KING AND COURT 601point of view. All matters inside and out are the fami Iy affairs of the Emperor
and there is no principle which says that the great officials can not participate [in
these decisions]. Furthermore, when the Emperor makes even a single appoint-
ment to high office or advances even a single official to be close to him. he must
consult the views of the world. How much more so when he is selecting an
emprcss to he the mother of the empire?Yu was obviously enamored of Fan Tsli-yu's plan to bring the selection of
imperial consorts within the purview of the scholar-official class by requiring
their consultation and limiting empresses and other consorts to the children of
that class alone. His requirement that the lineages and clans of each candidate
be checked by a committee of officials from the same class would havc pre-
served their exercise of influencc through the empress and her male relativcs. It
was already the practice in Korea that queens were sclectcd from the daughters
of the prestigious yangban. and the Sung practice appeared to reinforce what
was already accepted social practice. Yangban influence, if not nccessarily direct
control, over the marriage partners of royalty was an important weapon in the
preservation of the social and political status quo in Korca. Yll's ideal society,
howevcr, would have replaced the yangban with a class of scholar-officials
recruited on the basis of moral behavior, so that his endorsement of Fan's rec-
ommendations could be perceived as strengthening the elite of his new society
rather than the hereditary yangban of the old. Nonetheless, what he did not want
to allow was the king to exercise his own choice to select women outside the
class of bureaucrats and scholars. The bureaucrats were to govern the proce-
dure, whether they represented the present yangban or Yu's idealized sadaehu.
In addition, Yll also called for abolishing the current practice of early mar-
riage in Korea for all classes of society. He thought that the age of marriage had
been reduced ovcr the years from the classical norm of thirty years of age for
men and twenty for women to the current norm of sixteen-thirty for men to four-
teen-twenty for women primarily because early marriage had tirst been adopted
in the royal house and then adopted by the elite. He also proposed the adoption
of Confucius's recommendation to require that all bridegrooms receive the bride
as part of the formal marriage rite instead of visiting the bride's house and mov-
ing in for a few days - a vestige of matrilocal marriage practice that was pre-
served in the Choson dynasty. He thought that this practice reversed the proper
dominance of the yang or male principle over the yin or female, but what he
meant was that the treatment of women should conform to proper Neo-Confu-
cian standards of patriarchy and patrilocal marriage, not to the earlier. more native
practice of matrilocal marriage. Finally, he demanded frugality in expenditure
at wedding~ and the reduction of all rituals, clothing, and ceremonial statements
to a bare minimum, another example ofthe power of rcstraint by Confucian norms
against thc arhitrary power and propensity for ostentatious display by rulersY