OFFICIAL SALARIES AND EXPENSES 851although slavery could be reduced gradually by stricter laws governing inheri-
tance of status, in the interim daily discrimination against official slaves had to
be corrected by guaranteeing salaries for them as well as those of good or com-
moner status.
While flexible in his toleration of slavery for the moment, he was adamant
about the necessity for abolishing private property in land and replacing it with
land grants for the peasants. Given current conditions in which the majority of
cultivators were either poor or marginal landowners or tenants, he assumed that
the state would receive sufficient revenue to assume all costs for salaries and
expenses only if the redistribution of land were carried out and a land tax lim-
ited to 10 percent of production, and he based his financial calculations on the
assumption that each peasant household would be cultivating his proposed stan-
dard plot of roo myo or 16.7 acres, instead of the minuscule holdings of the
average cultivator in the mid-seventeenth century.
Yu concluded his study of the taedong system shortly after 1658, just before
expansion of the taedong tax to the upland districts of Cholla Province. Between
1653 to 1659 a major cadastral survey was then carried out undoubtedly as a
means of felicitating expansion of state revenues now that the land tax was fast
becoming the most important component of national revenue. Yu may well have
been living at one of the most opportune times for the adoption of a land redis-
tribution program, because after his death major surveys were conducted only
in 17 I 8-20, 1820, and 1898-1904, intervals of 50 to roo years.^69
As Han Woo-keun pointed out in his survey of socioeconomic conditions in
this period, the land tax (chonse) had been graded in a range of tax rates from
4 to 20 mal/kyo! according to fertility and climatic conditions by King Sejong
in 1441, but the assessments on land had been reduced gradually over the years
so that by the beginning of Sukchong's reign in 1674, almost all land was graded
at the lowest category (lower-lower) and taxed at the rate of 4 mal/kyo, with
some land in the southern provinces at 6 mal/kyO!. After 1708, the lower six
provinces had replaced tribute with the taedong land tax, and the rate of all land
taxes in 17 I 7 was 24 mal/kyo!, of which 12 mal was the taedong tax, 4 mal was
the old land tax, 2 mal was the samsumi for support of the three types of sol-
diers (including the new musketeers) in the army, 2 mal was for miscellaneous
expenses, 3 mal was for pheasants and chickens consumed by the district mag-
istrate, and I mal was for four types of firewood, straw, and coal for fuel. Since
Han found an estimate in 1737 that average production in husked rice was
300-375 mal/kyol or an average of 350 mal/kyo! for low-quality land, the com-
bined land tax rate was still low, only 20/15') mal or 7 percent of productionJo
Despite this reasonable tax rate, in the eighteenth century the central gov-
ernment was plagued by a chronic shortage of revenues. The Ministry of Tax-
ation was responsible for collection of the land tax and the Office for Dispensing
Benevolence for the taedong tax. Han Woo-keun found that in 17 I 7 annual rev-
enues for the Ministry of Taxation was no more than 130,000 som, but because