48 EARLY CHOSON DYNASTYand foreign traveling envoys on their way to and from the capital, and govern-
ment officials on their way to new posts or in the conduct of government busi-
ness. Since in many cases these requirements could be sudden, unannounced,
frequent, and arbitrary, they interrupted normal village life and disrupted agri-
cultural production.
The second source of exploitation for the peasantry under the early Choson
fiscal system was the expansion of bureaucratic authority in the tax collection
process over the late Koryo period, and the increasing abuse of this authority in
the arbitrary and often corrupt exaction of taxes, fees, and bribes. Although the
potential for these problems existed from the beginning of the dynasty, they did
not become serious until the last half of the fifteenth century as bureaucratic
procedures became routinized and morale among officials suffered.
The Land TaxAfter a cadastral survey was conducted in 1388, it was found that exclusive of
the northern two provinces, there was a total of about 800,000 kyo! of land of
which 623,000 kyo! was under cultivation.^66 In 1401 the territory of Kyonggi
Province consisted of 149,300 kyo! of land of which 115,340 kyo! was used for
prebends.^67 Efforts to expand the land under cultivation and register it for taxes
continued, and by 1404 there was 922,677 kyo! registered for the country exclu-
sive of Kyonggi, and about 1,700,000 kyo! including it, a figure close to the
recorded figure of 1,619,257 kyo! mentioned in the "Treatise on Geography in
King Sejong's Reign" (Sejong chiriji, compiled 1454), the highest figure
recorded for the whole dynasty.6s
Not all fiscal problems were solved by the increase in land tax revenues. The
annual grain revenue at the beginning of the dynasty was about 400,000 som,
of which 40,000 som was used for soldiers' rations. There were problems, how-
ever, in accumulating sufficient reserves in case of emergencies. By 1403, how-
ever, the government held only about 20,000 som in reserve for military
provisions, and in 1413 it held in central and local government granaries only
about 357,000 som, and that was achieved only as a result of eliminating super-
numerary officials and reducing salaries and monastic estates.^69 Despite these
difficulties, however, these sums represented vast increases over revenues avail-
able to the late Koryo central government.
Nonetheless, the land tax was by no means the major source of revenue for
the state for two reasons: Confucian norms limited the size of the tax for moral
reasons, and tribute and uncompensated labor service provided the bulk of tax
revenues. The volume of these latter two sources of revenue were hard to cal-
culate because there was no common denominator for tribute and labor at the
time, but the phenomenon became more obvious after the seventeenth century
when the tribute taxes were converted to a rice surtax on land.