990 FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMY
Pak Chega, whose ideas on commerce we have explored above, complained
about the poor quality and lack of uniformity of Korean cash in comparison with
Ch'ing coins of the K'ang-hsi and Ch'ien-lung eras, and he suggested the pos-
sibility of importing superior Ch'ing coins into Korea, an idea that had been
mentioned before in Korea but not attempted until the late I 860s. Pak favored
the import of Ch'ing cash as the means of alleviating the perennial cash short-
age and price deflation that usually plagued the Korean economy. .l3
U Ch6nggyu was another scholar-official of the late eighteenth century who
had relatively liberal economic views for the time. In 1788 he had sent a memo-
rial to the throne urging the adoption of silver currency, and in his Rustic Views
on the Management of the Country (Kyongje yaon) he wrote that gold (or metal,
i.e., metallic currency) was as valuable to the country as grain and was there-
fore the secret to national wealth and the prosperity. The use of silver had been
proven useful as a medium of exchange in China because it was both lightweight
and valuable, and for that reason Korean interpreters and merchants who accom-
panied tribute missions had taken large quantities of silver with them to pur-
chase goods in Yenching and promote trade with China.
Because the export of silver had led to the exhaustion of Korean silver reserves,
the government should have been stimulated to increase silver mining, but to
the contrary officials had condemned the silver shops in Korea, and the gov-
ernment had banned them, allowing only copper and copper shops to exist. But
if the silver shops had been so bad, how could the copper shops have been guilt-
free? On the contrary, U Ch6nggye continued, both silver and copper shops, and
by extension the use of silver and copper currency. were beneficial. Local offi-
cials should be allowed to recruit people to engage in the minting of silver cash.
It would only become a problem if that activity took the peasants away from
agriculture. but in fact it would create more opportunities for employment for
peasants without land or for those who were not engaged in agriculture by stim-
ulating wealthy merchants to invest their capital in hiring laborers to do the min-
ing of silver and minting of cash, and they would pay taxes to the state as well.
The condemnation of silver shops and silver currency was obviously erroneous
because the merchants would earn a return on their investment, and the land-
less workers would earn enough to support themselves, "benefiting both private
and public interests alike."34
He also intended that silver coins circulate along with copper cash because
copper cash had been in use as the most important medium of exchange since
the Chou dynasty in China. Imbalances in commodity prices had always been
regulated by either increasing or decreasing the money supply. Like Yu
Hy6ngwon, he commented that Korea had in its past experimented with silver
jar money and paper money, but they had not worked out because they were too
light or irregular. Cash had now been in circulation for over a hundred years,
but the difficulties involved in using it (shortage of supply?) had led some to
advocate its abolition. This was obviously mistaken because similar proposals
made in the Han and Chin dynasties in China had been rejected.