ROYAL DIVISION MODEL 441vice from the central government's treasury mainly for the doctrinaire reason that
grain-tax financing was a symbol of high-cost standing armies. He was willing
to propose a modification of the existing system because he thought of it as self-
financing.
If he had believed in the priority of military strength and a well-trained army
no matter what the cost, he would have been far more flexible in determining
the mode of finance for the military. Since the traditional three separate cate-
gories of land, tribute, and personal service had already been modified by the
taedong reform of the tribute tax based on a conversion of tribute to a surtax on
land, a proposal that he himself had admired, he could have adopted a newer
system of finance based on taxes from a variety of sources to finance the mili-
tary. He could have included a grain or other surtax on land, or God forbid, a
tax on real estate, net worth of individuals or families, or commercial transac-
tions. He did not do so because all those alternatives were considered illegiti-
mate, unorthodox, or taboo; they were not part of the accepted wisdom on the
modes of taxation.
One suspects that Yu really had not worked out in advance just what kind of
army was needed in Korea in the late r660s, because what his plan provided for
was a small force of duty troops, a slightly larger force of reserve, olT-duty sol-
diers, a still larger number of provincial slave reservists, and a very large force
of poorly trained support taxpayers. A rational budget-planner at heart, he was
more interested in keeping costs under control than in building a large army. He
would have been a more consistent cost -cutter if he had, in fact, insisted on cre-
ating a militia system in conformity with the well-field model. He chose instead
to retain the contemporary Korean rotating duty and support taxpayer system
despite its past dismal performance.
Although he claimed, and probably believed, that he was advocating an egal-
itarian well-field ideal in the distribution of military service and tax responsi-
bilities, his plan was modified in serious ways by contemporary social prejudices
and status criteria. He allowed for inheritance of vacant duty soldier positions
in conformity with the rules of the early Kory6 chiinsiklm system, which con-
tained within it certain features of hereditary service, occupation, and tenure
that contradicted the fundamental principle of returnable grants and rotating,
universal, militia service. Finally, despite his theoretical opposition to slavery,
he would have legalized their military service, doubled their burdens relative to
commoner peasants of good status, and kept them segregated from commoners
in the ranks. In other words, the influence of heredity, aristocracy, and status
still exerted a significant influence over a scholar who thought he was doing his
best to eliminate those features of Korean society.