CASH AND ECONOMIC CHANGE 997trend that Tasan had hoped to redress. After 1806 the Office for Dispensing Benev-
olence and other capital agencies were authorized to mint cash as well because
the Ministry of Taxation had failed to keep pace with the increased demand for
cash since 1798 and the value of cash had risen once again. Centralization of
minting had lasted only for about twenty years, and in the early nineteenth cen-
tury both central and local government agencies began to shift responsibility
for minting to private parties to cut production costs. These private parties were
wealthy individuals who requested permission from officials and received a per-
mit to assume all costs for privately minting a specified amount of cash and paid
a tax for the privilege. Even though the central government refused to grant for-
mal permission for requests by private parties to mint cash, the practice con-
tinued, and the volume of cash probably increased during King Ch'olchong's
reign, from 1850 to 1864, and in 1874 Pak Kyusu attributed the increasing amount
of poorly made cash in the money supply to private minting. Because the mar-
gin of profit left to the private minters was so small, the only way they could
make a profit was to work their employees overtime and mint more cash than
was authorized in the agreement they signed with the officials.
TABLE 13
QUANTITY OF COPPER COINS MINTED, 1807-57
Year Quantity Minted (yang)
1807 300 ,000
1814 326 ,400
1825 36 7,5 00
1830 733,600
1832 784,300
1855 1,57 2 ,500
1857 916 ,800
TOTAL: 5,001,100SOU R C E: Won Yuhan, "Choson hugi hwap'ye chongch'aek e kwanhan ilkoch'al: Koaekchon ui
chuyong non'uirul chungsimuro" [A study of late Choson currency policy: Proposals to mint mul-
tiple-denomination cash], Han 'guksa yon 'gu 6 (September I97!), pp. 89-93,95-97.
Won Yuhan regarded these figures as displaying an escape from the confines
of traditional custom and ideology in favor of a pursuit of profit, and a change
in the mode of management of minting from public to private enterprise. He
also believed that the main reason why the requests by officials to mint multi-
ple-denomination coins disappeared after 18 I 6 was because the surplus in the
supply of copper and adequate profits of seigniorage rendered them unneces-
sary - although why nickels, dimes, and quarters should not have been a boon
to a nation of consumers lugging carts of penny cash around is hard to under-
stand. He also believed that this situation opened the prospect for the healthy
development of a cash economy, and by 1862 officials were even discussing the
possibility of converting taxes and official grain loans to cash.^44