266 SOCIAL REFORM
to auxiliary soldier and allowing them to form special units intermediate in sta-
tus between the units composed of (the sons of) petty officials and slaves, or
even manumitting them in return for a lump sum payment of the total amount
of tribute due between their current age and their age of retirement.^203 Even
though the large capital required would have limited the opportunity to only a
few, this discussion presaged a significant liberalization of the rules for escap-
ing the burdens of slavery.
Chongjo went still further in 1797 when he approved a proposal to drop all
terminological distinctions between good and base (slave) status troops among
the provincial samsu (the three types of soldiers of the Military Training
Agency) to remove the social stigma from military service and increase the num-
ber of recruits. Hiraki marked this as an epochal decision, for up to that time
slaves had to receive an exemption from slavery before they could become com-
moners, and now they became commoners without having to pass through that
process.
Several suggestions were also made that official slaves be called support or
service personnel instead of slaves, in effect converting official slavery into some
form of obligatory service for commoners. This was not exactly the plan that
Yu Hyongwon had proposed, which was to convert all slaves into hired labor-
ers, but at least Chongjo presided over the partial elimination of status distinc-
tions even though he had declared it was against his principles to do SO.204
King Sunjo's Abolition Order of 1801. In 1801, half a year after Chongjo's
death, King Sunjo ordered the abolition of most but not all official slaves (naesi
nobi): those of the Royal Treasury, palace estates of royal relatives (kungbang),
and the capital bureaus of the regular bureaucracy. The records of 66,067 slaves
were burned, but official slaves attached to the Ministries of Works and War, the
offices of provincial governors and district magistrates (kwannobi), the nation-
wide post-stations, and of course, private slaves, were not affected by the edict.
The edict also had no effect on the reduction of criminals to slave status in the
future. Liberation only affected tribute-paying official slaves listed on the slave
registers, but of these probably all but a few thousand were liberated by the
decree.2os
Since Sunjo was a minor acting under the instruction of the dowager regent,
King YOngjo's second queen, Chongsun,206 and most high officials were mem-
bers of the Patriarch's and pyokp a factions who were sympathetic with the idea
of abolishing most official slaves, he obviously does not deserve credit for the
decision.^207 The instruction to the people (yun'um) issued in his name shortly
after the abolition indicated an important shift in the officially sanctioned atti-
tude of the throne toward slavery. Chongjo had taken several steps to liberalize
the means of escape from slavery but was reluctant to condemn status distinc-
tion in principle. Sunjo's edict, on the other hand, claimed he was motivated by
one of the principles for the governance of a state in the Doctrine of the Mean
that the ruler was responsible for "treating his people as [his own] children."
What this meant was that it was improper for the ruler in governing his people