Usually I write about film that I have seen but this time I would like to write about the slavery in Korea. Not much ago I watched a drama, Chuno (추노), that revolves around the life of a slave hunter during the Joseon Dinasty. In terms of visual product it has some great scenes but what I found quite interesting was the depiction of the slave figure. Probably because I did not know too much about the slavery system in Korea, I start to search about it.
The slavery structure formed a part of Korean history. Around 30-40% of the population during the Joseon Dinasty was slaves or ‘nobi’ (노비), as it is called in Korea. If we think carefully about this percentage, we can realize the importance of this social class in the pre-modern Korean history.
The society in this period was divided in 4 different social statements. The higher social class or aristocracy was called ‘Yangban’. This class was formed by Confucian scholars that had to succeed becoming a government official in order to keep their status. In case the family member of three generation did not succeed in the government official examination, they would lose their yangban status and would become commoners. Yangban were followed by ‘chungin’ that was the petit bourgeoisie. They were just a privilege class of commoners that formed a group of bureaucrats and skilled professionals. These two social classes were in the top of the social hierarchy and they controlled and ruled over the others.
There was also the Sangmin class or commoners, common people in Joseon Korea that were clean workers with a very little social status. At the bottom of the social hierarchy there was the slavery class called nobi (노비) in Korean.
In the drama it is shown how slaves were skin marked with the Chinese characters for no (노; 奴) and bi (비; 婢) to show whether they were male or female respectively.
The nobi class were owned by the elite yangban and, as part of their properties, they could sell, buy, leave as inheritance or give them as a present. However, nobi class was also fed and clothed by their masters. Probably, they could be sometimes under better conditions than the commoners in terms of food, clothes and housing. The slavery status was hereditary but it was also given as a legal punishment. There are some other curious points that characterize the nobi class. For example they could own some properties and they would be taxed for their properties. It was also common that they had the suffix kae in their names which means tool. In terms of marriage, nobi could marry with commoner and, although it was not allow for them to marry with yangbans, sometimes this prohibition was ignored and some slaves women became 2nd wives or concubines of the yangban elite.
Nobi in Korea fulfil a great part of Korean History that cover from 7th to 19th century. For a length of twelve years, Korea has experienced a large-scale slave system, longer than in other slave-holding countries. That is the main reason why Korea has a peculiar position among slave system societies without mention the fact that Korea was isolated at the end of Asia with almost no connection with other slave societies.
The other slave-holding countries except Korea were located near areas that were connected by the slave trade markets. That was around the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean connecting America, Africa, Europe and India in Asia. As we can realize from this is that Korea is the unique society that, outside of the mainstream of slavery trade, established a slavery society for a long period in history.
- "Korean nobi in American mirror": http://econ.snu.ac.kr/~ecores/activity/paper/no26.pdf
- "Nobi: Rescuing the Nation from slavery": http://muninn.net/blog/2005/04/nobi-rescuing-the-nation-from-slavery.html
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