The Geographical Characteristics of the Rural Settlements in Chosun Dynasty

This paper intends to describe the spatial characteristics of the villages, especially the site, the size, the form and the socio-spatial divisions of them, in Chosun Dynasty. The results are summarized as follows; 1)The village clustering as a natural one had scarecly been developed all over the country till the first half period of Chosun Dynasty. The execution of the local administrative orgnaization of Ri-Myon(里一面) in the later 18th century can be regarded as a consequence of steady growth of natural village clustering. Ri is the title of lowest level of the local administrative divisions and naturally it corresponds to the natural clustered village. Though the partial examples, the size og Ri gradually became stabilized with 30 households as a median. But in the 18th century, Ris composed of 10 or more hamlets were numerous yet. For the period from the 18th century to the 19th century, the overall size of the villages was increased and all country was filled up with the villages substantially. Thus the village clustering had not been generalized till the 18th century except for the special case like manors(莊, 處). 2) From the early Three Kingdoms period, in which the title "Chon" (village) appeared, to the early Chosun dynasty, the word "Chon" had implied not only natural villages but also the lowest level of the local administrative organizations. It was needed to establish the administrative village systems consisted og several natural villages in order to execute effective administrative control. From the Koryo Dynasty on, there appeared administrative villages somewhat different from the above, having the titles of cardinal directions, and such villages subordinated Ri as their lower unit of local admistrative organization. As population growth continued and all country got filled up with full-grown natural villages, the administrative (regional) village organization disappeared. Accordingly we can conform the facts that this village system was a device for controlling the peasants, and that the domimance of this system reflected the poor-developed state of natural village clustering