MILITAR y SERVICE SYSTEM 567Chongjo's reign in the late I 77os, men were still evading service by registering
with government schools or private academies as students or school officials or
getting registered as yuhak without respect to their scholarly qualifications. The
rich and influential were signing up for low-rate service if they could not escape
taxes altogether, and some tax evaders were able to register with local gentry
associations (hyang'an) by donating money to their support. Men were begin-
ning to form associations called kye according to function or occupation (like
local clerks, local gentry, military officers, even official slaves) to protect them-
selves against military taxes (a practice called kyebang). Sometimes a whole
village (kyebangch 'on) would sign up with an official for low-rate service to
reduce the tax burden collectively. To maintain tax quotas officials were con-
tinuing to pile up taxes on the remaining members of the village, the '"neigh-
bors and relatives." And officials of various types continued to recruit additional
men for service or tax payments under an almost infinite variety of titles.
Writing in the early nineteenth century, Chong Yagyong (pen name, Tasan).
noted that in 1750 presumably 500,000 men of good status were paying four
yang of cash (the cash equivalent of the two-p 'il cloth rate), or a total of 2,000,000
yang in revenue to the state. Even though the rate was cut in half, by the tum of
the century the number of cloth taxpayers had in fact increased to something
over two million people, four times his estimate of the number in 1750, and dou-
ble the highest estimate of the actual total of taxpayers in other sources.
Although the rate was supposedly reduced to two yang. the total revenue had
doubled to 4,000,000 yang by his estimate. "If you consider that the benefit of
a 50 percent tax cut resulted in a doubling of the taxes collected by the local
districts, can you say that this country has laws,?"4^1
Even though the number of taxpayers was increasing. military service quo-
tas established in 1750 that were supposed to be revised periodically in accor-
dance with changes in population became fixed quantities distributed among
rural districts, without any respect whatsoever to the adult male popUlation or
the number of men actually available for tax payments. For that matter, Kim
Yongsop found that district military support taxes quotas were established as a
factor of government costs or requirements rather than simply as a function of
the adult male popu lation even before 1750. This development led to some fa~
cinating adjustments. In 1790 some magistrates in the Hwanghae and P'yong'an
areas had begun levying household taxes as the only fair and feasible way to
distribute the tax burden, but the central government refused to adopt the method
for the entire country, primarily because King Chongjo treated the equal-ser-
vice legislation as an ironclad legacy from his grandfather that could or should
not be amended. Some villages began paying the quotas collectively on their
own, in the fashion of the village-responsibility system the government attempted
to adopt in the early eighteenth century, distributing the burden equitably
among households, including in some instances yangban as well as common-
ers. They did this by forming military cloth tax associations, donating land to
be used for paying the village's military tax quota, contributing to funds used