REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH 337or without office) and it had resulted, or more accurately, reinforced, the dom-
inance of a semihereditary official class, the yangban. Yu, therefore, explicitly
stated that he was combining the kongjon or public ownership aspect of the well-
field systcm with the graded land allotments of the limited-field (hanjongbop)
system "according to which people who are Confucian scholars lvusaJ or higher
[in rank and status] will be granted additional amounts of land [over the base
grant of 100 myo or I kyong] and will be exempted from military service."7^6
Yu's provision of extra land allotments to the sadaebu, however, violated one
of the principles ofthe well-field system, which was that the state granted land
only to peasants because they cultivated the land and contributed to agricultural
production. How then could Yu justify land grants to noncultivators, or as his
imaginary partner in debate in the Pan 'gye surok put the question: "Is it justifi-
able to provide extra land grants to those who are scholars or officials since they
are not engaged in agriculture?,,77
Yu replied that scholars and officials had to be supported some way. hut there
were only three choices: land grants, salaries, and prebends. The grant of land
to scholars and officials (in amounts greater than the commoncr peasant allot-
ment) was the most appropriate method because the land could bc cultivated by
their solchr'5ng. So/chiJng is a term defined by the dictionary as dcpendcnts or fam-
ily members, but we may pause to ask what group Yu was referring to.7^8 Since
all commoner adult peasants and sadaebu would qualify for land grants, and since
in any case Yu was opposed to tenancy, it is hard to imagine any adult males of
the elite or commoner class who would have been available to work the excess
land grants of the sadaebu under the terms ofYu's system. For that matter, it is
hard to find any room for the landless hired laborers he planned to use to rcplace
slaves unless he envisioned a rather lengthy transition period prior to the enact-
ment of his land rcform program or the abolition of hereditary slavery.
As for private slaves, remember that Yu put the idea of granting land to slaves
in the conditional tense, and even in that case confIned the grant of land to the
outside resident slaves (oegi5 nobi). The only category of people that would have
been availahle to serve as cultivators of the sadaebll land grants were private
slaves. In other words, Yu argued that the grant of larger allotments to the sadaebu
was the only proper and feasible method of approximating the ch 'aeji prebcn-
dal model of ancient China because the sadaebll would be able to use their pri-
vate slaves to cultivate the land!
As we might expect, therefore, Yu took this into account in drawing up a sam-
ple format for registration of cultivators under his proposed system. The land
of commoner peasants would thus be registered in their own names, and they
would be designatcd either as a cavalryman (kibyong) or infantryman (pobytmg)
depending on their military service assignment. In the case of the sadaebu elite,
however, the name of their slave cultivator would be included in the land reg-
ister after the name of the scholar, official, or royal prince. The purpose was to
spare them the embarrassment of being listed in a land register along with com-
mon peasants!