MILITARY FINANCE 471
personal aides) attached to the headquarters of the provincial governors, of which
17,045 were support taxpayers and military officers (kun ·gwan). Thus, the total
of soldiers, sailors, marines, and their support taxpayers of good status (as opposed
to base or slave) that served in the provinces was 426,745 men.
Finally, there were the soldiers and taxpayers of base status, primarily the sag 0-
gun in all provinces, totaling 19 r ,786 men, of which 3.762 were officers, 26,520
were horse soldiers (rnagun), I I 1,895 were infantry, and 49,609 were miscel-
laneous (reserve) soldiers (chapsaekkun). The other category of slave service-
men were the 69,350 post-station workers, who were not soldiers but were
included nonetheless in An's service statistics. An Chongbok also noted that he
was not including sago soldiers formed into platoons in the northern provinees.^6
An's figure of one million soldiers and support taxpayers is confirmed in at
least one place by the offhand statement of Second State Councilor Cho
Hyonmyong in 1751, who was trying to defend the 50 percent tax cut on sup-
port taxpayers enacted the year before by King yongjo. He was arguing that even
though there were some problems involved in the substitute taxes adopted to
make up for the loss in revenue, one could never expect perfection in reform,
and the situation was still better than when "over" one million men (or 1.2 mil-
lion to use the a rule of thumb for estimating the size of "over") were paying
the two-p 'il cloth tax.^7
The well-known memorial of Hong Kyehui in 1752 claimed that because of
various types of tax exemptions, only about 120,000 households were paying
the cloth taxes that were due from "500,000 yangy6k," which presumably means
taxes due from 500,000 adult males.^8 One can only speculate how to reconcile
this figure with the one million mentioned in An Chongbok's statistics, but if
one deducted the sog '0 and post-station slave servicemcn, the figure would be
reduced to about 750,000. It may also be justifiable to deduct the rotating duty
soldiers and a variety of miscellaneous troops as well, which might leave about
500,000 support taxpayers.
The lack of statistical accuracy in these estimates makcs it difficult to com-
pare eighteenth with seventeenth century quotas, but some figures exist to enable
a rough comparison. In 1640, for example, the Border Defense Command esti-
mated a total of 401,390 men listed on the military rosters for all eight provinces,
of which IO 1,9 I 4 were soldiers organized into regular military units (p'yi5n 0-
gun) and 299.476 were miscellaneous soldiers (chapsaekkun). These appear com-
mensurate with the approximately 400,000 soldiers estimated for the pre-lmjin
(1592) period. But these 1640 figures only represented numbers on ledgers, for
eight years later the same office reported that 25 I ,6 13 of this number could not
be located at all!9
Ledger quotas may havc borne little relation to reality, but there are other indi-
cations of high or increasing levels of troop and taxpayer quotas. For example,
the number of men registered for "extra-quota service" (([eg 'ocyi'ik. as opposed to
regular quota service. or aengnaey6k), must have heen relatively slllall prior to
1650, but by I 699lhere were 10,000 ofthem.'o Perhaps a better measure was the