17th century quiet revolution

By Mark Peterson

I've previously written about the changes in the late 17th century and listed seven major features of social life and family organization that changed. I've written that these changes affected every aspect of social life in Korea. It was a revolution. But the revolution was not with bloodshed and chaos, but rather was a quiet revolution that changed everything.

Why did it happen? What caused Korean society to disinherit daughters, leave daughters out of the ancestral ceremonies, drop the details of a daughter's life and posterity from the genealogy, look by all means to have a son, and adopt a son from within the patrilineage if a son was not born, marry only at the father's house (no longer recognizing an option of marrying at the bride's home, and thus creating villages of "men-related-to-men-by-men." They created a system where women were invisible and only useful in biologically producing a son.

Why?

That is the question and I'm not sure I understand it completely, but I understand part of it. In fact, three parts of it.

As I see it, three forces came together in the late 17th century to bring about these radical changes. First was the natural growth of Confucian scholarship. Second was a population crunch. And third was the international situation involving the demise of the Ming dynasty, the headwaters of Confucianism. Let's look at each of these in turn.

When Confucianism came into Korea in the middle of Three Kingdoms Period, around the fourth century, it came in as a set of ideas, a philosophy really, from China. At that point, China and Korea had radically different societal organizations. China was "patrilineal," meaning inheritances were passed from father to son, without the involvement of mothers and wives. Korea, on the other hand, had a bilateral system, meaning sons and daughters shared inheritances. We also call this system one with "partible" inheritances, meaning the inheritance was divided, not kept as one whole, as in the patrilineal system. So, Korea accepted the philosophy without the practice. Or rather, they modified the practice to match their social reality. Specifically, when the Chinese Confucians wrote of performing ceremonies to the ancestors, they did so from their own frame of reference ― the eldest son performs the ceremonies, and they wrote it that way. But to the Koreans, that did not fit. The eldest son had no special role or recognition; rather, all the children worked together, and in fact took turns hosting the ceremonies. That made more sense to them given their equal division of inheritances from ancestors.

Korea began, therefore, to practice "Korean-style Confucianism."

But as the years went by, particularly reaching the high point of Confucian philosophical studies in the mid-16th century ― this was the time of Toegye Yi Hwang and Yulgok Yi I who are now featured as the figures on Korean money ― the contradiction between philosophy and practice began to be discussed, not as a unique feature of Korean Confucianism, but as a problem, a deficiency, in Korean Confucianism. And there was more and more discussion of "doing things right."

At the same time, Korea began to reach a population breaking point. We know of Korea today as one of the more densely populated places on Earth, but it was not always so. In the Silla period (57 B.C. ― A.D. 935), and Goryeo period (918-1392), and up through the first half of the Joseon period, there was land to spare. The population was not stressing the land; there weren't famines in times of bad harvest years. But somewhere in the 16th century this started to change. Now, with bad harvest years, there were famines and deaths. The population had reached a saturation point.

We see this in other countries. In times when inheritances are divided equally, but the population grows to a tipping point, there is motivation to change to a system of putting all their eggs in one basket, so the main household can survive in times of hardship. Primogeniture is one such basket ― meaning the property goes to the eldest son, but there is in some societies "ultimogeniture," where property goes to the youngest son or daughter (if the society is matrilineal). Korea opted for primogeniture. Why? Because Confucianism was sitting there with that as the answer.

The arguments over how Korea was out of step with the classics now had real importance ― now was the time to get in line and to adopt the principles that Confucius had long been teaching.

And the final step, the demise of the Ming dynasty, meant the death of the "older brother," from a Korean point of view. And now Korea was the more-civilized country, when compared with the barbarian Manchus that had taken over China and set up the Qing dynasty. This was all the more reason for Korea to do the "right" thing, and fully Confucianize. And thus the "now" I've been addressing, the late 17th century was the time of the full Confucianization of Korea.

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