44 EARLY CHOSON DYNASTYby the burning of their sajon prebend certificates in 1390, in 1391 King
Kongyang allocated a minimal prebend of five or ten kyo! of "military or sol-
dier land" (kunjon) from land in the provinces to heirs of prebend holders who
themselves lacked a post qualifying them for a larger share (the hallyanggwan
or idle officials).s6 Since they owed service in capital guard units in return for
these minimal prebends, some have interpreted this arrangement to have meant
a system of universal military service including even the most privileged sta-
tus group in the country, but it was more likely that this provision was designed
to provide guaranteed income for untalented descendants of prebend holders
as a whole.
King Kongyang also gave special prebends called "merit subject land"
(kongsinjon) and "special royal award land" (pyo!sajon) to people in addition
to whatever kwajon prebends they may have been granted, and allowed them to
bequeath those grants to their heirs.57 For the next century kings continued to
grant both prebends and slave cultivators as unvarnished political rewards for
those who supported them in any of the political crises that occurred.
In short, the land reform of 1390-91 contained contradictory elements: the
burning of existing sajon prebendal certificates was designed to maximize tax-
able land for the state at the expense of the yang ban class, but the establishment
of new, heritable sajon as kwajon and merit subject prebends provided a new oppor-
tunity for the yangban to accumulate control over new resources at state expense.
The difference between this system and that of late Koryo was that in the Choson
period the state protected itself at the outset by limiting the land over which
prebends could be granted to Kyonggi Province alone, the province surround-
ing the capital, first at Kaesong in late Koryo, and later at Hansong or Seoul after
the transfer of the capital there in the early Choson period. While it expanded
the territory it assigned to Kyonggi Province in the early Choson dynasty, it did
not assign all the land in that province as prebends to possessors of rank or merit
subject land. A certain portion was retained as taxable land for the state, for mil-
itary purposes, or for state agencies. Just after the beginning of King Taejong's
reign in 1401, the territory of Kyonggi Province consisted of 149,300 kyo! of
land of which 115,340 kyo! was used for prebends (84,100 kyo! for kwajon rank
land prebends and 31,200 for kongsinjon or merit subject prebends).S8
The creation of this system of inheritable prebends to men of rank was far
less radical and ambitious than the plan advocated by Chong Tojon, another of
the chief Neo-Confucian supporters ofYi Songgye and subsequently of the new
dynasty. Inspired by the classical well-field model of the ancient Chou dynasty
in China, Chong argued for a program of total nationalization of land and redis-
tribution of land to all peasants in society as the best means to eliminate the cur-
rent monopoly of wealth by the rich landlords and the landlessness and
pauperization of the tenants of large landlords. ChOng had little use even for the
Han dynasty attempt to limit excessive landholding, or the T'ang equal-field sys-
tem because both were only temporary systems. He objected that even the T'ang
equal-field system was imperfect because instead of the classical model of state