Chapter 180
In the original history, the Geographical Record in the Veritable Records of King Sejong was created to strengthen centralization and make the provinces easier to control.
In other words, one could say that the Sejong Sillok Jiriji was intended solely for the officials of the royal court.
However, after seeing commerce flourish and directly improve the people's lives, and after learning even the principles of supply and demand, Sejong seems to have developed a different idea.
If they identified the specialties of all eight provinces and encouraged their cultivation and production, while also recording what each district lacked in the gazetteer, merchants would naturally buy up abundant goods and set out to sell scarce ones...
He believed that as this process repeated, the country would grow increasingly prosperous.
"Your Majesty's purpose in ordering the Hall of Worthies to compile the gazetteer is broadly twofold. First, by compiling a geographical record that clearly records the population, geography, fortresses, military camps, tribute goods, embankments, temples, and other features of each county and prefecture, Your Majesty wishes to make it easier for the court to control the provinces."
Joseon could be called an unusually centralized state even by the standards of the world.
By the early fifteenth century—in other words, during Sejong's reign—it was nearly impossible to find a country where centralized rule had been realized to such an extent.
Even in Joseon, however, powerful local gentry still wielded considerable influence, so complete control over the provinces was not easily achieved.
One could see that simply from the fact that the son of Pyo Un-pyeong, the victim of the Seo Dal incident—the greatest blunder of Hwang Hui's life—led forty cavalrymen there and beat Seo Dal to a pulp.
Joseon had an overarching principle that no one was permitted to maintain private soldiers, yet even an insignificant local clerk had failed to observe it.
That was why Heo Jo proposed and implemented the Law Prohibiting Commoners from Suing Local Magistrates.
"It is certainly necessary to understand local conditions well before imposing corvée labor or military service. In truth, thanks to the Bang-won Law, it has been a long time since the problem of bangnap—forcing the people to provide tribute goods not produced in their region—disappeared... Yet the magistrate of each district still has to use the Bang-won rice collected from the people to buy nonlocal tribute goods at inflated prices and submit them, so the government keeps being forced to collect additional taxes from the people to cover the cost."
One of the reasons the bangnap system was introduced, ultimately rotting the tribute system from within, was precisely the problem of nonlocal tribute goods.
For example, Anseong in Gyeonggi Province produced plenty of apples, but no tiger pelts...
What if, due to an administrative error or for whatever reason, the government recorded 'tiger pelts' as a specialty of Anseong?
The people living in that district would be unconditionally required to offer tiger pelts to the state.
In the early Joseon period, when neither the division of labor nor commerce had developed very far, it was by no means easy for an ordinary farmer even to lay eyes on a local specialty...
It would have been absolutely impossible to obtain something like a tiger pelt, which could only barely be acquired through another district, and offer it to the state directly.
Thus, bangnap began when magistrates and local clerks bought tiger pelts from someone else and submitted them to the state in exchange for receiving enormous compensation.
'To be more precise, the reason bangnap truly began to torment the people was that part of the tribute was entrusted to Buddhist monks in exchange for providing them with rice.'
"Furthermore, I believe Your Majesty also intends to eliminate nonlocal tribute goods entirely. And in my humble opinion, Your Majesty may also intend to absorb into Joseon the lands abandoned by the Jurchens as they fled after being thoroughly defeated in this campaign."
"What does compiling a geographical gazetteer have to do with conquering the Jurchens?"
"You will be conducting a census as part of the process of compiling the gazetteer, will you not?"
The work later known as the Sejong Sillok Jiriji—in other words, the Newly Compiled Gazetteer of the Eight Provinces until the death of King Sejong—also included the census results for each district.
In the original history, the Battle of the Pajeo River took place a considerable time after compilation of the gazetteer had begun in earnest.
In other words, compilation of the gazetteer began separately from the conquest of the Jurchens and the occupation of the Four Garrisons and Six Forts.
But Joseon's finances and economy were far stronger now, so it seemed that His Majesty intended to advance all the way to the frontier while securing the supply lines.
Although Sejong had not said so outright, it was as plain as day that he had resettlement in mind.
