TRIBUTE AND THE TAEDONG REFORM 787
tax rate at sixteen mal/kyol to provide sufficient revenues not only for tribute
items, but also for yamen expenses and salaries for district yamen, human and
horse transport costs, and medicine for the king. After he made his decision, he
urged the governor of Kangwon to canvass the population again, and the gov-
ernor reported that the public was in favor of the law.27
In the provinces, especially Ch'ungch'ong and Cholla, the large landlords were
apparently the leading opponents of the taedong land tax, but poor peasants may
have resented it as well because they must have suffered loss of income from
Yi Kwal's rebellion and a bad crop in 1623. Even though Injo called a brief halt
to the taedong substitute tax and reverted to assessments of tribute goods to alle-
viate the impact of a new land surtax in the wake of the rebellion, the peasants
may still have taken a jaundiced view of government fickleness over reform and
perceived the surtax as an additional tax, not a replacement for tribute. It may
thus be mistaken simply to blame rich landlords alone for opposition in
Ch'ungch'ong and Cholla to the taedong system at that time because many peas-
ants may not have perceived that the reform was in their best interest.
Furthermore, King Injo was persuaded by opponents of the reform after a cam-
paign of a couple of years that the peasantry did not like the taedong system.
He did his best to order his officials to conduct surveys, but he had to operate
on a poor system of communication and incomplete information. Even though
he did decide to eliminate the taedong system for Ch'ungch'ong and Cholla
provinces, he attempted to preserve it for Kangwon (as well as Kyonggi) when
he was told that the popUlation favored it. In short, the effects of the Yi Kwal
rebellion, the retreat to a half-taedong system to accommodate peasant hard-
ship, the apparent vacillation by the government in its determination to abolish
tribute altogether, and the imperfect means of assessing public opinion helps to
explain King Injo's partial abandonment of the reform by r625.
Ch'ungchong, 1652; P'yong'an and Hwanghae, [646The period after the Yi Kwal rebellion was hardly more conducive to the adop-
tion of a major tax reform because of the two Manchu invasions of 1627 and
- In r633, when the government was in desperate need of revenue and sol-
diers, King Injo was intrigued by a report from the Office of the Censor-Gen-
eral that the late ex-governor of Ch'ungch'ong Province, Kwon Pun, had
investigated tribute taxes and devised a reform system almost as good as the
taedong system, but he was not moved to adopt it.2s After the second Manchu
invasion in r 637, Censor-General Yi Sik proposed an extension of the taedong
system to raise funds for military expenses and to eliminate corruption of the
tribute system by clerks.^29
In 1638 Kim Yuk, the governor of Ch'ungch'ong Province, argued that the tae-
dong system would be suitable for his province because of the large amount of
arable land there. In an act of hyperbole motivated by his enthusiasm for reform
Kim estimated that even with a very low tax rate, the revenues from a taedong