Property ownership in traditional Korea

By Mark Peterson

Since I have been writing recently of changes in Confucianism involving changes in property inheritance, I have been thinking that most readers have no idea about how complicated property ownership was in traditional Korea. It was surprisingly complicated and unlike anything you would expect.

Let me ask you to paint a picture, your own mental picture of what the farms and estates looked like if you understand that traditional Korea ― Joseon and Goryeo and Silla ― for 1,500 years, was a slave-holding society. In fact, Korea may have had the longest unbroken chain of slave holding of any country on earth. Coupled with the fact that traditional Korea was dominated by agrarian economics ― farms ― not businesses or merchants, there was, particularly in the Joseon period, a Confucian-based bias against commerce. So, we can picture a farming society that was hierarchical and highly stratified, with scholar-officials (seonbi or yangban) on the top, commoners in the middle, and slaves on the bottom.

If your mental picture comes out something like the American slave-holding South with large plantations and aristocratic-looking plantation-owners, "Southern Gentlemen" ― if that's your picture of traditional Korea, we need to shake the etch-a-sketch and start over. Aristocratic, slave-owning Koreans had, by the time you reach the point of change in the late 17th century, had been dividing property between siblings on an equal basis for two or three centuries (assuming a land-holding restart with the founding of the Joseon Kingdom), and thus ownership was an acre here in this county, another half-acre on the other side of the county, two acres in the bordering county, a half-acre in the next county over, a quarter of an acre in the county to the south, a two-and-a-half acre parcel in the county two counties to the east, an acre in one county in the next province, and another half-acre in another county in that province, and three-quarters of an acre in the next province, and three more parcels in three separate counties in the next province. How's your picture now?

Property divided between one's umpteenth-generation grandfather and grandmother was passed down, and divided in each generation, and one knew that this piece of property came through one mother's father's father's mother's line. And another piece of property came through another ancestor, and another, and each in a separate part of the county or province, or even in neighboring provinces. To say land-holding was fractionated is a severe understatement.

In your mental picture of the U.S. South and the large plantations with large numbers of slaves working the fields around the plantation, you see the slaves living on the plantation, right? Where are the slaves living in the Korean situation? Since the land parcels are scattered, the slaves must be scattered hither and yon on the land? Right? Yes, and no. Some of the pieces of land had the landowner's slaves living and working there. But some pieces of land did not have the owner's slaves working the land, and there were slaves that did not even live on the owner's land. How in the world did such a system work?

The owner collected "rent" separately from each slave and each piece of land, regardless of whether one's slaves lived on one's land. It was an incredibly complicated system.

It was in the midst of this system with all of it's frailty (collecting rent from dozens of sources must have been fraught with problems) that Korea moved from a system of equal inheritance (also called "partible inheritance") to primogeniture ― inheritance in whole for the eldest son. In most cases younger sons were given small shares, but daughters were no longer eligible to receive any shares of inheritance. Thus began the system of the primacy of the eldest son, and the eldest son's line came to be known as the "큰집" ― the "big house" ― where the inheritance was no longer divided into smaller and smaller and smaller shares.

Why the change? In addition to the obvious difficulties of maintaining a fractured system, Confucianism provided the outlet. The population was also growing, and in other countries when population reaches a kind of saturation point ― where people die in years of bad harvests ― the inheritance system changes. Korea in the late 17th century was experiencing a population boom.

The answer was found in the Confucian texts. The "Chou Li" and the "Li Chi" ("Churye" and "Yeji," in Korean) were Chinese ritual texts that said the eldest son receives the inheritance and is responsible for the ceremonies. Koreans, for 1,200 years had read those texts, claimed to be Confucian, but ignored the "eldest son" part, and rather claimed the prerogative of equal inheritance, since that was the Korean tradition, through the Silla, Goryeo, and early Joseon times. Finally, with economic and social pressures building, the Confucians said, here is the solution! It's been right in front of us the whole time. And thus, by observing the Confucian teachings, Korea changed its inheritance and social systems to conform to the ideal Confucian system. Thus Korea became the ideal, male-dominated, oppressing-the-females, system that we know from recent historic times in Korea.

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.