DISINTEGRATION OF THE EARLY CHOSON 71stitute payments at prices higher than the capital market, or pay bribes to avoid
a second tax.^25
The business of tribute contracting (taenap, or pangnap) emerged in which
merchant middlemen collected rice or cloth substitute payments from district
magistrates or taxpayers and used them to purchase the tribute items on the mar-
ket. Kings T'aejong in 1409 and Sejong and 1420 and 1430 took action to pre-
vent magistrates from participating in tribute contracting, but these prohibitions
proved ineffective, and commoners were not prohibited from engaging in the
business. In the 1440S when State Councilors Ha Yon, Yi Sukchu, and Chong
Inji advised Sejong to prohibit tribute contracting, establish an open and pub-
lished schedule of tribute payments in rice and cloth, and have the magistrates
allocate household quotas according to the amount of land a family possessed,
King Sejong failed to take any action.^26 On the contrary, as a result of Sejong's
increasing devotion to Buddhism after the deaths of two of his sons and his wife
between 1446 and 1448, he abandoned his attempt to uphold the original sys-
tem and even decided to encourage tribute contracting by monks to help finance
the construction of Buddhist temples, and he allowed them to monopolize the
profits from tribute contracting between 1449 and 1457.^27
In 1459 King Sejo also permitted tribute contracting against the letter of the
law, but he sought to bring it under control. He forbade contracting arrangements
against the will of the taxpayer, and he required that contractors first pay trib-
ute goods to the capital bureau and present a receipt from the capital bureau before
asking for reimbursement. This procedure was later adopted in the Kyongguk
taejon law code of 1469, but the new restrictions were soon ignored, and trib-
ute contracting spread beyond the monks to merchants and even yangban.
Royal relatives, high officials, and other prestigious persons began to engage
more openly in the contracting business themselves by using their personal aides
(pan 'in or pandang) or slaves as henchmen to beat the peasants into paying higher
prices. Contrary to his own laws Sejo also allowed the Office of Merit Subjects
(Ch'unghunbu) and the Directorate of Buddhist Publications (Kan'gyong-
dogam) to engage in tribute contracting to support important merit subjects and
publish Buddhist sutras in honor of the crown prince, who had died at the age
of twenty.28
King Sejo's Attempt at Reform by Adaptation
Sejo, however, then had a change of heart and tried to rectify the corruption of
the system by limiting tribute to existing quotas. By ordering the compilation in
1456 of the Horizontal Ledger (Hoenggan), a list of all tribute in kind and the
cost of manufacturing tribute items by artisans, a task completed by King
Songjong in 1473, he felt that he could stop the uncontrolled demand on the tax-
payer. But because the government agencies did not cut their expenditures, con-
formity to the Horizontal Ledger only served to guarantee annual deficits, and