34 EARLY CHOSON DYN ASTY
Survival afthe YangbanOne of the primary objectives of the Neo-Confucian reformers, to destroy hered-
itary aristocracy and replace it with a meritocracy based on the knowledge of
the Confucian classics and Chu Hsi's commentaries, was not really achieved
despite the arguments of a number of contemporary scholars that it was. The
leading political and social elite in the Choson dynasty were recruited for the
most part from members of the late Koryo dynasty's upper class except for those
few that were eliminated because of their loyalty to the old dynasty and resis-
tance against the new, despite the moral liberal legislation of the new dynasty.
John Duncan, who investigated the personnel of the new dynasty to trace their
roots, found that the vast majority of them belonged to prestigious clans that
flourished in the late Koryo period. These included not only the yangban but the
local elite (hyangni), who were appointed to about two-thirds of posts of dis-
trict magistrates during most of the Koryo dynasty.22
Hereditary aristocracy had a long history in Korea, reaching its height during
the Silla dynasty when membership in the ruling class was determined by birth
into the "bone rank" (kalp'um) aristocracy. Even though the bone rank system
was abandoned with the Koryo dynasty's reestablishment of unified government
in 935, the importance of inherited status as a criterion of membership in the
ruling class recurred, reinforced by the retention of many members of the late
Silla aristocratic families in the ruling coalition.
The Koryo term that later became synonymous with aristocracy in that era,
yangban, originally meant only the "two files of officials (civil and military)"
who lined up in front of the throne in a royal audience, that is, the regular bureau-
cracy of the central government. The narrow meaning of yangban as "regular
officials" was retained, but by the late fourteenth century yangban was used to
denote the families, relatives (including affines), ancestors, and descendants of
prestigious officials as well. This broader ruling class was also referred to by
the adoption of Chinese terms of ancient derivation, the sajak (shih-tzu in Chi-
nese) or "families of the scholar-officials," or sadaebu (shih-ta-fu in Chinese),
a term that could mean scholar-officials, or in Chou times (first millennium B.c.)
the intermediate and lower officials of the king or feudal lords. 23
In the last few years, a majority of scholars in South Korea have written that
the founding of the Choson dynasty marked the overthrow of the Koryo yang-
ban aristocracy by a rising (economic) class of landowners of small and medium-
sized parcels, who were also committed to Neo-Confucian ideology borrowed
from Yuan China in the late thirteenth century. These men supposedly sought
to create a new ruling class dominated by state bureaucrats recruited on the basis
of scholarly merit in the civil service examination system.>4
Some scholars, notably Han Yong'u and Yu Silngwon, argued that early
Choson society was divided only into two classes: the yang 'in and ch onmin, or
in practical terms, commoners or free men, and slaves or unfree men. The term
yangban persisted, but it referred only to men who had been granted office, rank