ROYAL DIVISION MODEL 419
tation that this separation of funds would preserve the fiction of the self-sup-
porting nature of the unit.
In delineating the details of his own program Yu Hyongwon made quite clear
that he intended to maintain a distinct separation of men liable for military duty
and those responsible for support tax payments for the soldiers: "The support
personnel may be examined for talent, and if any of them passes, he may be per-
mitted to become a soldier. If there are crimes involving duty soldiers having
too many support personnel or collecting too much from them, then the person
on military service will be punished and dropped down to become a support
person."7^0
He also stipulated that when a soldier ran away or died, his place might be
taken by an heir or a support taxpayer, indicating that in normal circumstances
soldiers and support taxpayers were neither equal nor interchangeableJ' Obvi-
ously, ifYu had chosen to adopt a militia system in which all adult peasants were
potential or actual soldiers, there would have becn no need for regulations detln-
ing duty soldiers and support persons as separate entities.
Ofthe four peasant recipients ofland for each 100 myo in a village, only the
strongest and healthiest would be designated "the main householder" (chuho)
or household head (hosu) and act as the duty soldier. The other three would be
support taxpayers (po)J^2 The support taxpayers, presumably other members of
an individual family, would be required to pay either 12 mal of rice or 2 p 'il of
cotton cloth a year to support the main householder (chuho), that is, the family
of the regular duty soldier. Of the three support persons, one would pay either
rice or cloth directly to the place where the soldier served on duty. In the case
of infantrymen (pobyong), only the man singled out for military service would
serve either at the capital, a provincial commander's headquarters, or a frontier
garrison.?3
One ofYu's main objectives was to extend the Royal Division model of rotat-
ing duty soldiers and support taxpayers to all military units. He complained that
new types of soldiers like the sogo troops established in [594 and the Special
Cavalry of the Military Training Agency created in I669 had never been
assigned support taxpayers.74
He also hoped to remedy the main weakness of the current system, the accep-
tance of cloth tax payments in lieu of service from duty soldiers. He insisted
that all the duty soldiers must remain soldiers and not be converted to cloth tax-
payers, and all duty soldiers had to be supported by the assignment of support
taxpayers. Since the regular infantrymen and cavalrymen, who were nominally
duty soldiers backed up by support taxpayers, were in facl paying a fee 'Or lax
instead of serving, he insisted on adoption of a regulation to prohibit this prac-
tice: "With regard to all types of soldiers, completely stop collecting the [sub-
stitute] cloth payment [in lieu of service] [the kapo], and for all of them provide
cloth."75 Any commanders of army or navy garrisons found guilty of releasing
even a single soldier from duty to collect a cloth tax from him would be indicted
under the laws against embezzlement. For that malter, the same ordinance would