992 FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMY
reformers and progressives like Yu Hyongwon as well as conservative opponents
of metallic cash. His sources for these concepts were not restricted to the Con-
fucian giants of antiquity, but to the practical statesmen of the Chou era, Kuan-
chung of the Ch'i state and Shang Yang of the Ch'in state. Kuan-chung had said
that "the fields and the market areas of a country were engaged in competition
[to attract] the people [to them], and gold and grain competed to be held in greater
esteem," but the secret to production was commitment by the people to culti-
vation of the fields (not gold or money) because it was the only route to greater
production and the wealth and prosperity of the country. Shang Yang also
remarked that gold and grain were related adversely to one another: "If gold [or
metal] were produced, then grain died; if grain grew, then gold died .... If you
liked to produce gold in your country, then both gold and grain would die, the
treasuries of the state would be empty, and the state weakened. If you like to
grow grain in your country, then both gold and grain would grow, the treasuries
would be filled to overflowing, and the state would be strong."
In other words, Kuan-chung, the spokesmen for the hegemons of ancient Chou,
and Shang Yang, the architect of Legalist materialism, shared with Mencius and
other Confucians the devotion to the supremacy of agricultural production. "Gold
[or metal]," that is cash or money, could only be produced as an adjunct to the
production of things of real value like food, while abandonment of agriculture
for commercial profits would end by reducing labor power and production. Unfor-
tunately, most people only thought of cash as a useful means of providing food
and clothing against the evils of famine and cold and stored as much cash as
they could in normal times as a hedge against flood, drought, and war, but they
did not realize that money alone was not enough.37 This point of view, by the
way, was not too far from that ofYu Hyongwon.
Despite his apparent agreement with Yu Hyongwon on the secondary rela-
tionship of currency to agriculture, Pak was more progressive than Yu in his pre-
scriptions for coinage reform. In a letter Pak wrote to the Councilor of the Left
Kim Iso in 1792, he expounded his views on the problems of adjusting the money
supply according to the volume of commodities in circulation by raising or low-
ering the value of money to create stability in commodity prices. Facing the cur-
rent shortage in the supply of copper as well as copper cash, he advocated the
minting not only of multiple-denomination cash in addition to "penny" coins,
but silver currency as well, with a guaranteed profit of seigniorage of 10 per-
cent in the process. Silver was bound to gain public confidence because the metal
itself was precious; Koreans were simply unused to using it as coins.
He also noted how silver ingots had been used primarily by Korean interpreters
and merchants to finance the China trade, but contrary to U ChOnggyu, he viewed
that trade as damaging to the economic interests of Korea because an annual
average of I 00,000 yang of silver had been exported to China to pay for luxu-
ries and perishable items like felt hats. Once Korea began to mint silver coins,
it would reduce the silver supply available for export, so that the government