PROVINCIAL AND LOCAL ADMINISTRATION 693
this covers the various types of evils in the Righteous Granaries today. What is
said to bc rightcous is in fact to do things that are not righteolls. What was origi-
nally meant to hcnefit the people, on the contrary has come to harm them. The
only thing I see is that the business has become bothersome [for the people 1 and
the clerks only act in corrupt fashion, and there is truly no henefit as far as relief
is concerned.^39In short, Yu ended his treatment of grain loan administration with remarks
condemning the Righteous Granaries, that is, the method of magistrate control
over loans to the peasantry. This meant that he had brushed aside the equally
damaging history of the village granaries of the Sui dynasty.
Ever-Normal and VillaRe Granary Systems
Yu interrupted his historical survey of Chinese relief and loan institutions at this
point to comment that the village granary system was obviously superior to the
righteous granaries heeause they were located in the villages. managed by the
villages themselves, and designed to encourage frugality and savings by the vil-
lagers to accumulate a reserve against the possibility of famine. The village gra-
nary reserves were never to be moved to the district or prefectural towns lest
these advantages be lost, but in contemporary seventeenth-century Korea the
grain reserves for the Korean grain loan system (hwanja) were in fact stored in
the district town and run by the magistrate's office. Righteous granaries were
also established in the district towns to administer annual loans to ordinary peas-
ants, but all the forms of corruption described by Hu Hung (?) and Ch'iu Ch'lin
for the Chou and Ming dynasties had been replicated in Korea: rigid adherence
to repayment deadlines. harassment for repayment, skimping on lending and
overcounting on repayment. forced loans in normal years to collect interest, peas-
ant flight to escape repayment, unauthorized collection of repayments from rel-
atives and neighhors of absconded debtors, and arbitrary collections on the basis
of false loan papers. "This kind of system is nothing but a net to ensnare the
people; it does not accord with the basic intention [of the system] to save the
people from suffering."
Yu criticized the Korean system for lacking the equivalent of village granaries
run by the villagers themselves. The Korean administrative structure for loans
and relief, therefore, did not replicate the best features of the Chinese system,
but rather of the universally condemned green-shoots system (ch 'ing-miao fa)
of Wang An-shih, adopted in 1069 in the Sung dynasty. The ever-normal sys-
tem was far better than both Wang's green-shoots and the Korean hwanja sys-
tems because it harmed neither the peasants nor the state and provided henefits
to both. It aided the farmer by maintaining a good price for his crops even in
the face of a glut of production, and keeping prices down during famine condi-
tions. In early Kory6 times ever-normal granaries had been established in the
capital and in the twelve IIwk or districts headed by magistrates sent by the cap-