Roy AL DIVISION MODEL 423the rice were to be converted to cloth, clerks would be designated to supervise
the collection. Likewise, if the reception point were in the capital, the granary
officials would ask agents from the Ministry of War to oversee the collection;
if in a provincial military base, the district magistrates would monitor the col-
lection. The same procedure would be observed when rice rations were paid to
duty troops every month.K, Yu summarized the advantages of the Royal Divi-
sion's system of rotating service and support taxation by quoting what he had
heard from the soldiers and common people in the streets:
"Of all the soldiers in Choson, it's only the men of the Royal Division who have
been able to escape the hell [of military scrviceJ and gain a glimpse of the sun
in the sky." What makes Royal Division service so much better than the rest?
Nothing more than the fact that the soldiers received rice rations when on duty
and the support taxpayers only had to make their rice payments and were not
required to perform double and triple service as sog'o soldiers and the like.x4It should be clear that part of the reason why Yu was willing to retain the sup-
port taxpayer system is that he believed that it was already functioning smoothly
in one of the capital divisions. All that needed to be done, therefore, was to extend
the model of the Royal Division to all military units.
Weaknesses of the Royal Division as a Model
Increased Fiscal Burden, Unfortunately, reform of the military service sys-
tem was more complex than Yu imagined. Not only was his faith in detailed
regulations to ensure probity and honesty in the administration of tax funds rather
nai"ve, but what was even more important, he failed to take fully into account
problems involved in the actual operation of the Royal Division and the mili-
tary system as a whole.
For cxample, Yu was either unaware of or neglected the debate that took place
when the Royal Division was expanded from 12,000 to 2 I ,000 duty soldiers
and reorganized under the support tax system in 1651. This measure was bit-
terly opposed by the then Second State Councilor Kim Yuk, author of the tae-
dong tribute reform and proponent of the expansion of metallic currency in the
economy. Kim, who was at the same time one of the most progressive and yet
fiscally conservative statesmen of the century, remarked that when the Royal
Division was first created in 1624, it was not intended to be a permanent palace
guard, only a temporary unit to operate in the provinces. It was only when the
"bandit ministers" (i.e., the political generals of the 1620S) got hold of it that
they were able to expand it by unrestricted recruitment to 40,000 men.xs
Kim argued that a number of problems developed in association with the divi-
sion: there was never a full complement of troops on duty in the ranks, special
tax exemptions for its soldiers led to a reduction of tax revenues, and unem-
ployedrelatives of yang ban (hanjong) who were not really serving on duty were