CASH AND ECONOMIC CHANGE 991U was convinced that the current high value of cash had been created because
too much cash, probably two to three hundred thousand strings (two to three mil-
lion coins), had been collected from the people in taxes and was being held in
reserve by the treasuries of state officials and agencies. No more than IO or 20
percent of those tax receipts had been spent and recirculated into the market, and
in recent years the percentage of retained cash savings had grown even greater
as military units and divisions had been buying and storing copper and iron.
The solution to the problem was simple: just order all government agencies
to buy grain with their cash reserves or loan it to the people to recirculate it. In
addition all copper and other metals in reserve should be used to mint more cash
not only in "penny" cash, but in multiple denominations of ten, a hundred, or a
thousand. These remedies would solve the problem of cash shortage, the exces-
sively high value of currency, and the stagnation of circulation of both cash and
commodities, because then cash would be performing its "ever-normal" func-
tion of creating a balance between goods and currency and stabilizing prices.3^5
Pak ChiwDn. Pak Chiwon was another of the famous travelers to China who
wrote a well-known travelogue after his first visit in 1779 called Diary of My
Trip to lehol (Yi5ha ilgi). When King Chongjo ascended the throne in 1776, Pak
decided to go into self-imposed exile because one of Chongjo 's closest officials,
Hong Kugyong, intensely disliked Pak's patron, Hong Naksong, who was a mem-
ber of the pyokp a faction that had supported King YOngjo when he committed
filicide against Chongjo's father, the Sado crown prince in 1762. Like Pak Chega,
Hong Taeyong, and many other travelers to China in this period, Pak Chi won
was greatly impressed by the splendor of late Ch'ing civilization, the architec-
ture, the boats, and carts, the tiles, and standards of measure as well as agricul-
ture, sericulture, and animal husbandry. He entered a career as an official in the
late 1780s, and in the late 1790S submitted a land-limitation scheme to restrict
the private estates of the landlords.
Because of the content of one of his popular novels, The Biographv of Mas-
ter Ho (Hosaengjon), he has earned a reputation as a progressive thinker on the
matter of commerce and trade because the protagonist of the novel bOlTowed
money from a wealthy man, led a band of robbers to an island off the coast, and
accumulated a fortune by trading with the Japanese. He then returned to the penin-
sula and distributed his wealth in humanitarian, Robin-Hood fashion, to the
impoverished peasants. During his conversations with friends Master Ho extolled
trade with China and praised it as the means for enriching Korea, and denigrated
the awkward and impractical traditional long-sleeved, white-cotton clothing of
the Korean elitc.^16
A number of scholars have praised Pak for his progressive views, but there
was also a strong conservative tendency in his thought that affected his ideas
about commerce and currency. He, traditionally, believed that agriculture was
the primary source of wealth, that commerce could only play an auxiliary role
in the economy, and that cash was only a means for circulating goods, not a
source of tangible products or real wealth. This point of view was shared by