410 MILITARY REFORMsiastic about the fu-ping system had he known of them. Nonetheless, Yu as well
as most traditional commentators conceded that thefu-ping system was at best
an approximation of the well-field ideal.Ming Military OrganizationYu relied on a single source for his description of the Ming military system, Ch'iu
Chlin, who served as an official in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
This system, like that of the Sung, was based on the recruitment of soldiers from
the general popUlation to form a standing army. The imperial and capital sol-
diers were organized into a number of guard (wei) units that were also under the
jurisdiction of a Five Armies Command (Wu-chlin tu-tu-fu) that might use them
on expeditions outside the capital. In addition, over 500 wei were also located
throughout the empire.
Although Chiu praised this wei-so system for at least establishing quotas for
the provincial and district garrisons, he also reported that the actual number of
soldiers on duty barely averaged half the quota and recruiters were unable to
enlist sufficient troops in the districts. Men were still evading service by chang-
ing their names, getting clerks to falsify the military rosters, illicitly dividing
their families to avoid registration, or hiding from the registrarsY Although Yu
Hyongwon appended no comment to these remarks, he must have felt that the
late fifteenth-century Ming military system had produced problems similar to
those in seventeenth-century Korea. As we will see, what Yu admired most about
the Ming military system was the sogo mode of organization developed by Ch'i
Chi-kuang, not other aspects of the Ming armies.
The Koryo Military SystemYu's account of past military systems concluded with a brief treatment of Korea,
but it was limited only to the Koryo dynasty (918-1392). His interpretation was
based on the biased view of the Neo-Confucian compilers of The History oj the
Koryo Dynasty (Koryosa) in the fifteenth century that the early Koryo military
system was a copy of the admirable fu-ping system of the Tang, but that it began
to deteriorate at the beginning of the twelfth century and fell into total disorga-
nization after the military coup of I qo. King Kongmin's attempt to restore it
in the fourteenth century (r. 135 I -74) ended in failure. In short, Korea also suf-
fered from problems in its military system after the abandonment of the militia
system.
Yu repeated the Koryosa account that in early Koryo all males were liable for
military service at the age of twenty, given land grants, exempted from military
duty at the age of sixty, and organized according to the fu and wei (guards) of
the T'ang.53 According to more recent scholarship in the twentieth century this
account has been discounted; most scholars no longer believe that a version of
either the Ju-ping or equal-field systems were adopted at the time. Rather, mil-