in your cheeks. No matter how angry you are, don’t beat your wife; no matter how vexing affairs may be, don’t throw dishes. Don’t hit the children with your fist. Don’t call a servant a rotten so-and-so. When you’re annoyed by an ox or a horse, don’t curse the owner. Don’t warm your hands over a brazier. When you speak, don’t let your spittle fly. Don’t butcher beef or eat it. Don’t gamble. If any of the hundred provisions are at odds with appropriate yangban decorum, you must bring this deed to the government office and have it corrected.’
His Lordship the magistrate of Chŏngsŏn affixed his signature to the deed; the chief clerk and the inspector signed as well. The usher then took out the seals and attached them here and there across the deed. The sound of the seals rang out like the beat of a big drum; the seals on the deed were like the stars in the sky. When the local headmen had all read the deed, the rich man, visibly discountenanced, thought for a while and said, ‘Is this what a yangban is? I always heard a yangban was like one of the Immortals. If this is all there’s to it, it’s not very attractive. Can’t you correct it, give the rank a little more substance?’
Whereupon the magistrate wrote a new deed.
‘When Heaven created our people, it made four divisions. Of these four divisions, the most prestigious was the sŏnbi scholar; the sŏnbi was yangban and there was nothing better. He had neither to farm nor engage in trade. With a little learning, he could advance in the civil service. At worst, he had the rank of chinsa. The red certificate of the civil service is no more than two feet long, but it holds a hundred things. It is the sŏnbi’s money bag. If a chinsa gets his first appointment at thirty, every other post in the bureaucracy is open to him. His sideburns can grow white sitting under a sunshade; his stomach can swell to a chorus of “yeas” from his servants. In his room he can seat a kisaeng beside him; he can breed cranes in the trees in his garden. An impoverished sŏnbi, resident in the country, can do as he pleases. He can take a neighbour’s ox and plough his own fields first; he can call the villagers to weed his fields first. No one can curse him for behaving thus; no one can express resentment, not even a man who is hauled in and has lye stuck under his nose, not even if he is strung up by the topknot in punishment.’
The rich man took the deed, stuck out his tongue and said,
‘Stop, please! This is unbelievable! Are you trying to turn me into a thief?’
The rich man covered his head with his hands and took to his heels. Until the day he died, he never mentioned the word yangban again.
RAMIFICATIONS OF THE YANGBAN’S TALE
You now understand the sublime importance and unimportance of the yangban concept, as well as the niceties of the class system in Korea. You will have perceived that the sŏnbi scholar class is best of all; that the farmer is reasonably respectable; that the artisan is a step lower; and that the merchant ranks last of the four. Of course, a few doghouse professions have not been mentioned, notably, kisaeng, monk, mudang (shaman), slave and butcher. The butcher is the bottom of the barrel, but even here there are gradations: the beef butcher is superior to the pork butcher, who in turn outranks the dog butcher. So if someone calls you a dog butchering son-of-a-bitch, you’ll know that you have given great offence. Ex-pat merchant types should not feel too unhappy. At least you are not listed among the doghouse professions, although in Confucian terms you are not much better.
At the beginning of Chosŏn, the king stood on top of the social pyramid. The nation was composed of king and people (paeksŏng). The people, with the exception of the slave class, were yangmin (the yang character meaning good). A yangmin who passed the kwagŏ civil service examination became yangban upon taking up an official appointment. The yang character in yangban is different from the yang character in yangmin. Yangban means the two services, civil and military; yangmin simply means the good people. The term yangban was restricted to those in public office. Gradually yangban began to think of themselves as a separate class. To a yangban, everyone else was sangmin, meaning ordinary people, which included peasants and merchants. As time went on, however, sangmin became sangnom, and the sangnom label is very definitely pejorative. In late Chosŏn, landlords among the yangmin – self-styled sŏnbi (literati) – began to adopt the yangban style of living. Gradually the families of literati and office holders called themselves yangban and did not marry sangmin (ordinary people). This in turn served as a spur to wealthy sangmin to doctor their family registers so that they appeared to be yangban. Public office did not follow automatically from claiming yangban status. One had to pass the kwagŏ civil service exam AND take an official post. Even then, those who took the exam often encountered discrimination in the kind of post that was available to them, particularly so in the case of people from the north and the west.
The yangban/sangnom distinction is part of Korean folk history. When a yangban drank from Yŏngwŏl’s ‘Chuch’ŏn’ (Wine Spring), he got refined rice wine, but makkŏlli was as much as a sangnom could squeeze out of it. An irate sangnom borrowed a yangban cloak and horsehair hat and approached the spring with new confidence, but all he got was makkŏlli. In his rage he blocked the spring with a huge stone and the well dried up.
The Yangban’s Tale doesn’t mention two further grades in the status system of old Korea, chung’in and so’ol. Although these classifications are no longer really relevant, I suspect they could still be dragged out at marriage negotiation time. Chung’in do not appear as a discrete class until the sixteenth century. They took the chapkwa (miscellaneous) civil service exam. Many grew quite wealthy from contacts with the Chinese, which enabled them to build commercial connections. I have also read somewhere that they took the regular mun’gwa exam too. One way or the other, they had restricted opportunities for promotion. Chung’in ranked between yangban and commoner; they were the secretaries, translators, interpreters, accountants, geographers, scientists and doctors in the administrative system. They worked in technically demanding positions that yangban would not take. They were the brains of the bureaucracy, did all the work and were rewarded with small stipends and smaller respect. Sŏ’ol was the term for a child of a yangban and kisaeng, or a yangban and his concubine. Like the chung’in, the sŏ’ol was precluded from rising very high in the bureaucracy. At least this was the case until the Hideyoshi Wars. After Hideyoshi and the subsequent Manchu Invasion, Korea endured a terrible bout of national depression. The intellectuals looked for a new code to re-establish the national dignity. Part of the effort led to a rejection of Chinese influence in art and writing. Why should we imitate great masters from the past, the radicals cried? In the changes that ensued, the sŏ’ol found themselves being promoted to ranking positions in the bureaucracy. To the end chung’in were denied much promotion, but with their brains and skills they emerged in the 1800s as a very wealthy class. Chung’in students were among the first to study abroad, mostly because yangban would not allow their beloved sons to mingle with barbarians. A number of these chung’in intellectuals played prominent roles in the Enlightenment period. Chung’in were also first to wear the dirty label of Japanese collaborator. Chosŏn had discriminated against them for hundreds of years; one can understand why they jumped at the chance to increase their personal wealth under the Japanese.
CONCLUSIONS FROM THE STUDY OF THE YANGBAN CONCEPT
What are the lessons to be drawn from studying the yangban concept? First, it behoves you to treat everyone, on every occasion, as yangban, and to hope that sometimes, at least, you will be treated as yangban in return. This is quite a lot to hope for since, as Dr Crane points out, the foreigner begins as sangnom.
The great key to cultural accommodation is the realization that
