COPPER CASH AND THE MONETARY SYSTEM 865
for cash and meted out beatings or demanded redemption payments for those
who had none on them. Their behavior was so tyrannical that the villagers ran
off as soon as they heard they were coming.
Kim Yuk was set back by this statement, and the next day he obtained Hyo-
jong's permission to put the assistant governors (Tosa) of the provinces in charge
of circulating cash. Since the way to do it was merely to have magistrates col-
lect cash for taxes and use it for expenditures, he also won approval for
P'yong'an to follow the practice in Hwanghae by collecting 1 mal of rice for the
(land?) tax (probably 16-25 percent of the tax).22
Yi Kyongyo's Objections to Cash Policy. [654After a severe flood in the summer of [654, the sinecured Yi Kyongyo submit-
ted a lengthy moral lesson to Hyojong in which he chastised the king for faulty
planning, and failure to adopt the ancient precedent of choosing some material
other than food and clothing to use as currency to offset shortages of goods in
some areas and to create an equal distribution of products throughout a coun-
try. Yi was himself criticial of copper cash, but he was even more critical of Hyo-
jong's vacillation in determining a policy of action and foJ1owing it through with
conviction. He believed that for the four or five thousand years of Korea's his-
tory since Tan'gun, all Korean kings had been aware that cash was beneficial to
both the country and its people alike, but that no king who had adopted cash for
currency had ever changed his mind and abolished it after he had done so. This
was a flawed premise because not all kings since Tan'gun were advocates of
metallic cash, and a number of kings in the fifteenth and early sixteenth cen-
turies had tried with considerable effort both cash and paper money and aban-
doned it only after it failed to circulate properly.
Unfortunately, Yi continued, Korea was then faced with insurmountable
obstacles to the successful adoption of metallic currency. Since copper and other
metals used for cash were not produced in much quantity in the country, Korea
had to depend on foreign imports of metallic raw materials. What was more
important, however, was that economic conditions did notjustify the use of cash
because the population as a whole was too poor, and few had any surplus wealth.
Most people lived on a hand-to-mouth basis,
cultivating the land for food and weaving cloth for clothes. Although there were
artisans and merchants, the artisans worked mostly in construction, leatherwear,
and linen. and cloth and rice were used for the circulation of these goods. The
people were barely able to provide enough for themselves. and people had to run
away from their homes and become vagrants because they were starving and
freezing from the cold. There just was not enough surplus property saved up to
allow people to purchase a stock of eash to be lent out at TO percent interest. 23The people did not consider that cash would ever be of any utility to them for