TRIBUTE AND THE TAEDONG REFORM 777
ute, sable pelts, had been preserved even though the animals themselves had dis-
appeared, and the cost of purchasing them in the capital had doubled. The Korean
people throughout the country were constantly plagued with demands for royal
tribute items no longer produced in their districts, food for the king, fees and
bribes to local and capital bureau clerks, and horses or oxen to the post-stations.
Cho appealed to the more modest tribute requirements of Chou China as
described in the Book of History. In those times the tribute ofYti only required
tribute in fish as the only live or perishable item for use in sacrificial offerings,
primarily because "the enlightened kings of ancient times did not impoverish
the people of the empire to fill their own stomachs." In Korea, however, per-
ishable royal tribute had become a major burden. Tribute in live fish and pheas-
ants had not been required for Kyonggi Province in early Choson, but it had
become a major ordeal for the people by the sixteenth century.
King Sejong, he argued, had only required that 300 households living along
the coast would provide tribute fish in a rotation system three times (a year?),
but the cost was so high that revenues were often insufficient. At the end of King
Songjong's reign in the T 490s, Son Sunhyo, the governor of Kyonggi, became
so concerned that fish for the entertainment of a visiting Ming envoy might run
out that he collected a double levy on the population, and that double tax quota
was later incorporated into the province's tribute quota as a standard levy.
By the end of the sixteenth century, the province had begun to collect a land
tax of two mal of rice for a parcel of four kyol of land in each district to provide
the cost of purchasing a single fish, and if the revenue was insufficient, it could
double the number of kyol taxed per district. Cho did not know how much fish
was currently presented from Kyongsang Province, but he did know that they
had to supply four palaces. Although it might seem like a small amount, the
thirty-two lIlal collected in taxes from sixteen kyol would produce enough grain
to feed a family of eight or nine for a month. In the short spring season when
the peasants could neither raise nor borrow the grain to pay for their tribute tax,
the magistrate's clerks dunned them for payment, or bound them up and put them
in jail if they failed to make payment on time. In effect, royal tribute in fresh
fish was depriving a dozen families of half a year's livelihood when the king
should have been showing compassion for their suffering. Cho asked that Sonjo
return to Sejong's more modest fish levy and abolish the double taxes introduced
by Son Sunhyo in Kyonggi Province.
To lend force to his argument, Cho pointed out that Emperor Hsiao-tsung (the
Hung-chih emperor) of the Ming who ascended the throne in 1487 had
announced that he was reducing his own daily consumption to one goat and one
chicken a day because he was afraid that ostentatious consumption on his part
would leave the old and sick without enough to eat, a good example of how a
son could change the laws enacted by his father without doing violence to the
principle of filial piety.
In Korea, however, royal tribute had started because of fawning and obsequious
ministers, and it was exacerbated by the extravagant consumption of King