358 LAND REFORMstill, nonagricultural industrial enterprise, to gain even larger profits.^6 But there
is little solid evidence to indicate this kind of development until the 1920SJ
On the other hand, the position of many small peasant proprietors was weak-
ening. Since the beginning of the dynasty the average size of the small-peasant
plot was declining, and under the pressure of taxes, bribes, and famine many
holders of small plots were forced to mortgage their land to the wealthy or sell
it to the landlords and become tenants or day laborers.
Kim Yongsop, a pioneer in the study of land tenure and agriculture in the
Choson dynasty, wrote a series of articles based on land registers (yangon) in
which he used the registration of kiju (lit., master of cultivation). According to
this formula the wealthiest landowners in the villages he studied owned on the
average only about I kyol (2.2 acres of the most fertile land or 18 acres of the
least fertile land), while most of the kiju owned less than .5 kyol, and the major-
ity of those about .25 kyat. He used these figures to support his interpretation
that the average holding had declined significantly from the average of 5 kyat
per peasant family in the early fifteenth century, a process that he described as
fragmentation.
Unfortunately, since his villages showed no signs of large landlords, he had
to explain the absence of evidence to demonstrate the accumulation of land lost
by small peasant proprietors to the hands of large landlords by arguing that those
large landlords must have owned parcels in other villages not included in his
documents, that the "estate" of large landlords consisted of separated and scat-
tered pieces. In addition, his figures showed that slave "owners" of land (i.e.,
kiju) often owned more than some commoners and even some impoverished yang-
ban, supporting his argument about the emergence of a new class of entrepre-
unerial peasants among all status groups that led to an overturning of the old
status order.s
Kim's arguments have been weakened to some extent by the work ofPak Nouk,
who found that the term kiju did not indicate ownership at all. He demonstrated
this by showing that the "land" of a runaway official female slave, Kim ldok,
had been "recorded and turned over" to her "master," the Royal Treasury (Nae-
susa). Even though she was the registered "master of cultivation" (k!iu), it was
impossible for her to be the real owner of that particular parcel. In addition, Kim
also showed that the land register usually juxtaposed ki with chin, meaning "cul-
tivated" or "fallow," respectively. Kim's findings called into question Kim
Yongsop's use of yangon data to define in quantitative terms the average size
of the land owned by the yangban, commoners, and slaves in the late Choson
period^9
Despite this damage to Kim Yongsop's conclusions, other kinds of qualitative
evidence indicate that he may have been on the right track in several respccts.
While the yangon records may have hidden the actual extent of real landhold-
ings by the wealthiest landlords and exaggerated the amount of land owned by
commoners and slaves, most of the ordinary peasants were either reduced to the
ownership of small parcels, partial tenancy, outright tenancy, or work as seasonal,