74 EARLY CHOSON DYNASTY
these clerks have been rejecting them and demanding payment in rice or cloth
instead, and they have been doing it for some time. This means that the basic
intent of our forefathers in founding this law has been changed into an evil prac-
tice by the private masters [sajuinJ.
The dynastic law code has prohibited tribute contracting [pangnap J and
has prescribed that officials who engage in it will never again be appointed to
office, and commoners who do so will be transported with their families to the
frontier. This is indeed a severe law, but there are no greater profits to be made
than those from tribute contracting. The profiteers get rice and cloth from each
magistrate and make substitute payments for the tribute items, only fearing that
they might have to make payment in kind. They divide the rice and cloth they
have obtained, give some to the clerks and slaves of the capital bureau and
have them pay it to the official. This is the way in which the original intent of
the law of our forefathers has been converted into an evil perpetrated by the
tribute contractors.
Of the rice and cloth collected to replace tribute items, all of it comes from
the people, but 50-60 percent of it is put in the hands of the tribute contractors
and 30-40 percent in the hands of the private masters [sajuinJ. Only 10-20
percent is paid to the state treasury. There is no limit to what is taken from the
people, but all of it is consumed in the lair of the profiteers)3By the end of the sixteenth century, the tribute system had been converted
into a new type of commerce, but not one that was fully free from governmen-
tal involvement. Almost every segment of society was involved in the trade: the
peasant villagers who had to find funds to pay the district's tribute clerks, the
district tribute clerks who had to pay fees to the private masters or warehouse-
men at the capital, the official slaves in the employ of the bureau clerks in the
capital, the yangban who employed their agents and slaves to engage in the trade
themselves, and the officials in charge who collected payoffs from the bureau
clerks. Kings and officials could be faulted for the weakness of their commit-
ment to maintain the legal requirements of the system and free it of all taint of
commercial activity. However, since the narrow regulations and restraints
imposed on private merchantactivity in the beginning of the dynasty had already
been violated by the emergence of unlicensed shops and active private merchants,
the tribute contracting business looked like another aspect of the general eco-
nomic change spreading throughout the country. What was anomalous about
that economic change was that commercial activity was taking place just as more
advanced forms of currency was disappearing from the Korean economy. Com-
mercial activity along with agricultural production then suffered a severe set-
back from Hideyoshi's invasions, but by the mid-seventeenth century commerce
regained the force it had gained a century earlier and set the stage for new eco-
nomic manifestations.
What happened in the seventeenth century was partially the result of this phe-
nomenon, the beginning of a protracted program to convert tribute altogether to