DEBATE OVER MILITARY TRAINING AGENCY 461A censor reminded the king that the Southerners had tried to use the supreme
commander's headquarters to control all military forces, and he pointed out that
when Yu Hy6gy6n had been commander of the Military Training Agency, he
had issued orders on his own authority to expand his control of military forces.
H6 Ch6k and Yun Hyu were implicated mainly because their previous attempts
to gain control over military units appeared suspicious, and both were executed
on the grounds of failing to inform the king of everything they knew about the
plot. The government was purged of Southerners, and the military units the South-
erners had done so much to create or expand ended up in the hands of their West-
erner enemies.^43
The Forbidden Guard Division, 1681In 1681, a year after a conspiracy trial and purge had brought the Westerner fac-
tion back into power, Song Siy61, restored to court as a sinecured minister-with-
out-portfolio (Ch'ungch'ubu Y6ngsa), revived his pet project to pare back the
Military Training Agency and aimed his guns at the agency's special unit as well.
He instructed King Sukchong, as he had Hy6njong, that permanent soldiers
imposed a heavy cost on the state.The Military Training Agency and its Special Unit have become plagued with
problems. lance read a statement of Chu Hsi's that in ancient times, the soldiers
were all out in the countryside and were only provided rations by the state when
the army was on a campaign. The only reason that the army was permanently fed
by the state during the Sung dynasty was because they were constantly at war.
At the present time the cost of rations for the musketeers of the Military
Training Agency comes to 80,000 slim [of grain per annum], while the cost
of salaries for court officials is no more than 40,000 s6m. Furthermore, muske-
teers were not part of the old military system established by the founders of
the dynasty; they were established only after 1592 by the recommendation of
Yu Songnyong [a Southerner!]. I hear that before 1592, after the government
paid officials their salaries, it ordinarily had 300,000 sam left over [in the trea-
sury], and yet in those days they still said that state finances were impoverished.
Nowadays how could we even hope to have a balance of 300,000 sam'?Song's remarks illustrates three major points of policy: a civil official's objec-
tion that two-thirds of the national grain expenditures were devoted to the cost
of the Military Training Agency, that muskets were not that important for mil-
itary defense and were not justified by precedents established at the beginning
of the dynasty, and that the agency had been created by the most prestigious
member of the Southerner faction. For a disciple ofYulgok to degrade military
strength and the most advanced infantry weapon of the time must have meant
that times had changed, and indeed they had. Although Song was still smart-
ing from the humiliation suffered at the hands of the Manchus, the state was