four Yangban Cohesiveness and the Chosŏn Dynasty

As emerging status boundaries sharpened in late Chosŏn, the yangban status group itself became internally differentiated, cleaving in the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries into distinct central civil official, central military official, and local yangban kinship groups. Oligarchic central civil official descent lines based in and its surrounding areas dominated court politics, and the central military official lines played supporting roles. In contrast, local throughout , including the southern yangban, experienced exclusion from the central political arena. Did this differentiation lead to the dissolution of the yangban aristoc- racy into three discrete groups? In answering this and re- lated questions, we need to remember that scholars of Chosŏn social history regard yangban not so much as a body of incumbent central offi- cials as an ascriptive status group. Song Chun-ho, for example, once noted that regardless of branch affiliation, military examination passers and military officials drawn from local yangban were regarded as social equals by other local yangban, because they all qualified as such in the most fundamental way—by birth.1 By extension, the same was true for the generally officeless local yangban as a whole. Throughout late Chosŏn, personal ties and cultural exchanges con- tinued to bind the central and southern yangban together, in spite of obvious differences in their political stature. The two groups maintained a mutually beneficial relationship. For a southern aristocratic lineage 118 Yangban Cohesiveness and the Chosŏn Dynasty

based in a remote provincial county, such ties meant access to the latest news on court politics and foreign affairs, a personal introduction to the new county magistrate or provincial governor, or even an arranged marriage with a Seoul yangban family. In return, local yangban provided their associates in the capital with gifts, supplementing the latter’s official salaries, which were too small to maintain expensive lifestyles in Seoul.2 Of course, these ties do not prove that central civil officials, central military officials, and southern local aristocrats constituted one cohesive status group, the yangban. After all, it is possible that among the three, only the central civil officials retained membership in the bona fide , with the others interacting as social inferiors or subordi- nates, in the same way many hereditary local functionaries and technical specialists were able to engage in exchanges with bona fide yangban.3 In such relationships, a yangban and a chungin could respect each other as intellectual equals, but the disparity in status must have been experienced as real. Furthermore, clear differences in career pat- terns and political power among central civil official, central military official, and southern local yangban make it tempting to declare that the three were distinct status groups.4 Even the officeholding capital yangban lacked cohesion. Hereditary political cleavages, bloody purges, and the factionalization of local pri- vate academies for scholars and officials all indicate that cohesiveness was not the primary feature of yangban society, particularly when it came to politics. Economically, however, we see greater—if not total—unity. Central and local aristocrats alike defended their economic privileges in land and slave ownership, as well as their exemption from military service. For sure, some yangban officials took the side of the state in increasing revenues to finance the government—even going against the general interests of the yangban at times—but such public-minded reformers did not fare well. In sum, differences in factional loyalties and intellectual lineages could supersede the more or less common eco- nomic interests of central and local yangban.5 To determine whether the central civil officials, central military offi- cials, and southern local aristocracy belonged to one cohesive social status group, the yangban, additional criteria are necessity. To that end, I will analyze marriage and adoption practices, genealogical proximity, and the state’s treatment of the aristocracy and others especially as