908 FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMY
mainly on punishment to coerce the use of paper bills. However, from 14IO to
1415 he required payment in paper money for all prebendal rents paid to des-
ignated officials and government offices (probably constituting most if not all
the land in Kyonggi Province), tribute taxes on slaves and base persons, repay-
ment of government grain loans to peasants, one-third the salaries paid to offi-
cials, and a number of minor taxes on merchants and artisans. Technically
speaking, he may have missed Yu's criteria by a few percentage points in each
case, but it would appear unreasonable to charge him with lack of effort in pro-
viding support and guidance. The unwillingness of the popUlation to accept paper
money at face value could easily have derived from their belief that the money
had no value of its own, but a modem economist might conclude that their sus-
picions were the products oftraditional psychological prejudice that could only
have been broken down by the kind of aggressive support for the use and accep-
tance of cash that Yu favored.
After 1425 when King Sejong minted cash, he also required cash payments
for slave tribute, and taxes on merchants, shamans, and home sites, but he did
not require it for payment of the land tax, replacement of tribute levies, or the
military support tax (instead of cloth). He also relied heavily on coercion and
punishment to enforce the use of cash but did not take sufficiently aggressive
action to import sufficient copper to guarantee enough cash for the economy.
As a result, he soon found that the restriction to cash as the only legal tender
for transactions in the marketplace had simply brought market activities to a
standstill. He did not anticipate that because ofthe copper shortage, copper itself
or items made from copper would become more valuable than the cash, and
that people would melt down copper and smuggle it out of the country to make
greater profits than by using cash - a lesson that Yu had learned from the expe-
rience of the Liu-Sung dynasty in the fifth century and Liu Chih of the T'ang
dynasty in the eighth century. These developments, however, could have been
prevented by adoption of another ofYu's admonitions, to import enough cop-
per from abroad to ensure a sufficient supply of cash, but Sejong failed to live
up to this responsibility.
After 1469 King Songjong tried to introduce paper money again, but he did
not require larger payments of ordinary taxes in paper money than had been
attempted before, and in 1470 he retreated by permitting official slaves to pay
their tribute in grain or cloth. Throughout the decline of paper money and cash
into the early sixteenth century, there was no evidence that any king made a seri-
ous attempt to convert the majority of tax payments into cash or paper money.
The one criticism about the weakness of the central government's effort might
have been the lack of sufficient pressure from the king and capital to force lesser
officials and district magistrates to accept paper money and pay for purchases
with either cash or paper money. Although it would appear unreasonable to place
blame on the king and his court for the inertia of the lower bureaucracy since it
was such a common feature of centralized bureaucratic regimes, there may be
no other scapegoat to find if one insists on searching for human error rather than