REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH 331When a male fanner reached the age of twenty, he would receive his land grant
from the state, although in the case of families with many sons, fractional grants
might be issued at the age of sixteen. The basic one-kyong allotment would pro-
vide support for a standard extended family, consisting of the farmer, his wife
and children, and his parents, Since Yu assumed that the number of household
members would vary from five to eight, he was obviously not concerned to cre-
ate a system of perfect per capita income equality,
Each peasant would have the responsibility of finding a suitable empty plot
of land and petitioning the district magistrate to receive his land grant. If the
petitioner chose a piece of wasteland, the magistrate would conduct a survey
and layout the boundaries around the one kyong area and draw up a new regis-
ter. If more than one individual applied for the same piece of land, the magis-
trate would have to make a decision along certain guidelines. Assuming that
officials might be competing with commoner peasants for the same piece ofland,
preference had to be given to those with the highest rank; otherwise priority would
be afforded to the largest families. If family size were equal, the family with the
poorest land would get preference.^58
If the recipient died, his land would be returned to the state unless he had an
heir who was qualified to receive his father's grant in full, or a widow who was
entitled to retain a fraction of the original grant for her SUppOlt, termed kubunj6n,
in the style of the early Kory6land system. Each farmer was to receive a grant
only in the district where he lived. If a person of higher status was authorized
to move, he had to receive a signed document from his district magistrate and
register with the new magistrate before a land grant would be authorized. 59
Yu claimed that he had selected the one-kyong or Ioo-myo unit of land as the
basic grant for all peasant families in his system on the grounds of rational cal-
culation rather than fundamentalist literalism because the standard, fixed plot
of one kyong or 100 mvo in ancient China kept the area of land under cultiva-
tion constant and free of confusion.^60 But if it were not fundamentalist literal-
ism that attracted him to the idea of a fixed plot, he appears to have been obsessed
with the sense of permanence and security conveyed by the concept of a square
etched out of the landscape by means of ridges and dikes, a pattern that he derived
from The Rites of Chou. He copied out its description of the network of water-
ways, pathways, and roads that accompanied the well fields and then commented
that even if it were not possible to reproduce the classical model in exact form,
it was essential to surround the squares with ridges, sluices, paths, and wide roads
of specific dimensions. Every fall the district magistrate and a special commis-
sioner would have to make the rounds to investigate these facilities to inspect
maintenance, ""enforce the law and make punishments of those who failed to
keep the law."h'
He anticipated that the project of redrawing the land boundaries and con-
structing the earthworks and sluices would take six or seven years. Neverthe-
less, nationalization and redistribution of land could be done right away, and he
was certain that the peasants would observe the boundaries without trespassing