KING AND COURT 61 Iobviously felt that a restoration of dynastic fortunes had to be dependent on the
structure of the bureaucracy itself, as if formal structure could work a trans-
forming eUect on the honesty and efficiency of all officials. The Taewongun's
reforms may have bought a decade of time in a period of crisis, but too many
prohlcms were left unresolved. For example, Yu\ recommendation to aholish
the Royal Treasury (Naesusa) and to shift control of the king', finances to the
regular bureaucracy was essential for the effective use of resources for defense,
but it was only achieved under the Japanese-sponsored Kabo reforms of 1894.
The failure to reform local government in the seventeenth century meant the
accumulation of superfluous officials, duplicated costs, and the increased power
of local clerks to exploit the peasantry for gain, all of which contributed to the
r862 rebellion itself.
Yu also sought to surround the king with moral examplars as had been done
in the ancient Chou dynasty, the prime minister and two high councilors of state.
He wanted to curtail the king's freedom to choose his queens and concubines
not only by insisting on the supervision of the choice of consorts by a bureau-
cratic committee, but by defining the criteria of eligihility according to the norms
of the Confucianized ruling class - not that distant from the yang ban of his own
time. While his comments were somewhat oblique on this question, it was obvi-
ous that Yu was not comfortable with the prospect of the king, on a whim, select-
ing his queen from the lowest and most unrefined classes despite his sympathy
for the downtrodden in other areas of life.
Finally, with respect to the king's conduct of daily government business, Yu
chose to counter the tendency of monarchs to retreat to the cozy confines of their
inner palace quarters with their favorites because it would remove their contact
with the problems of the populace. He emphasized the necessity of maintain-
ing accessibility to officials. reestablishing personal contact with them to incul-
cate the ancient, feudal touch of personal loyalty, and reducing the aura of
inviolate superiority and arrogance that had developed in the royal lectures since
the late fifteenth century. That arrogance inhibited the lecturers from express-
ing their views and fulfilling their function of guiding the king to righteousness.
In almost all thesc problems, Yu Hyongwon was inspired by classical Confu-
cian norms in which the ruler functions as a symbol of standards, performs rites
to illustrate moral standards, reinforces the Physiocratic philosophy of the econ-
omy, and subjects himself to bureaucratic regulation and restriction in his expen-
diture of money, conduct of funerals and banquets, and management of daily
aUairs of state.