MILITA R Y S ER VICE SYSTEM 541tion for the idea derived not from Yu hut from Song Siyol's attack on the Mili-
tary Training Agency in 1669. Yi Yu of the Reform Bureau recommended shift-
ing the rotating duty troops of the Forbidden Guard Division back to the agency
and eliminating the agency's permanent soldiers by attrition as Song had sug-
gested decades earlier. When Minister of Taxation Kim Ch'angjip, a prominent
Patriarch, endorsed the idea, Sukchong agreed.
Abolishing anyone of the Five Military Divisions proved almost as difficult
a task as adopting the household cloth tax.^2 A month after the king had made
his decision, a number of officials led by Censor-general (Taesagan) Yi Konmyong
of the Patriarchs protested that the times were too precarious to permit dis-
bandment of the most essential divisions in the capital for the purpose of reor-
ganization, no doubt because of the disruption caused by the purge of the
Disciple's Faction in 1701. Yi felt that the Royal and Forbidden Guard Divi-
sions were indispensable because they werc ideal approximations oftheJu-ping
of the Tang dynasty and were properly financed through the assignment of sup-
port taxpayers to duty soldiers, even though the Tang fil-ping were supposed
to be manned by militia soldiers. He preferred the immediate abolition of the
Military Training Agency but was willing to compromise by reducing it by half.
When other officials opposed any major reorganization, Sukchong reluctantly
withdrew his initial decision to abolish the new divisions created since the Imjin
War.3 The only alternative was an across-the-board reduction of all divisions
and military units and fixed limits for all the service-exempt military officers
(kun 'gwan) and school students (kyosaeng) in the provinces whose numbers had
long since far surpassed earlier quotas. All agreed, however, this kind of reform
could only be temporary and marginal in its effect.^4
The commanders of the the Fivc Military Divisions of the capital region and
the civil officials associated with them (as concurrent appointees), had an inter-
est in their perpetuation if only to maintain collection of tax rcvenues. Sending
a division of capital troops back to the countryside or reassigning thousands more
support taxpayers to different units would have created unnerving dislocations
if only by breaking old networks. In a society where personal contact was so
important, people may have felt comfortable knowing what to expect in the way
of hribes, extortion. and gratuities from army officers, clerks. and officials they
had been dealing with for years. Eliminating such estahlished institutions was
hardly easy, something that a recluse scholar like Yu Hyongwon never had the
opportunity to find out because he was never in a position of power. He was
unaware of the practical prohlems that could be caused by abolishing four of the
five military divisions, paring back the capital guards from about 300,000 to
70,000, reassigning the 230,000 men, and breaking the networks of attachments
of so many thousands of people. Furthermore, the king could not risk weaken-
ing the existing divisions while the transfers of troops to new units took place.
Yi Yu's recommendation for cuts in all units rather than the elimination of
any single one became the hasis for the major troop reduction of 1704. A net
reduction of 35.365 from the total of :307.926 soldiers and support taxpayers of