More on 1688 document

By Mark Peterson

Recently I wrote about the 1688 inheritance document of the Buan Kim family that marked the beginning of the end for female inheritance rights and property ownership rights. In the document the family says "Our family is different from other families." The document was written mostly in Chinese with some sections in "idu" ― the modified Chinese character format that captured Korean grammatical particles with Chinese characters.

This sentence hit me like a ton of bricks when I first read it. In the first place, the simplicity of the sentence ― that I could understand it easily ― struck me. And that it was not that the statement was unique to one family, because, although it looks like it is one family, it was really happening to many families, one after another. So, the point is not that one family was making a break with the past, but this one family was making the break together with virtually all other families. This was a statement, not in isolation, but as a part of a sea change in social practice in Korea. The whole of society was moving from equality in inheritance to primogeniture ― inheritance dominated by the eldest son.

The key sentence was written in simple Chinese. It said literally "our-family-different-from-other-family." Chinese is structurally similar to English, whereas Korean is not. Korean is a SOV language, but Chinese and English are SVO languages. Subject Object Verb versus Subject Verb Object. Thus, the translation into English is simple and direct. Clearly, this family, a Buan Kim family, was making a break with the past.

As the Buan Kim family, an elite, office-holding family, was one of the first prominent families to start changing their method of passing property from one generation to the next. As elite families decided to reduce the amount of property that passes to the hands of daughters, the movement began to spread. Once a wife marrying into a family came in without an inheritance, families decided that their marrying-out daughters would not be given property. Preservation of the male household became the focus.

The document went on to say that the way they would be different is that their daughters who "marry out" would no longer be given a full share of inheritance, but rather, they would be given a one-third share, when compared with the sons' share. The implication was that sons were still treated equally, but daughters drop to treatment by the new one-third rule.

Why one-third? The rationale was that daughters mourn for a parent at their time of the parent's death for one year, whereas sons would mourn for three years, according to the Confucian ritual texts. Therefore daughters are due only one-third as much as the sons.

Other families at this time of transition in the late 17th century used other rationale. One family said that the daughters had married off to distant places and did not return faithfully for the performance of ceremonies, therefore, they would be given less. And other families had other rationale for diminishing the fraction of property given to daughters.

These fractions of shares, or lesser shares, given to daughters was the case only for about one generation ― roughly from 1660 to 1700 ― when the next move was to completely disinherit the daughters. That was the case universally when we entered the 18th century. Daughters were completely disinherited. And with that disinheritance came the loss of property rights in general. Everything turned to the hands of the sons ― and later, totally in the hands of the eldest son.

We see this transition in the excellent collection of Buan Kim documents, published by the Academy of Korean Studies, that daughters' shares drop to zero. The Buan Kims were typical of elite families, land-holding families, slave-holding families of the 1392-1910 Joseon Kingdom. Their claim of being the "first" ― "different from other families" ― was only true in that soon thereafter ALL elite families became "different." All elite families moved to disinherit their daughters. And as elite families changed, non-elite families eventually mimicked the elite and began to disenfranchise their daughters. Thus, so-called traditional Korean society today, looking back at the most recent history, looks totally male-dominated. What Koreans call the "bugye," patrilineal, society.

The case is clear. The inheritance documents of the 15th, 16th, and the first two-thirds of the 17th century show equal inheritance for daughters. What about the inheritance documents of the 18th and 19th centuries? They do not exist! Once Korea moved to full Confucianism, or reliance on the eldest son, or primogeniture, there was no longer a need to write inheritance documents ― the eldest son had it all. The transition was complete.

The process is clear. I have written a book on the matter. Other scholars have written on the matter. But still, strangely, this issue does not yet appear in Korean secondary school textbooks. Why?

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