ROYAL DIVISION MODEL 439
their own authority and removing them from service as sog'o soldiers. I 23 In the
short term, Yu was more concerned about utilizing slaves for state service sim-
ply because they constituted too great a percentage of both the current duty sol-
diers and the population at large to ignore. As indicated previously, he estimated
that there were about 162,000 sog'ogun (mostly slaves?) compared to 67,000
regular soldiers (chonggun) and their 132,160 support taxpayers of commoner
status in 1660. T 24 Nonetheless, they had to be segregated from soldiers of good
status and kept at home as a reserve force.
CONCLUSIONIn his usual fashion Yu Hyongwon began his study of the reform of military insti-
tutions by considering classical and historical literature that revealed that the
model institution to be emulated was the militia system of the ancient Chou that
was associated with the well-field method of land distribution. The essence of
this model was the training of ordinary peasants during peacetime and their
recruitment in the army during wartime, and the organization of those peasants
into military units organized around villages to maintain high morale, cooper-
ation, and solidarity. The system also reduced the cost of supporting the mili-
tary by having peasant soldiers provide their own rations and supplies as
self-sufficient farmers.
After the Chou dynasty fell the closest approximation to its militia system
occurred with the institution oftheJu-ping system in the Northern Wei that was
carried over into the early Tang dynasty. It purportedly obviated the need for a
standing army of professional soldiers supported by tax revenues, and it elimi-
nated the political threat to the state posed by commanders of long-term sol-
diers either on the frontier or in the capital - problems faced in China from the
eighth-century Tang through Ming dynasties and Korea in the Koryo dynasty.
When the time came for Yu to apply the lessons learned from scholarship to
the problems of military service in his own time, however, he confined his use
of the militia model to three principles: the assignment of military service accord-
ing to units of land area, the organization of low-level organization based on
village units and community solidarity, and the rotation of duty soldiers back
to the farm during the intervals between tours of duty. He believed that the exist-
ing system that required the assignment of military service on the basis of head
counts of the adult male population was doomed to failure, but otherwise he
adopted the model of organization used in the Royal Division established in 165 I
as the basis for his plan for reform.
The Royal Division model represented a continuation of the division of all
men liable for military service into rotating duty soldiers and support taxpay-
ers. Even though that system had been corrupted over the past two centuries by
the illegal exemption of duty soldiers, the inadequate financial support for duty
soldiers, and excessive taxation of support taxpayers, he believed that those prob-