820 FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMYwere found wanting in quality, however, then in accordance with classical feu-
dal practice, only the "lord of the province" (toju), as ifhe were a lord of an ancient
fief, should be reprimanded for an act of discourtesy, but the items should not be
rejected or demanded again as clerks in the capital had been doing in the past.
Yu was serious about the ritual required in presenting letters of felicitation
(chonmun) and gifts of tribute on New Year's day and suggested that procedure
in use in either the T'ang or Yuan dynasties in China might be adopted. During
the Yuan dynasty, the Ministry of Rites presented commissioners from each
province to step forward before the king, read their letters of felicitation, pre-
sent gifts as tribute from the provinces, and receive a statement of "instruction"
(kyo) from the emperor. Yu suggested that this procedure could be used for any
ritual performance, the entertainment of guests, and provisions for the king's
support. The goods received would then be sent to the particular bureaucratic
ministry responsible for its disposition, such as the Ministry of Taxation. In short,
the responsibility for managing and paying for all ritual acts performed by the
king in addition to the costs of his upkeep would be taken over entirely by the
regular bureaucracy as a means of checking the unrestrained greed of a despotic
king. The model for the ideal form of limited monarchy was to be found in the
feudal arrangements of the Chou when ritual behavior conferred a religious sanc-
tion to restraints on monarchical excess. 10
Yu also cited Yulgok's words back in the late sixteenth century that tribute for
the king should not require more than a small supply of goods, and that the sage
kings of antiquity never believed that it was proper to mobilize the whole nation
merely to support the consumption of the ruler. Yu expanded on Yulgok's com-
ment by emphasizing the moral basis for tribute offerings: "The people offer
tribute on the basis of their righteous obligation [to demonstrate their loyalty to
the king] [~li], and the ruler receives them as an act of ritual propriety [ye]." Over
the years, however, the royal tribute presented from the provinces had come to
include an endless variety of tasty food items offered as frequently as two or
three times a month, a custom that began in the middle of the dynasty and was
never the custom at the beginning. All these levies were in addition to regular
tribute, and because the provincial governors were otherwise occupied, they
turned responsibility over to the district magistrates.
In Kyonggi Province, the magistrates then shifted the responsibility to the chiefs
of the major post-stations (Ch'albang) and redistributed taxes among the peo-
ple allowing brokers (kaek) and clerks to reap profits from bribes, gratuities, or
tribute contracting. As Yu put it, "the royal tribute runs through you like a roast-
ing skewer, and the gratuities are piled on you like a horse load." The actual
operation of the system had nothing to do with the righteousness and ritual pro-
priety that inspired tribute at the outset. The amount and variety of goods
demanded in all sorts of weather without consideration for spoilage or difficulty
in transport had destroyed the production of a thousand families and caused harm
to tens of thousands only for supplying things "that the ruler of men has no inter-
est in and have never passed before his eyes."