson dynasty. The essence of this new system was the abolition of all the tax-
exempt prebends (literally, "private land" or sajon) or "special [tax-exempt] royal
award land" (pyolsajon) that the Koryo kings had issued to officials and favorites
over the years, most of which had been passed on hereditarily.44 This act did not
mean either that the king confiscated the privately owned lands or estates of the
yangban elite, or abolished the system of prebendal grants altogether, only that
the taxes granted from prebends to individuals was transferred to the central gov-
ernment or its district magistrates and the land so affected was immediately con-