776 FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMYpopular welfare. The emperor guaranteed salaries to district magistrates in sil-
ver and cash for them to purchase their needs on the marketplace, and he had
forbidden them from collecting even one foot of cloth or a single chicken on
their own authority. The only tax burden the people had to bear was the regular
land tax and miscellaneous labor service. "Even the greedy magistrates do not
transgress the law to exploit the people; the population increases and the land
is productive."
Despite Cho's glowing report of late Ming prosperity, the Ming government
was suffering too many of the same difficulties that plagued contemporary
Choson: faulty and infrequent cadastral surveys, frequent extra charges and bribes
to make up for fixed low taxes and insufficient revenues, and disparities of wealth
between rich landlords and impoverished tenants. Nonetheless, the Ming tax
system had experienced a major reform in the adoption of the single-whip sys-
tem of taxation by replacing wheat and cloth taxes and labor service by silver
payments, and Cho and other observers were quick to observe the advantages
of that system. I 2
Cho was convinced of idyllic circumstances in southern Manchuria and north-
eastern China, possibly because of the stark conditions he described in the two
northern provinces in Korea where the fields were overgrown with weeds and
the population had been decimated. Only 10 or 20 percent of the families could
afford an ox, and family size was small. The people had suffered from years of
unauthorized and arbitrary levies on the people; they had to pay three p'i! of
cotton cloth for every eight kyol of land and an additional five p' if of cloth as
their annual military or labor service support obligation (pongjok). The agri-
cultural promotion agents (K wonnongsa) organized the peasant households into
large and small mutual aid groups (tong) and called them out to the fields six
times a month, and punished anyone who failed to appear for duty by levying
a cloth penalty. The peasants also had to perform service as a magistrate's run-
ner or assistant almost every day and had to pay a penalty if they missed their
duty. Families had to provide service personnel or substitutes no matter how far
they lived from the place of duty or how distant their family relationship, so that
the looms of a whole clan could be tied up in weaving cloth to pay the cost for
three or four absentees. They had no time or resources left to clothe their own
children and protect them against the cold, they were burdened by private debts,
and their official taxes were increased at every step in the tax process. If they
owed one mal of tax, they had to pay four mal to the magistrate's granary, an
extra eight mal to mill the grain, and four times the tax rate to cover transportation
of taxes to the capital. They also owed an additional five mal a year to purchase
the tribute quota in pheasants and deer. By the end of the year the people had
to sell their oxen and calves because they had nothing left.
While royal tribute for Hamgyong only amounted to 100 p'il of cloth per year,
the population was also held responsible for levies of fine cloth, a tax on salt
fiats, provision of minor food costs for officials, and a paper tax, all of which had
become standard practice over the generations. Another element of royal trib-