CONFUCIAN STATECRAFT 49
The Tribute Tax and Lahor ServiceWhen the Choson dynasty was first established, peasant households had to pay
local tribute in products specific to their own region to the king and royal fam-
ily (chinsang), various burcaus of government in the capital (kongmul), and the
Chinese emperor (sep ae), and also transport thesc tribute goods by boat and
horse, and provide entertainment costs for visiting envoys, labor service for horse
guides, and attendants at funerals, and rituals. In addition, provincial governors
and magistrates were also required to present tribute articles to the king and the
capital in their own names, but they eventually made the peasants responsible
for the goods.
Yi Songgye, the founder of the dynasty, established a General Directorate for
Determining Taxes (Kongbu sanjong-dogam), which advised him to review the
tribute ledgers (kong an) of the Koryo dynasty to reduce the tribute levied on the
population.7° Even though the Choson tribute system was supposed to have been
modeled on the T'ang system, it did not follow the T'ang capitation tax for trib-
ute (cho2, tiao in Chinese) because the Koreans used the term for tribute, cho^2 ,
to mean a household tax payable in any medium, and personal tribute (sin 'gong)
paid by outside-resident official slaves (oeg6 nobi) to support those selected from
the province for duty in the capital (s6nsang nobi).
Labor service in the manufacture of tribute products was also required in addi-
tion to transportation of tribute levies. This kind of labor service involved boat
construction, the mining of metals, the gathering of husks, straw, coal, and fire-
wood, and hunting for game. Gold mining in the districts of Hwaju, Anbyon,
and Tanch'on in Hamgyong Province up to 1425, for example, required eighty
days of labor service per year, estimated at ten times the value of one year's trib-
ute levy. In 1470 the revised labor service law included tasks that were involved
in the fabrication or transportation of tribute goods, or the entertainment of envoys
involved in international tribute payments: cutting ice for the capital, gold min-
ing, repairing buildings, constructing ranches, digging coal, cutting straw, smelt-
ing iron, tending horses, fishing, and digging tombs. Special service included
wall construction, transporting rice, carrying Chinese envoys in palanquins, build-
ing new ranches, erecting tents for guests, brewing nitrate, transporting wood
and stone, building dikes and ditches, finding fibrous plants, making plaster.7'
There was no schedule of tribute levies by household for a province or even
the country at large. District tribute quotas were originally set according to the
amount ofland in each jurisdiction, and magistrates had the authority to deter-
mine the distribution of tribute by household in their own districts. Since King
T'aejo (Yi Songgye) at the beginning of the dynasty prohibited peasants from
moving from their home villages and assumed that the village population would
never change, he forbade magistrates from adjusting tribute quotas listcd in the
tribute ledgers (kollgan) according to annual changes in population. Since peo-
ple continued to move and die without respect to T'aejo's expectations, the house-