568 MILITARY REFORM
for that purpose, or paying the village's quota collectively. These measures were
taken as a defensive reaction on the part of some villages rather than as a pos-
itive policy advanced by the government, but on the other hand these village
cloth-tax associations appeared to have included yang ban members of local soci-
ety. By no means, however, were all yangban households throughout the coun-
try required to pay the military service taxY
Failure to solve the fundamental problems of military service taxes contributed
to the imsul rebellion of 1862, and that rebellion finally stimulated the Taewongun
in 1870 to issue a private order to all yangban households to pay the military
cloth tax in the name of their household slaves.^43 By the middle of the nine-
teenth century, military service had been converted mainly to a tax system rather
than a labor service system with the unfortunate consequence that when West-
ern and Japanese gunboats appeared off Korean shores, the armed forces were
too weak to defend the nation. Despite the changes that had taken place, those
who had succeeded in evading or gaining exemption from military taxes were
able to defend their privileges against the interests of the state. The yangban and
the official spokesmen for yangban interests put up an impregnable barrier against
kings and reformers, but the ever-expanding pool of tax-exempt men had gone
far beyond any narrow group of hereditary yangban aristocrats. That is why Kim
Yongsop found that in Yongch'on district of Kyongsang Province in 1792 only
15 percent of the households were paying service taxes.^44