CENTRAL BUREAUCRACY 631the jobs there. Yu remarked that the hiring of young boys was never practiced
in classical times and ought to be discontinued in the future. He wanted to allow
young men from the age of sixteen or older to enter service without respect to
the status of their parents. After they were capped, the best would then be cho-
sen to fill vacancies in the ranks of clerks, and the lesser qualified men could
become runners or return home to the village to engage in agriculture. The juris-
diction of these service personnel was handled by the prime minister (T'ien-
kuan) in Chou times, but in contemporary times the chief official of every office
would have responsibility for appointing and recording the names of all employ-
ees. The names would be sent to the Ministry of Personnel, which would then
send them to the Ministry of Taxation to pay their salaries.
The lowest level of service official would be the attendants (Chong'in), two
of which would be assigned to every Tangsang official and one for each Tangha
official as his personal servant. Counting the private slaves as well as govern-
ment attendants, the law would limit the total number to twelve for officials of
rank 1 A down and three for rank of seven or below, to restrict excessive expenses
for these servants.
Yu devised other regulations to limit expenses for carriages, sedan chairs, and
horses with accompanying attendants. Only rank one and two capital officials
would be allowed to ride a sedan chair, a habit that had been begun by the first
emperor of the Ch'in dynasty. Even though the Choson system allowed only high
officials the privilege, by the seventeenth century all officials were doing it. Despite
Yu's proclivity for raising the status and treatment of slaves and clerks, however,
Yu wanted to limit this privilege only to princes and the prime minister and extend
the right to ride carriages to others only if carriage-riding in the future became
a popular custom among the general population. In other words, men of lesser
status should not be granted privileges reserved for the truly superior.
In addition, he wanted to abolish the use of guides for horses except for gov-
ernment horses loaned by post-stations to officials on duty. Yu's method was to
provide strict guidelines for the use of servants and assistants according to the
rank of the official to curb ostentatious display of good fortune and power, and
to reduce total government expenditures.^59
Official RanksYu then turned his attention to rectifying some of the fundamental errors in the
system of official ranks.6o One of the leading problems was prejudicial treat-
ment of military officials. Not only were civil and military ranks strictly sepa-
rated by two distinct sets of terms, but the highest rank military official was
lowered to the third rank. Inspired by Ma Tuan-lin, who had written that only
in later times (after the fall of the Chou dynasty) were civilian and military offi-
cials divided in two so that civil officials had no knowledge other than their lit-
erary skills and military officials were no longer expected to be literate, Yu wanted
to bring military officials to the same level as civil officials with separate but