Yu's ANALYSIS OF CURRENCY 905Kingdoms period.3^9 It also noted that so-called silver jar money (iinhynng) had
also circulated with copper cash and bolts of cloth as well, but because of prob-
lems in the law both silver and copper cash had been dropped. It had been replaced
by the five-sac (sling in Sino-Korean pronunciation) cloth^40 but this cloth had
been devalued in thread count to two-or three-sac cloth. It was still inconve-
nient as a currency because it required labor to manufacture it, was too heavy
to carry around, and was eaten by rats when in storage. It provided a poor reserve
for the state when it needed relief against famine or expenses for the army.
The council's conclusion, however, was that despite the advantages of cop-
per coins, it would be too difficult to attempt to revive them at the time and far
simpler to print paper money designed like the IlUi-tzu of the Sung or the pao-
eh (10 of the Yuan dynasties. They recommended that it be stamped with the slo-
gan "Koryo Circulating Paper Money" (KorylJ t'onghaeng chOhwa) at a value
of one bolt of five-sae cloth, that all the "rough" cloth of lower than standard
thread count and quality be abolished, and that both five-sac cloth and paper
money be accepted as legal tender.^41
Even without his own commentary on the history of currency in the Koryo
period, it should have been obvious from his treatment of the last two notices
that he had already decided in favor of copper cash. In his own commentary, he
made it explicit that cash was the necessary medi urn of exchange because it would
help to fill the state's financial needs and promote people's standard of living,
but he wondered how it was possible that of all the countries of the world, only
Korea could have failed to put cash into circulation permanently. He rejected
the common argument that the main cause for failure was that the land was infer-
tile and the population poor, that is, that Korea had insufficient production of
surplus wealth to justify an active commercial market. because the quality of
the land in the country (hence average productivity) was not uniformly bad but
varied in quality and in that respect hardly differed from any other country. The
tastes of the Korean people, the distribution of the population in the universal
four categories of occupations, the means by which they earned their I iving, and
the exchange of goods to satisfy demands or trade surpluses were as much fea-
tures of Korean life as in any other country. In other words, both economically
and sociologically there was no special reason why Koreans could not have had
a cash economy.
Won Yuhan has argued that Yu's position here was unrealistic because of his
excessive admiration for the Chinese experience. Won felt that the situation in
Korea was vastly different from contemporary China and that Yu exaggerated
Korea's capacity to adopt currency because there had been no long tradition of
metallic currency, the Korean government was facing a fiscal crisis, and the
population was still suffering the effects of three invasions in the mid-seven-
teenth centuryY
Yu also felt that the argument that Korea lacked copper and tin for minting
cash was also misguided because those metals could easily be imported from
abroad, especially since the raw metals were not that expensive. It was obvious