KING AN D COURT 587
Altogether, as many as a thousand men from Kyonggi Province might be allo-
cated for the labor of transporting a bier to the place of burial. The clerks dis-
patched to each district to supervise the work would quarter themselves in
peasants' homes and demand that the peasants either perform work for them or
pay cloth fees of as much as thirty to forty p'i/ of cloth. Those too poor to pay
had to work days or even weeks for these clerks. For that matter the costs of rit-
ual utensils was divided up among the districts along the funeral route as well
as labor service. Even the gravediggers often had to leave their homes for sev-
eral days to do the work at a gravesite some distance from their villages.
Yu claimed that labor service for funerals was worse than the land tax, a bur-
den equivalent to an emergency levy in time of war. He suggested banning the
use of human labor for bearing biers and replacing it either by horse-drawn vehi-
cles or by cooperative labor from the neighbors of the deceased. He was sure
that the wording of the Li-chi clearly described horse-drawn carts instead of man-
ual portage of coffins and biers, standard limits on the use of human labor, and
community cooperation in the conduct of funerals.
Yu also prescribed that soldiers who happened to die during guard duty on
the frontier were also entitled to immediate temporary burial by the members
of the man's unit, and state-assisted transportation of the corpse back to his home
village. He felt that this kind of assistance was necessary because a number of
soldiers had died from the cold on the northern border and their corpses were
simply dragged to the side of the road and left as carrion for dogs and pigs, "a
sight so pitiful that [ cannot bear to look at it." Some poor soldiers on duty in
the capital away from their provincial homes had died from the cold as well,
but nothing had been done to transport their bodies back home either and "the
high ministers of state and all the officials see them with their own eyes and
look upon it as if it were an ordinary matter without giving it a thought, a sign
that government has failed [to do its duty]." Yu charged that if there were no
relatives available to take the body home, the state had the responsibility for
providing permanent interment and the captain of the man's unit should lead
the troops in accompanying the funeral bier and offering wine and drink in the
burial rite.
Royal tombs and burial areas in general were to be protected by law from cul-
tivation or the grazing of animals, and the dimension of the forbidden territory
should vary with the prestige and rank ofthc individual. Yu also wanted to limit
the indiscriminate use of arable and grazing land because So K y6ngd6k (d. 1546)
had complained that people had been locating new grave sites at places deemed
lucky by the geomancers, which sometimes required that old graves be disin-
terred and the bones removed to different places. 10
Although Yu concerned himself with reducing the labor service associated
with state-supported funerals, and not just limiting the expenditures for royalty,
his primary object here was to limit the king's power to requisition funds and
labor for funeral expenses.