Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions. Yu Hyongwon and the Late Choson Dynasty - James B. Palais

Yu's ANALYSIS OF CURRENCY 917

not interfere with proper moral standards, only with the abusive use of social dis-
tinction to enslave the commoner population to the uncompensated service of
the yangban, a class of people who owed more to the inheritance of their status
from their forebears than their own inner virtue. His reasoning on this issue, to
provide government compensation for travel to eliminate unjust labor demands
by traveling yangban without thereby destroying the necessity of respect by social
inferiors for their superiors, was very similar to his argument to replace slavery
with wage labor because he had assumed that wage laborers would continue to
show respect for their employers instead of claiming equal status with them.

Government Regulation of the Exchange Rates

Of course, in this chapter, Yu's primary interest was the circulation of currency
itself more than rectification of social evils, and he insisted that the value of coins
could be established by the government in relation to rice, cloth, and silver. In
other words, once cash were minted and the government controlled the quality
and quantity of the money, it could set prices of those three basic goods per-
manently in cash. He worked out a schedule of exchange rates himself after
reviewing standards set for taxes and salaries since ancient times and set the pri-
mary standard exchange rate of his new coin at 200 coins (mun) per tael or ounce
(yang) of silver, or 20 mun of cash for each tenth of a tael (chon) of silver (.005
tael of silver for each coin or mun). Twenty copper coins would be equivalent
to I mal of rice or a five-"foot" length of cotton cloth (myonp ()). He determined
the ratios of the standard units - husked rice (paengmi), a bolt of cotton cloth
(myonp'o), cash (chOn), and silver (un) -as shown in table 10.^60

TABLE 10

Yu's PROPOSED EXCHANGE RATES

Substance Cotton Cloth Cash Silver Rice

Cotton, 1 f! 'il 120 mun .6 yang 6 mal

Cash. 20 mun 5 feet .1 yang J mal

Silver, I yang I p'il, 20 ft. 200 mun 10 mal

Rice. 1 mal 5 fect 20 mUll .1 yang

Nor E: I p'il or I bolt of cotton cloth defined as 30 "fl." by 8 "inches," of 6 sung thread count

(480 warp threads).

He claimed that although Chinese authorities allowed cash to circulate
(freely?), they also set prices to avoid fluctuations. Someone had pointed out to
him that despite Yu's admiration for government price-fixing in China, this pol-
icy had not succeeded in establishing constant prices in contemporary times
because the price of a mal of rice cost no less than several hundred coins, and
that private families who had accumulated savings of twenty or thirty thousand
cash were not regarded as wealthy.