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South Korea Traditional Social Structure
In Choson Dynasty Korea, four rather distinct social strata
developed: the scholar-officials, collectively referred to as the
yangban; the chungin (literally "middle people"),
technicians and administrators subordinate to the yangban;
the commoners or sangmin, a large group composed of
farmers, craftsmen, and merchants; and the ch'ommin
(literally despised people)," at the bottom of society. To ensure
stability, the government devised a system of personal tallies in
order to identify people according to their status.
In the strictest sense of the term, yangban referred
to government officials or officeholders who had passed the civil
service examinations that tested knowledge of the Confucian
classics and their neo-Confucian interpreters. They were the
Korean counterparts of the scholar-officials, or mandarins, of
imperial China. The term yangban, first used during the
Koryo Dynasty, means literally "two groups," that is, civil and
military officials. Over the centuries, however, its usage became
rather vague, so that the term can be said to have several
overlapping meanings. Strictly speaking, a yangban lineage
was one that consistently combined examination success with
appointments to government office over a period of some
generations. During the Choson period, examination candidates had
to show several generations of such ancestry on both sides to be
admitted to the civil service examinations. A broader use of the
term included within the yangban two other groups that
could be considered associated with, but outside of, the ruling
elite. The first group included those scholars who had passed the
preliminary civil service examination and sometimes the higher
examinations but failed to secure government appointment. In the
late Choson Dynasty, there were many more successful examination
candidates than there were positions. The second group included
the more remote relatives and descendants of government
officials. Even if these people were poor and did not themselves
serve in the government, they were considered members of a
"yangban family" and thus shared the aura of the elite as
long as they retained Confucian culture and rituals.
An interesting development in the social history of the
Choson Dynasty occurred after the government began to sell
honorary patents of office to people who were not yangban
to raise revenue following the dislocations of the Hideyoshi
invasions. Wealthy commoners sometimes went beyond such status
symbols to commission forged genealogies or to take on other
trappings of yangban status. This form of social climbing
was highly irritating to traditional yangban families of
the types mentioned above. Probably even more common were former
yangban families that had drifted down into genteel
poverty and commoner status. Both developments show that the
Choson Dynasty class system was beginning to lose some of its
rigidity on the eve of the momentous changes of the late
nineteenth century.
Yangban serving as officials could enrich themselves
because they were given royal grants of land and had many
opportunities for graft; but unemployed scholars and local gentry
often were poor, a kind of "twilight elite" that was both feared
and yet often mocked in peasant entertainments. In his satirical
Tale of a Yangban, the writer Pak Chi-won (1737-1805)
describes the life of a yangban, however poor, as one of
enforced idleness, exacerbated by the need to maintain
appearances. A yangban had to study Confucian literature
and pass at least the preliminary examinations. He was prohibited
from engaging in manual labor or commerce and had to present an
image of poise and self-control. A yangban could not,
among other things, "poke and play with his chopsticks," "eat raw
onions," or "puff hard on his pipe, pulling in his cheeks." Yet
he exercised much arbitrary power in his own village.
In principle, the yangban were a meritocratic elite.
They gained their positions through educational achievement.
Certain groups of persons (artisans, merchants, shamans, slaves,
Buddhist monks, and others) were prohibited from taking the
higher civil service examinations, but these formed only a small
minority of the population. In theory, the examinations were open
to the large majority of people who were farmers. In the early
years of the Choson Dynasty, some commoners may have been able to
attain high positions by passing the examinations and advancing
on sheer talent. In later years, talent was a necessary but not
sufficient prerequisite for entry into the core elite because of
the surplus of successful examinees. Influential family
connections were virtually indispensable for obtaining high
official positions. Moreover, special posts called "protection
appointments" were inherited by descendants of the Choson royal
family and certain high officials. Despite the emphasis on
educational merit, the yangban became in a very real sense
a hereditary elite.
Below the yangban yet superior to the commoners were
the chungin, a small group of technical and administrative
officials. They included astronomers, physicians, interpreters,
and professional military officers, as well as artists. Local
functionaries, who were members of a lower hereditary class, were
an important and frequently oppressive link between the
yangban and the common people. They were often the de
facto rulers of a local region.
The commoners, or sangmin, composed about 75 percent
of the total population. These farmers, craftsmen, and merchants
alone bore the burden of taxation and were subject to military
conscription. Farmers had higher prestige than merchants, but
lived a hard life. Below the commoners, the "base people" or
ch'ommin did what was considered vile or low-prestige
work. They included servants and slaves in government offices and
resthouses, jailkeepers and convicts, shamans, actors, female
entertainers (kisaeng), professional mourners, shoemakers,
executioners, and for a time at least, Buddhist monks and nuns.
Also included in this category were the paekchong,
apparently descended from Inner Asian nomads, who dealt with meat
and the hides of animals, were considered "unclean," and lived in
segregated communities. Slaves were treated as chattels but could
own property and even other slaves. Although numerous at the
beginning of the Choson Dynasty, their numbers had dwindled by
the time slavery was officially abolished at the end of the
nineteenth century.
During their invasions in 1592 and 1597, the armies of the
Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi destroyed many genealogical
records, making it difficult to determine who was and who was not
a member of a yangban family. Also, as Japanese armies
were approaching Seoul, slaves in the capital rose up and burned
documentary evidence of their servitude. By the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, the old social distinctions were
breaking down. During the early Choson Dynasty, commoners did not
have family names or class affiliations
(see Traditional Family Life
, this ch.). However, they began to adopt names in order to
avoid the stigma of low status. Counterfeit genealogies could
frequently be purchased, and commoners sometimes attached their
names to yangban genealogies to avoid military service
taxes. Other late Choson Dynasty social changes included the
gradual shift of agricultural labor from slave status to
contractual arrangements, and the emergence of "entrepreneurial
farmers"--commoners who earned small surpluses through innovative
agricultural techniques.
Data as of June 1990
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