522 MILITARY REFORM
weapons was not up to the standard of Japanese muskets. When the Ch'ing court
demanded 100 muskets from Korea in 1657, the government scoured the coun-
try for Japanese muskets but found only 60 good enough to send; of all the Korean
guns available, only 30 were accurate enough to pass muster.^56
Yu Hyongwon was very much in favor of the use of firearms, and he included
testing in the shooting offowling pieces or muskets (choch 'ong) in his proposed
major military skill examinations for soldiers of the capital guard, citing Ch'i
Chi-kuang's Chi-hsiao hsin-shu as a precedent. He also stipulated the exact
amounts of these fowling pieces. rounds of lead musket balls. and gunpowder
for each military garrison or civil district.57
Yet his quotas do not indicate that he imagined that the fowling piece or mus-
ket would become the standard weapon for all footsoldiers in the army. A strate-
gic prefecture (Taebu or Tohobu), for example, would only have 24 of them with
4,800 rounds of ammunition (200 per musket), while the smallest civil district
(hyon) would have but 6 muskets and I,200rounds.^58 Since there were only about
330 districts in the whole country, Yu could not have envisioned more than a
total of four to five thousand muskets for local units.
Assuming that King Hyojong in 1656 ordered 6,400 muskets to be made for
the governors and provincial army commanders in the two southern provinces
and was having about 1,500 muskets manufactured each year in the late I650s,
Yu's quota represented only about three or four year's production at that level.
One must conclude that he expected spears, swords, bows and arrows to remain
the main types of small arms for a national army of about 220,000 men, let alone
400,000 support personnel functioning as a reserve militia.
CannonHyojong was even more concerned with the manufacture of cannon than mus-
kets. There is no evidence that Hyojong ordered the casting of cannon after his
accession in 1649 until the end of 1652, when he told his officials he wanted to
improve the quality of Korean cannon by melting down all the copper or brass
cannon used on ships of the southern fleet and convert them to wrought iron
(suktong) because the brass cannon had frequently broken apart on firing. This
was opposed in early 1653 by Pak So, his minister of war, on the grounds that
brass cannon had long been in use and if they broke apart (or exploded?), it was
more the fault of inattentive officers than the guns themselves. Furthermore, con-
version would impose too heavy an economic burden on the people, the qual-
ity of workmanship would not be good, and the state lacked the financial resources
to do it; if it had to be done, it would be better to wait until the next bumper har-
vest. Hyojong refused to be put off and said that even if wrought iron (suktong)
cannon could not be made, at least they could be converted to (pig) iron, and he
countered with the suggestion that funds could be raised by selling off the brass
cannon. Pak later agreed to casting cannon in both both pig iron (such 0/) and
copper (brass) and tcsting both for comparison.^50 At the urging ofYi Wan and