LAND REFORM: COMPROMISES 289Northern Ch'i after the wu-p 'ing era (570-576), "irregular imperial grants were
made to the nobility and female relatives (of the imperial house) and favored
families without any restraint ... " and arable lands along rivers or foothills was
taken over by powerful households, "while the common people could not obtain
even a clod of earth."l~
Emperor Wen of the Sui made large grants of hereditary land (yung-yeh-t'ien)
to princes and nobles from 30 to 100 kyong in size and in addition provided
office land to capital and provincial officials.^39 This practice was continued in
the Tang dynasty, and as Yu's text noted, "Hereditary land [yongopchOnJ was
all handed down to sons and grandsons and was not included within the limits
of land that was taken back and given out [susu chi han]."40 Of course, these
official hereditary holdings were subject to limitations by law. Officials dismissed
from office or guilty of some crime were required to return their hereditary hold-
ings to the stateY Nevertheless, the toleration of even limited forms of private
ownership hy nobles. merit subjects, and high officials must have been perceived
by Yu as a major cause of the return to private landholding. This point must be
deduced from Yu's overall position because yung-yeh-t'icll and chilzJen-t'ien
grants were not specifically identified by Yu or his sources on the Tang as the
major prohlem. He did, however, mention them in his discussion of the etiol-
ogy of the failure of the Kory6 dynasty land system. As will be seen in the descri p-
tion of his own system, however, he was strongly opposed to private ownership
in any form and made no provision for any equivalent of the yung-yeh-t 'ien of
the Tang system.
In addition to the toleration of the permanent holding, the equal-field system
seemed to allow loopholes in the handling of the rotating returnable k'ouJen-
t'ien grants that also opened the door to private ownership. During the North-
ern Wei the law allowed individuals with surplus land to sell the surplus to those
lacking a full share even though an individual was not supposed to accumulate
more than what the law allowed him.42
Excess population pressure on available land for k 'ou~lel1 grants was to be
alleviated by ti"eedom of movement and the expectation that people would nat-
urally migrate into areas of low population density. If this did not work to equal-
ize man/land ratios throughout the country, it was always possible to reduce the
size of the per capita grant in areas of overpopulation.^43 In the Northern Ch'i
the law prohibited the purchase or sale of land, hut the account in the Kuan-tung
feng-su chiian by Sung Hsiao-wang indicates that in fact the rich and powerful
accumulated vast holdings at the expense of the poor peasant.^44 One of the rea-
sons for this was that the state was unable to enforce the prohihition against the
alienation of the temporary k'ou-fen-t'ien allotment. The law provided punish-
ment for those who held land in excess of the k'ou~t('II-t'icn limits and encour-
aged private citizens to inform on their neighbors hy a promise that they would
receive the confiscated land of the guilty as a reward. This led to the practice of
false accusation and the expropriation of k'ou-fen lands from their rightful pos-
sessors. In addition, enforcement of the prohihition against purchase and sale