450 MILITARY REFORM
or sog 0 soldiers to important capital guard units like the Military Training Agency- an attitude reflected in Yu Hyongwon's assignment of SOf('O soldiers exclusively
to be duty at homc as a provincial reserve force.
In any case, of the remaining 10,110 men, residents of P'yong'an and Ham-
gyong provinces had to be excluded because they were needed for frontier defense.
This left only 6,665 unregistered men available for scrvice. That only 6,665 of
54,000 hanjonf( could be used to increase the capital guard forces supported Yi
Wan's view on the question; it also attests to the restrictions imposed by status
privilege and discrimination on the state's ability to muster a national army.
Recruits of Unregistered Men to a New Unit
Since there were not enough men to replace the Military Training Agency, it
was decided to add these new hanj6ng recruits to the agency as a new and sep-
arate unit. Following the proposal made by Song Siyol and Hyonjong himself
to adopt the system of the Royal Division, H6 Ch6k recommended that the 6,665
men be divided into thirteen groups of 512 men.IS The 5I2-man group would
be divided into 127 rotating service soldiers (hosu or "household heads") and
38 I support taxpayers (pongjok) at the rate of three per soldier. ,6 These figures
can be translated in the following way: of the 6,656 men in the Special Unit of
the Military Training Agency, 4,953 would be support taxpayers and 1,65 I rot at -
ing duty soldiers, of whom only 127 would serve at anyone time. Ho also rec-
ommended another investigation of over 4,700 men, whose status as either good
or base (slave) had not been indicated in the provincial records, to see if more
hanjong could not be obtained for service.
The result of thc investigation for "idle males" confirmed Yi Wan's point about
the difficulty of finding recruits. As opposed to the I,ooo-man duty force and
20.000 rotating service soldiers of the Royal Division, or the 6,000-man Mili-
tary Training Agency, the supply of hanjong allowed for an increase of a mere
127 soldiers on actual duty, or a pool of 1,651 rotating duty soldiers. As Yi Wan
pointed out, replacing the entire roster of permanent Military Training Agency
troops with rotating scrvice soldiers - one of the key recommendations ofYu
Hyongwon - was impossible.
Hyonjong adopted Ho Chok's recommendations with only minor modifica-
tions. He instructed that of those hanjong discovered in the search for suitable
soldiers, youths younger than fifteen and men older than sixty be assigned duty
as support taxpayers, and that the healthy adults who were assigned rotating duty
would each be responsible for signing up their own support taxpayers. Then after
enough men were recruited for a regiment, some consideration might be givcn
to "making adjustments among the old soldiers," an oblique reference either to
Song Siyol's proposal to eliminate the agency through attrition, or more likely,
to H6 Ch6k's earlier suggestion about recruiting ncw soldiers to replace the troops
of the old Military Training Agency. 17 Furthermore, new troops who showed up