848 FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMY
CONCLUSION
The inspiration for Yu's financial reforms came from the taedong reform in the
first half of the seventeenth century, but he carried it much further than the cur-
rent law by expanding it to cover almost all costs of government except regu-
lar military service. The tribute system had already been converted to taxes levied
in grain and cloth through tribute contracting arrangements even prior to the
adoption of the taedong system. That system, therefore, was less important for
changing the real tax situation than for legitimizing current, illegal practice and
restricting it to a public system of tax quotas and rates based exclusively on the
amount of land under cultivation. Since Yu realized that the taedong system had
converted the national tax system by making the land tax its most important com-
ponent, he believed not only was it essential to carry out a complete and accu-
rate survey of all cultivated land to ensure a fair and equitable distribution of
taxes, but also that the time had come for a more equitable system of land dis-
tribution to provide stability for peasant livelihood as well as national tax rev-
enues. Unfortunately, Yu's expectation that a strong king would have been willing
and able to confiscate land from the powerful landlord class in Korea to redis-
tribute it to smallholders and tenants proved to be an Utopian and anachronis-
tic fantasy. Nonetheless, he was convinced that the taedong formula would
provide the key for a more rational system of budgeting, accounting, and finance.
The rational aspect ofYu's thought was certainly not a manifestation of West-
ern concepts of progress or modernity because there is no evidence that such
influence reached him at the time. He derived the notion of rational planning
and cost-cutting efficiency from the superior methods of classical Chinese gov-
ernment and late Ming dynasty finance. Although he agreed that the world was
always subject to change, neither he nor his intellectual predecessors had devel-
oped any theory of upward progress from primitive to more developed economic
systems, probably because they felt that contemporary times had never and prob-
ably could never reach the heights of the ancients.
He objected to royal tribute as a separate category of tribute not only because
it was an obvious excuse for unlimited demands on the peasantry, but also because
there was no precedent for it in feudal Chou China, let alone the post-Han bureau-
cratic age. He believed that the Chinese had always paid for the ruler's needs
by using national tax revenues, and had put an agency of the regular bureau-
cracy in charge of the ruler's finances (a measure not adopted in Korea until the
1894 Kabo reform).
He blamed the Korean custom of royal tribute on the absence of an age of sage
rule in Korean antiquity and a barbaric tradition established by the Koguryo court
over its hapless tributary, Okcho. Since this sign of barbarism had never been
routed out over the past millennium of Korean history, the time had arrived for
reconstructing the care and feeding of the king according to the model of moral