Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions. Yu Hyongwon and the Late Choson Dynasty - James B. Palais

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provide adequately for infantry, particularly when the evidence of comlption in
its operation in his own time was so overwhelming?
He also felt that Sung systems of providing for combat horses were not good
solutions. Under the "household horse system" (hu-ma-fa) of thc Sung, still in
use in the Ming period, the government abolished state-run ranches and either
provided one state horse to any family that volunteered to accept and care for
them, or provided funds for a family to buy a horse on the market. The (pao-
ma-fa) system divided households into groups of ten and either held the house-
hold or a particular cluster of households (pao or she) responsible for paying
compensation if a horse under its care happened to get sick or die,92 He obvi-
ously felt that this arrangement imposed too heavy a burden on the individual
household.

Easing the Burden of Military Support Taxes

Varying Tours of Duty and Nonduty Intervals. Yu felt that it was possible to

regulate burdens on ordinary infantrymen of good status by adjusting provisions

for the number of shifts, length of service, time intervals between service, and

location of duty posts. Infantrymen, for example, would be divided into eight

groups or shifts serving on duty for two months at a time. Presumably, the inter-

val between service would be sixteen months.

To reduce the burdens of travel and the transport of support payments, in all

cases men would be assigned to units closest to their homes. Yu noted that in

T'ang China, distances were so vast that the government established a system

of grades of hardship (each 500 Ii of travel constituted a grade) to standardize

the travel burdens on soldiers. Since Yu decided that these grades would not be

necessary in a country as small as Korea, he reduced travel burdens to a mini-

mum by dividing all regular infantrymen into eight shifts and reducing their ser-

vice to sixteen-month intervals. In the few cases wherc soldiers might have to

travel to a post between 500 and 1,000 i (125-250 miles) from their homes, their

burdens could be alleviated by dividing them into ten shifts (rather than eight)

and extending the interval between service to twenty months.

In accordance with the principle of village solidarity, all companies from a

given district would serve as a unit rather than individual companies or platoons

disassociated from their districts and companies. The only exception would be

if a frontier garrison lacked a full complement of troops, then it would be able

to draw on soldiers from another district.^93

Yu also proposed reducing the burden on current soldiers in two other ways.

Currently rotating duty soldiers who served at the headquarters of the provin-

cial army commander (the Pyongyang) had to serve tours of one month. By

increasing the tcrn1 of duty to two months, Yu was in effcct doubling the time

interval between tours of duty. He also proposed setting a quota limit on the

number of troops assigned to provincial army commanders' headquarters, per-

haps as few as 600 but no more than 1,000 in the southern provinces for any