Roy AL DIVISION MODEL 425be excused from military service at the age of sixty. Yu himself had discovered
that cunently men past retirement age either found it impossible to obtain their
old-age exemption, had to pay a gratuity of thirty p'il of cloth to obtain it, or
even if they did. found themselves enrolled as beacon station soldiers beyond
their retirement date. The gratuities were so onerous in some cases that the men
preferred to stay on service rather than pay them. In the worst case. even death
did not provide relief from oppression. for the clerks collected a death gratuity
in cloth (mulgo injong po) amounting to twenty to thirty p 'il (ten to fifteen times
the current seventeenth-century annual military cloth level) for the trouble of
filling out the death certificate.
The plight of the widows and surviving relatives was particularly poignant:
I once saw a case in a village wherc a soldier died and his father wanted to take
care of the death gratuity. He rushed around from one direction to the other for
over a year but was not able to make plans for the funeral. and because his wife
was not able to pay the fee, she was made a prisoner and locked up in jail.
[When I saw her there]. her hair was a mess and she was crying in distress. It
was so pitiful I can't bear to talk about it.^88What was Yu's solution to this rather blatant violation of the law? He simply
insisted that after his land grant system was implemented, there had to be strict
observance of the regulation that ended military service when an able-bodied
adult male reached the age of sixty or became seriously ill, at which time the
soldier's land grant would be returned to the state. He provided no reason to
expect that officials in the future would be any more willing to forego the prof-
its of extortion and squeeze than at present.
Difficulty ofEnfcm:ing Rules: Trainingfor Off-duty Reglllar Soldiers. Another
drawback of the support system was the difficulty in regulating training for off-
duty regular soldiers. Since the system restricted service to only one fraction of
the number of adult males who served on duty for only one or two months in a
period that could range from several months to four years. the ofl-duty men might
be neglected altogether and left untrained. Conversely, they could also be
exploited by local officials for nonmilitary duties. Yu hoped to solve this prob-
lem by requiring that during the sixteen-month interval between shifts, off-duty
infantrymen take military skill examinations once a month in their home dis-
trict and assemble at the regional command ganison (chin'gwan) twice a year
in the spring and fall for training camp. To provide them with some respite from
local training sessions. they would be given two months of leave both prior to
and after the completion of their two-month tour of duty.8^9
Yu admitted that this system might impose a heavy burden on the corps of
regular soldiers, but it was still an improvement over current conditions where
both duty soldiers (infantry and cavalry) and support taxpayers had to double
up as provincial .lOR () soldiers subject to examination and inspection once every
ten-day week in addition to serving tours of duty or paying cloth taxes. Although