PROVINCIAL AND LOCAL ADMINISTRATION 703
the system with new capital taken from tax revenues. When tax revenues were
not sufficient to bear this burden, in T 867 the government ordered that cash funds
from the first minting of multiple-denomination cash in the dynasty's history,
the I oo-eash, be used to refund the grain loan accounts. Simultaneously, the Min-
istry of Taxation, undoubtedly at the urging of the Taewongun, King Kojong's
father, adopted the village granary system, but simply as a means of eliminat-
ing corruption by magistrates and clerks and guaranteeing honesty in the col-
lection of interest for the central government, not to maintain the sanctity of the
loan fund itself. And the debts of any borrowers who absconded to avoid repay-
ment would then be reallocated among neighbors of the debtor, one of the chief
evils of the hwanja system that reformers had long been trying to eliminate. Oth-
erwise, many of the regulations of Chu's Hsi's village granary system that Yu
Hyongwon had advocated were adopted in law.^54
Yu's ideas about reform of the hWLlnjLl official loan system were neglected for
two centuries, but when reform was finally attempted after the shock sustained
by the Imsul rebellion, those ideas became the cornerstone of the most radical
proposals made between 1862 and 1867. Since these proposals were based on
the hoary traditions of Li K'uei's ever-normal system of the Chou and Chu Hsi's
village granary system of the Sung, one could hardly argue that they represented
the fruition of modern thought on the problems of relief and credit. But even in
the midst of a tide of reform sponsored primarily by the Taewongun, the gov-
ernment was not ready or willing to abandon the hWLlnjo loans. They were
regarded as indispensable to government finance because of a regressive, unfair,
and inadequate agrarian tax base without any major revenues from modem busi-
ness and industry. When the Taewongun oversaw the adoption of Chu Hsi's vil-
lage granary system. he distorted its original purpose by converting it to a means
for a more efficient method of tax collection rather than for stabilizing relief for
the peasantry.
CONCLUSIONOf the four problems of local administration mentioned in the introduction to
this chapter, Yu sought to eliminate discrepancies in the size and tax distribution
of individual districts by restructuring the hierarchy of local districts and mili-
tary garrisons to make local districts at each stage of the hierarchy of adminis-
tration more uniform in size and population. He wanted to create a stronger
provincial administration by advocating that the provincial governor be settled
with his family in the provincial seat for relatively long terms of office so that
he could become familiar with provincial affairs and gain control over them. At
the same time he hoped to control costs by trimming down the staff of assis-
tants of both governors and provincial military commanders. To eliminate the
endemic corruption of unsalaried clerks and mnncrs, he would have provided
them with standard salaries paid by the state, and to alleviate the burdens on