36 EARLY CHOSON DYNASTYbeen changed from ascription to achievement because the main, if not sole, cri-
terion for social advancement now depended on individual ability and perfor-
mance in the examinations and in public office. Hence, the term yangban only
meant those who had attained civil and military office, a privilege open to any-
one of yang 'in status.
Even the sons (and sometimes grandsons) of high officials who were accorded
the urn (or "protection") privilege under the law that permitted them to receive
appointment to office without a high degree were given that privilege only because
of the achievements of their illustrious fathers, and even then, only for a maxi-
mum of one or two generations. In a paroxysm of hyperbole, Yu even argued
that there was far more equality in early Chason society than in most (if not all)
so-called modern societies that display a pyramidal social structure.^2?
Yu Silngwon, Han Yong'u, Ch'oe Yongho, and others who support this inter-
pretation have made the important and irrefutable point that the laws of the new
dynasty did in fact specify that all yang'in did have the right to enter official
schools. take the examinations, and hold office, in contrast to the practices of
the Koryo dynasty, but their interpretation has been tied too closely to the writ-
ten law. They did not prove their case by demonstrating that the new opportu-
nities established by written law were met in practice, and that the door to power,
prestige, and wealth was opened to a wider segment of the population, partic-
ularly those who had previously not demonstrated the possession of high office,
status, education, prestige, or wealth in Korean society, than before. On the con-
trary, John Duncan's recent studies have refuted their contention.
The social historian Song June-ho (Song Chunho), who has written detailed
studies of the yangban in the late Choson period, has also argued persuasively
that in the Ilrst century of the dynasty the yangban not only existed as a class in
early Choson, but were backed up by special privileges accorded them by the
state in statute law.2x Song felt that although the Choson state never did define
the standards for membership in the yangban class explicitly in law, one could
deduce the existence of that class from statutory or legal privileges and gov-
ernment policies on a number of important questions relating to their status.
Song insisted that the yangban class after the founding of the Chason dynasty
had to be defined in terms of conditions that he found were essential to its exis-
tence in the seventeenth century and after because yangban status could not be
confined only to individuals, but had to consist of families in which the indi-
vidual was only a part. No individual could be considered a bona fide yangban
without a prominent personage in his past, a proposition that Yu Silngwon specif-
ically rejected for the early Choson period.^29
Song also used the statement of Yang Songji, a prominent official in King Sejo's
reign during the Yi Siae rebellion of 1467 and 1470, as an explicit verification
of the existence of a yangban class of prestigious persons and families, partic-
ularly their rural members in the countryside. Yang remarked that the yangban
acted as a source of social stability and protected and supported Korean kings
through the ages, enabling Korean dynasties to last much longer than those in