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55 Case 3 A Defiant Slave Challenges His Master with Death Yi Pong-dol (Anŭi, Kyŏngsang Province, 1842) T he death of Yi Pong-dol, the son of a slave and thus an uneducable “fool” in the Chosŏn elite’s view, was “in vain.” His disrespectful speech and behavior upset a village yangban. The offended yangban invaded Pong-dol’s home after failing to catch him and broke jars containing precious preserved sauces, a critical source of nutrition for Korean people all year long. Pong-dol, in despair and frustration, committed suicide by throwing himself into a deep pond. This case reveals a widespread social problem: violation of the distinctions of status between noble and lowborn (ch’ŏnmin) and between master and slave, as manifested in insolent speech or behavior by people of the non-elite class. The Chosŏn elite’s sensitivity over the blurring of social status lines was acute throughout the dynasty because they believed that status distinctions were the foundation of society and that laxity in such matters meant institutional instability. Criminal incidents resulting from people crossing long-established social status lines seem to have increased in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and scholars such as William Shaw have interpreted the phenomenon as “a by-product of economic changes” that enabled non-elites to purchase yangban titles and to imitate the yangban lifestyle while some local yangban fell into poverty and could not maintain their decorum and way of life.1 The Yi family in this suicide case seems to fit this formula. The victim, Yi Pong-dol, as already noted, was the son of a slave who was owned by relatives of the assailant, Sin P’il-ho, a man from a well-established yangban family in the area. Pong-dol’s wife was a slave owned by the assailant, and his sister Ms. Yi was a private slave. Yet their eldest brother, Yi Pong-un, had the yangban 56 | Case 3 title ch’ŏmji, a senior third military post that was often sold for grain contributions in the late Chosŏn. Pong-un also owned a bean field of unknown size. Considering the fact that this family of slave status had a surname, that Pongun held a yangban title probably by purchase, and that they enjoyed some economic means, the Yi brothers and sisters were most likely descendants of the son of a yangban (or a commoner) by his slave concubine.2 Yangban Sin’s economic condition seems to have been modest, if not impoverished. He was in mourning for his mother but did not have the wherewithal to prepare all the needed daily ritual offerings. The audacity of Yi Pong-dol in accusing Yangban Sin of violating Yi’s usufruct of the fish farm that Yi had built may well represent this complicated situation in the village, where status and economic wealth did not always go hand in hand. However, contemptuous attitudes of the non-elite class toward yangban elites did not necessarily represent the dissolution of the social status system but fluid boundaries between social status groups. Tensions and conflicts among different social status groups did exist, often erupting into fights and even resulting in deaths; yet it seems that the existing law still functioned, in strong favor of the ruling class, to maintain social distinctions and inequalities. The legal reasoning in this case also clearly proves that it was Pong-dol who violated propriety, and thus Yangban Sin was not liable for Pong-dol’s death. This does not mean that non-elites did not have any legal rights to sue elites when they felt that their rights had been infringed, as shown in this case, in which Ms. Yi made a report of her brother’s “unjust” death to the authorities. Disappointingly to the victim’s family, the assailant was found not guilty of Pong-dol’s death, though he was punished for his excessive behavior of breaking Pong-dol’s sauce jars. In fact, the state was keen to regulate oppressive yangban who exercised abusive power over villagers in the countryside . From the state’s perspective, domineering and unruly yangban were anathema because they competed with the state in controlling local resources, both human and natural, and often disrupted the peace and stability in local society by exploiting and provoking people.3 Cases 2 and 6 are such examples of a powerful yangban invading the rights of a fellow yangban woman and a non-yangban woman...

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