794 FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMY
sures - adoption of copper cash as a medium of exchange and the taedong sys-
tem. Yi Man'ung's opposition to cash as well as the taedong reform indicates
that the conservative agenda was broader than preservation of the tribute sys-
tem and included a reaction to the perceived dangers that expanded commerce
and a cash economy would bring to the older economic order in Korea.
Yi was convinced that the people of Ch'ungch'ong Province were strongly
opposed to the taedong system. If it had been as good as advertised, how come
the king had not decided to adopt it for the whole country? He blamed the gov-
ernor, Kim Hong'uk, for failing to have conducted a thorough investigation of
the "feelings ofthe people" (minjong) right after he was first appointed to office.
For this reason negative popular opinion was never reported to the throne, and
the virtuous intentions of the court was never transmitted to the people.^42
Yi Man'ung also held the taedong surtax should not have been levied at a time
when peasants were in dire need of relief, especially since the taedong surtax
on land had increased the taxes of poor peasants as well as wealthy families. He
charged Inspector-General Ho ChOk of failing to inform King Hyojong of prob-
lems in the system in Ch'ungch'ong Province. He claimed that he had heard that
the councilor of the right was bombarded with written petitions when he vis-
ited the province but failed to report them to the throne, and that Chief State
Councilor Chong T'aehwa, who had never agreed with the taedong law, showed
no interest in its success. These officials should have emulated the behavior of
Yi Won' ik, who after advocating the taedong system for Kangwon, Ch'ungch'ong,
and Cholla provinces, later changed his mind when he was out of office and
wrote a letter to the high ministers opposing the system.^43
There were, in fact, several reports about the taedong system in Ch'ungch'ong
Province that corroborated some ofYi Man'ilng's criticisms. Contrary to the intent
of the law, soldiers on duty in the provincial army and navy garrisons were still
required to pay fees for service, food, fish, pillows, ramie, straw, and a number
of other items that were worth double the cost of cloth taxes for the support of
soldiers. Some peasants did perceive the taedong surtax only as an addition to
their own tax burden, and in 1657 the Office of Censor-General confirmed that
extra levies on soldiers had become oppressive. Agents sent out from the
Ch'ungch'ong provincial army commander's headquarters were making the
rounds of coastal villages to buy six times the normal allotment offish products,
and after they had paid the villagers for them, they immediately took the pay-
ments back as a fee to pay for transportation of the goods to the camp. The coastal
residents had also been bankrupted and were forced to leave their villages to evade
further depredations. Contrary to the legal limit of 10 mal/kyol on the taedong
grain surtax, a report was received in 1653 that in Hongju an extra 1.3 mal, col-
loquially dubbed "private taedong taxes" (sadaedong) was collected on the pre-
text that it was needed to repay grain borrowed from the granary by the previous
magistrate. Cloth taxes were demanded according to standards of measure longer
than the legal dimensions, and good cloth was switched for short and mediocre
cloth to use for payments to merchants or remittance to the capita1.^44