430 MILITARY REFORMruption if only the proper administrative arrangements were found. In fact, in
1750, his opposition to the land surtax as a substitute for the support system was
cited by one participant in the debate over the equal service reform.^99
Yu was, however, willing to use some revenues from land for military pur-
poses, but only to defray certain logistical costs of the military establishment.
Instead of adding a surtax to the existing land tax, he proposed using the usufruct
from specially designated military expense land (kunjaj6n). Yu designed this as
part of his plan to rationalize finance in general, for military units had evidently
been raising funds for expenses by exploiting fishing weirs, salt flats, and iron
smelters in territories under their jurisdiction. These revenues were used for
weapons repair, construction, banquets held after the annual spring and fall
maneuvers, and special banquets to honor the winners of skill examinations.
These post-maneuver banquets in particular were to be costly affairs, financed
at the rate of fifty mal per man, equivalent to the annual grain levy on four sup-
port persons. The costs would be deducted from the district's account of funds
derived from these lands.
Funds for the repair of weapons for both capital and provincial soldiers were
also to be paid for from military expense land revenues. For example, in the
case of the Military Training Agency a couple of land parcels in Kyonggi Province
would be set aside to defray weapons repair costs and the expected revenue would
be fixed at 2,400 kok (24,000 mal at IO mal per kok) for approximately 2,000
capital soldiers. The land was not to be administered or taxes collected by an
agency supervisor, probably to prevent the agency from gaining its own inde-
pendent revenue base, but would be handled by the regular district magistrate
as one type of special tax-exempt land.
By funding weapons repair and banquets for the Military Training Agency in
this way Yu hoped not only to abolish the arbitrary use of the fishing weirs, salt
flats, and smelters, but also to remove the financing of these needs completely
from all independent revenue-raising, commercial, and industrial activities run
by the Military Training Agency that involved employing ships, collecting taxes,
releasing soldiers for nonmilitary work, and hiring commoners as workers. "The
only thing that the agency should be in charge of are troops .... When it comes
to collecting taxes, naturally we have appropriate bureaus to do that; it is not
work to be done by the agency." It is hard to understand why he should have
opposed in principle the collection of taxes by a military unit since his support
taxpayer program already provided that part of the taxes paid by support per-
sonnel for individual duty soldiers would be "collected" in grain by the base or
duty station of the soldier, and part by the family of the soldier in his village.
It is also unclear why he would allow land taxes to be used only for military
expenses of units and not for the rations and equipment of soldiers. Setting aside
military expense land (kunjaj6n) certainly suited the tradition of separate mili-
tary colony lands in Korea, but the use of grain income from these lands was
hardly different in type than the use of a grain tax to finance military costs. One
can hardly help but conclude that his respect for the support taxpayer system