506 MILITARY REFORMonly T90 Forbidden Guards, but the number had grown to 600 by his own time.
If you cOLlnted the troops of the Concurrent Royal Stables (Kyomsabok) and
Winged Forest Guards (Urimwi) in addition (the troops of all three were
referred to as the Forbidden Soldiers or Kiimgun), the number of royal guards
was really closer to J ,000 men.^12
King Hyojong continued to press for expansion of the capital guard foree
toward the end of the I650S despite the increasing tide of protest from officials.
Between 165 I and 1655, he reorganized the Forbidden Soldiers (Kiimgun, his
personal guard), converted them all to cavalry, an increased their numbers from
600 to [,000 men.
Yu felt that 200 men would be more than enough, especially since Emperor
T'ai-tsung of the T'ang only had 100 cavalry for his personal guard, and there
would be a large contingent of rotating duty soldiers from the Five Guards on
duty as well. The troops of the Forbidden Soldiers would be divided into three
shifts that would rotate on and off duty, and they would be furnished horses
and a standard salary by the government. As permanent, salaried soldiers, they
constituted one of the rare exceptions to his preference for a support-taxpayer
finance system, but he felt that costs could be kept under control by limiting
the number. If he had known that the actual number of Inner Forbidden Guards
in 1407 was somewhere between sixty and ninety, he might have called for an
even lower quota.'3
One significant aspect ofYu's plan for the Inner Forbidden Guards was his
elaborate set of regulations for recruitment examinations in both military skills
and classical learning. Even though Yu called elsewhere for the total abolition
of the current civil and military examinations, in existence continuously in Korea
since 958, he allowed for military examinations along the same lines as the cur-
rent mubra or highest military degree examination only in the case of this small
royal bodyguard.
In addition to tests of archery and musketry, the candidates would be exam-
ined every three years on civil classics like The Four Books, military classics,
and Yu's favorite Chi-hsiao hsin-shu by Ch'i Chi-kuang. He claimed that his
intention was to create the well-rounded man, skilled in both the civil and mil-
itary arts in emulation of the classical ideal, who "while at home could act as
an official to look after the people of the local communities, and when out on a
military campaign could lead the army in defense against the enemy." In other
words, proper education would create the ideal sa or scholar-soldier who would
all engage in "true learning" (Sirhak). "Those who do not learn tthe double path
ofthe well-rounded man] would not be allowed to become officers, while those
who concentrated exclusively on a specific skill like archery, running, or riding
horses would be relegated to the role of ordinary soldier. How could you take
these kinds of men and put them in a position to command othersT' 4
Even though he disdained the creation of the military examination system in
the reign of Empress Wu of the T'ang as the work of an evil genius, deplored
its adoption in the late fourteenth century in Korea by King Kongyang, and