Yangban

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Yangban
A Korean official during his stay in China, taken in 1863.
Korean name
Hangul	양반
Hanja	兩班
Revised Romanization	Yangban
McCune–Reischauer	Yangpan

The yangban (Korean: 양반; Hanja: 兩班) were part of the traditional ruling class or gentry of dynastic Korea during the Joseon Dynasty. The yangban were mainly composed of highly educated civil servants and military officers—landed or unlanded aristocrats who individually exemplified the Korean Confucian form of a "scholarly official". They were largely government administrators and bureaucrats who oversaw medieval and early modern Korea's traditional agrarian bureaucracy until the end of the dynasty in 1897. In a broader sense, an office holder's family and descendants, as well as country families who claimed such descent, were socially accepted as yangban.

In contemporary Korean language, the term 'yangban' means to humourously (and often sarcastically) refer to a person in a derogatory way. [1]. Quite interestingly, the same word is used to describe something better as well ("A는 B에 비하면 양반이다" which means "A is yangban (much decent) compared to B".