I14 EARLY CHOSON DYNASTYlandlords with their flocks of sharecropper and slave cultivators coexisted with
smallholders tending ever smaller and barely economic tiny parcels ofland. The
maldistribution of land and wealth continued despite indications of surplus pro-
duction overall, and the situation was exacerbated for the peasant because the
new taedong surtax increased the nominal burden of the land tax to about three
times what it had been in the sixteenth century.
The most interesting development occurred in the taedong reform of the trib-
ute system because it converted in-kind tribute into a system of market purchase
and sale of goods, stimulating the commercial economy, and paving the way
for the introduction of copper currency (see Part 5). This represented the epit-
ome of the reform effort in this period, based on the adoption of a rational plan
put forward by reform bureaucrats like Kim Yuk to adapt an irrational tax sys-
tem to a growing market. This reform was also accompanied by signs of com-
mercial and industrial liberalization, the splitting of individual artisans from
government manufactories, the formation of unlicensed merchants who began
to compete with the licensed shops in the capital, and the greater exchange of
commodities in the markets of the smaller towns and countryside.
The mid-seventeenth century thus offered both challenge and opportunity, the
challenge to reform the sources of inequity and inequality and the opportunity
to ride the wave of change that was becoming barely perceptible.