EPILOGUE 1007
the wealth to buy luxury goods refused to dispense with them. Confucians had
either to engage in constant scolding of the recalcitrant or resign themselves to
tacit or hypocritical acceptance of human weakness. The Physiocratic empha-
sis on agricultural production and the concomitant denigration of industrial and
commercial activity in Korean Confucian thought supported the preeminent eco-
nomic and political position of the landlords by hindering the accumulation of
wealth by artisans and merchants, and by forbidding their participation in the
competition for bureaucratic office.
International trade did not provide a major stimulus to commerce in general
because of the restrictions of the tributary system with China, the suspicion and
lack oftrost between Koreans and their Chinese or Manchu suzerains, the preda-
tory aggressions of the Wak6 pirates from Japan in the fifteenth century, the
involvement of the Japanese with their own internal wars in the sixteenth cen-
tury, and the reimposition of severe limits on foreign trade activity after the
Shimabara Rebellion of [636. In fact, these real limits on international trade
probably accounted as much as Confucian doctrine for the restrictions on the
development of the economy.
Bureaucratic Routini::.ation and CrisisChinese had experienced the rise and fall of dynasties so frequently in their long
history that they became convinced that dynasties had a life of their own gov-
erned as much by bureaucratic routinization and laxity as the loss of moral fiber.
Korean dynasties lasted for much longer periods than the Chinese for a num-
ber of complex reasons, but the Choson dynasty began to exhibit characteris-
tics of bureaucratic deterioriation by the end of the fiftccnth century.
Laxity and corruption in administration that increascd over time meant that
registration of thc taxpaying population was not maintained, taxes and services
were levied more hcavily on the poorest peasants, and military scrvice was eroded
by evasion.
Bureaucratic laxity and corruption was exacerbated by the elimination of
salaries for all clerks at the beginning of the dynasty. The policy was undertaken
by the regular officials to elevate themselves over the influential local hyangni
or local clerk class of the late Koryo and prevent them from rising to the regu-
lar bureaucracy, but it forced all clerks into a life of corruption by demanding
fees and gratuities to make a living.
By the end of the sixteenth ccntury the capacity of the bureaucracy to rectify
the problems of maladministration was weakened by the emergence of internecine
factional strife within the bureaucracy after [575. The unfortunate conscquence
of this sad state of affairs was the devastation wrought by Hidcyoshi's invasions
in the 1590s. Someone looking at Korea in 1598 aftcr the last of the Japanese
returned home, might well have concluded that both the Chos6n dynasty and
the experiment in Confucian statecraft had been a failure.