374 LAND REFORM
feasible: if the 800,000 kyol of land in the country (as registered in 1769) were
divided among the population of 8 million (possibly an underestimate by as much
as 4 million according to Tony Michell), then each household, which he felt should
consist of an extended family of about TO persons (a rather large family), could
receive an allotment of I kyol of land, a probable area of 8.6 acres (see chap. 8)
that may have been close to the approximately 7-9 acres of grade 5 or 6 land
in Korea, but more than double the average holding in the late eighteenth cen-
tury calculated by Kim Yang sop in his studies.
Tasan argued that this would be far better than the current skewed distribu-
tion of ownership, whereby rich families like the Ch'oe family in Kyongsang
Province or the Wang family in ChOlla had no less than 400 kyol of land and
income of 10,000 som of grain while the rest of the population was either land-
less or eking out their lives in penury. On the other hand, since Tasan may have
underestimated the real population by 3 or 4 million and posited an unrealistic
household size of 10 persons/household, the population/land ratio may have been
far too great for his plan to succeed, unless, of course, the actual area of arable
land was far greater than the official cadastral survey information.
Kim Yongsop has argued that Tasan had been stimulated to a more radical
position by his observation of the stripping of small plots from independent peas-
ants by land barons, the growth of tenancy and hired labor, and the skewed dis-
tribution of land among peasant proprietors. He felt it was perverse for the ruler
of a state to tolerate present conditions in land tenure especially because it was
his responsibility to ensure an equitable distribution of wealth.
Despite his optimistic estimate of the possibility of distributing I kyol of land
to each household, Tasan was still worried that the Korean population might be
too large for the redistribution of land to everyone. Since he did think that the
equal-field system of the Northern Wei had failed because it had forced the dis-
tribution of land to the whole population, he suggested that the problem of sur-
plus population could be solved by allowing those men interested in commerce
and handicrafts to shift to those occupations freely, reducing the demand for
land grants - a significant departure from Yu Hyongwon's belief that a land grant
of 50 myo (half a peasant allotment) had to be provided to artisans and mer-
chants because their incomes from these occupations might not be sufficient to
sustain their families. Living in an age when the use of cash and market activ-
ities had developed beyond what existed during Yu's time, Tasan was convinced
that merchants and artisans could make adequate livings on their own, and he
was willing to limit land grants only to those farmers willing to cultivate the
land with perseverance and diligence.^53 Although he justified this position by a
slight reinterpretation of classical thought, insisting that the ancient Chinese sages
had always intended to limit grants only to willing and able tillers of the soil
and had thus allowed others to function as artisans and merchants, his instincts
definitely marked a departure from the fundamentalist Physiocracy of traditional
Confucian thought.