86 EARLY CHOSON DYNASTYto offset hunger than to provide serious support for crack troops. Because of the
shortage of funds during wartime, King Sonja ordered only half the men to
undergo training in the capital for a tour of eighteen months and the other half
to cultivate military colony lands (tun jon) attached to the agency, abandoned
Buddhist temple land in Ch'ungch'ong Province, or land without visible resi-
dent owner-cultivators, at least until they returned to their homes. Some grain
was obtained from certain colony lands by collecting taxes from peasant culti-
vators to offset agency expenses while the Ministry of Taxation and Military
Ration Agency paid the rations of the troops.
Nonetheless, rations were still meager, less than what regular soldiers of the
Five Guards were getting from the payments of their two support taxpayers. The
government then divided the troops in half and assigned the inferior troops to
agricultural work to increase the rations of the better troops who remained on
duty. Although the government granted income from fishing weirs and salt fiats
to the agency, it still suffered financial difficulties, even after the war had ended.
Some of the Military Training Agency's men were semipermanent, salaried
soldiers while others were support taxpayers, not necessarily assigned in any
formal way to the duty troops. Since the agency was not reluctant to recruit slaves
into its ranks, some declasse yangban who either had been or were still owners
of slaves ended up as support taxpayers for the slave soldiers of the agency!
Because of severe losses of men from death or desertion, the agency reached a
low point of 2,000 troops and 700 support taxpayers in 1603, but despite the
appeal of some officials to abolish it altogether, King Sonja insisted on main-
taining it by cutting the salaries of his regular officials. He also prohibited pri-
vate slaves from its ranks to stimulate more commoners to enlist and impoverished
yangban to become support taxpayers for it.
He adopted another supplementary source of funds for troop rations in 1602
by instituting a surtax on land called the "three military skills rice tax" (sam-
sumi) in the amount of one mal per kyol in five provinces, a practice that was
approved permanently in 1606. The rate was raised slightly thereafter but reduced
to one mal again and confined to the three southern provinces in 1634.79 Despite
the establishment of a financial base, the unit's troops had a reputation for wild
and unrestrained behavior for the twenty years after they were established.8o Over-
all the agency represented an extremely poor response to the challenge of cre-
ating a force of musketeers for the national army.
Yu Songnyong's Plan for the Chin 'gwan System. Even though the chin 'gwan
garrison command system of the early Chason period had been rendered use-
less by the sixteenth century. Chief State Councilor Yu Songnyong still thought
that it ought to be restored. He admired the way it subdividcd every province
into regions with a main garrison (chujin) headed by a garrison commander
called Pyongma cholchesa, which functioned as a command and control cen-
ter for other garrisons and all the district towns (up) under its jurisdiction.^8! Yu
thought that thc chin 'gwan system operated with a kind of biological unity in