444 MILITARY REFORM
the support taxpayer system. All the agency's musketeers (p'osu) and cavalry
(madae) would be recruited from residents of districts near the capital, and men
previously assigned from more distant regions would then be converted to sup-
port taxpayers. Support taxes would replace the rations or salaries previously
paid by the central government's treasury and financed by military colonies or
the samswni surtax. The support personnel under his new system would pay either
twelve mal of grain or two p 'il of cloth a year. As mentioned in the previous
chapter, this rcpresented a rate reduction from the current three p'il to two on
support taxpayers but an increase in the number of support taxpayers from three
to four.^3DEBATE OVER THE MTA AND SUPPORT TAXPAYERSYu's plan for reconstruction of the Military Training Agency was hardly a rad-
ical departure from current thinking, for the financial problems associated with
the agency had been under discussion at least since the 1650S when King Hyo-
jong was prcssing for an increase in the size of the agency as part of his mili-
tary expansion program. In 1657, when Yi Wan, commander of the agency, told
him that the agency only had a force of 5,650 men, he forthwith ordered an
increasc of troops to 10,000 men. His over-all plan was to create a capital guard
of 30,000 men since the Royal Division had been raised to 20,000 and the For-
bidden Guards from 600 to 1,000.
He was opposed this time not only by the fiscal conservative, Kim Yuk, but
by some of the most ardent supporters of his plan to build up the army for an
invasion of Manchuria, including Song Siyol and Song ehun'gil. Their objec-
tion was based on the hardship that the expansion would cause the common peas-
ants suffering from a series of bad harvests, especially since the agency's soldiers
were permanent troops supported by the Ministry of Taxation's grain stores in
addition to paymcnt from support taxpayers. They argued that instead of impos-
ing service and support tax burdens on the peasantry, the king should be dis-
tributing military grain rations to relieve thc starving, or at least postpone the
order until the following harvest.
Although forced to retreat from his goal, in 1658 Hyojong insisted on at least
a thousand-man increase in the Military Training Agency. Because of the diffi-
culty of finding men without service assignments to recruit, he hoped to solve
that difficulty by promoting support taxpayers to duty soldiers (sungha), and
transferring tribute rice paid by (official?) slaves to the government to the mil-
itary granaries. The first of these measures provided only temporary relief at
best, because for every man promoted to duty soldier, another had to be found
to take his place as a support taxpayer, and if not, then thc tax burden was
increased on the rest to make up the difference.^4
When he was forced to suspend the required rotation of troops from the south-
ern provinces to the capital in the fall of 1659 because offamine conditions there,
he still sought to maintain troop quotas by using tally and five-family mutual