 Many Song-Ming Confucians recognized that the commandery system was too well entrenched to jettison without major conflict or upheaval. Still, this did not prevent some political thinkers from advocating for a putatively older and better system known as enfeoffment (fengjian 封建). Official Confucian histories suggested that this system had been in place at the time of the sage-kings, which suggested that it had succeeded in creating the high degree of social harmony and virtue that characterized that golden age. The most notable feature of the enfeoffment system was that regional governorships were inherited titles and thus treated as the hereditary rights and responsibilities of certain families (with some allowances to forcibly remove vicious or incompetent governors). But Confucian proponents of enfeoffment such as Zhang Zai and Hu Hong (1106–1161) saw a great deal to recommend it. By creating regional power bases, they suggested, the Chinese state would be more resilient and better able to survive when the emperor or his court were in disarray. They also thought that by having lasting, multi-generational relationships between local governors and their subjects they would help bring about more intimate and family-like relationships between governor and subject, thereby creating circumstances more conducive to social harmony and the cultivation of virtue. Finally, advocates like Zhang and Hu thought that the enfeoffment system could be paired with a legendary system of land distribution known as the well-field system, which guaranteed farming families relatively equal plots of land with relatively incontestable boundaries, all of which was meant to ensure greater equality for commoners and greater peace and accord in general (Angle &amp; Tiwald 2017: 201–206).