"If we conduct a census, we will naturally learn how many landlords, owner-farmers, tenant farmers, merchants, artisans, and slaves there are, will we not?"
"That is true. But even setting the slaves aside, would people who have established professions of their own willingly agree to resettlement?"
In the original history, King Sejong granted enormous incentives to those who agreed to resettlement or were forcibly taken there.
For ordinary people, he exempted them from all corvée labor and taxes and granted them local official posts; for slaves, the moment they agreed to resettlement, he freed them from their lowborn status.
He also provided some food, farming tools, and oxen.
Even so, not even tenant farmers and slaves who made their living tilling fields or serving others were willing to volunteer for resettlement.
No one wanted to abandon their livelihood and volunteer to go to a place where their only hope was the possibility of rising in the world, the odds of failure were brutally high, and death-defying hardship awaited them.
But if one looked at the matter from a slightly different perspective...
'If we offer a proper lure to those without a livelihood, it may not be entirely impossible.'
"Naturally, those with livelihoods will not want to volunteer for resettlement, even if they are mere slaves. Going to be resettled means leaving behind one's relatives and neighbors—the villagers with whom one has lived all one's life—and abandoning even the foundation one has built for oneself."
"That is true."
"Those who have land to till, even as tenant farmers, will never want to volunteer for resettlement. Such people would rather live a little poorer while farming as tenants than go to a resettlement site, clear completely barren land, and risk being killed by the Jurchens."
The decisive reason Sejong's efforts to develop the Four Garrisons and Six Forts failed was the Jurchens.
Although the Four Garrisons and Six Forts had been nearly barren wastelands, the Joseon people who went there as settlers managed, through sheer grit, to farm and establish a foundation on which they could live.
The most serious problem was that no one knew when the Jurchens might invade and kill or abduct all the people in a village.
In fact, the Jurchens repeatedly abducted and murdered the people, so the Four Garrisons were abolished after Sejong's death and came to be known as the Abandoned Four Garrisons.
"Since we are conducting a census anyway, it would be good to count the people who do not even have land to farm as tenants. In addition, if we intend to carry out resettlement, it would be wise to estimate roughly how many people might volunteer."
Byeon Gye-ryang's face was gradually turning ashen.
"That would be a good idea."
"Furthermore, the second major purpose of compiling this gazetteer is to take advantage of merchants' desire for profit."
People do not shy away from adventures that may cost them their lives if it means making money.
During the Age of Exploration, even when a voyage succeeded and trade was completed safely, fifty percent of the sailors in a merchant fleet died from scurvy, various diseases, or all sorts of other causes.
Moreover, when they set out to discover new sea routes, they were liable to be shipwrecked and die at sea...
It was no different from buying a lottery ticket with one's life as collateral.
Yet Europeans, driven by the desire to make a fortune from a single haul of pepper, succeeded in rounding the Cape of Good Hope and reaching India.
Even if their desires were not wholesome, they nevertheless made an enormous contribution to the development of navigation.
King Sejong may not have known about the Age of Exploration, but he surely understood how powerful merchants' desire for money was...
That must have been why he spoke of supply and demand when he ordered the gazetteer compiled.
'A repeated series of choices: buying goods abundant in a particular district and selling goods scarce there to turn a profit.'
Byeon Gye-ryang nodded in agreement.
"Eung-gyo Kim is right. His Majesty said that although merchants' desires are great, they can benefit the country if properly harnessed. He also said this."
"What did he say?"
"He said that the reason flour is scarce is not that cultivating and harvesting wheat is difficult, but that so few people grow wheat."
He was right.
In Joseon's Hamgyeong and Pyeongan Provinces, people were willing to cultivate only coarse grains such as barley, sorghum, and millet, and almost no one grew wheat.
There were hardly any foods made with wheat in Joseon, but the greater reason was that there was no market in which to sell it even if one did grow it.
But what if it became possible to sell flour and use the proceeds to buy rice...?
No, what if wheat's scarcity were recognized and people traded one kilogram of flour for two kilograms of rice?
Wheat cultivation would begin in the northern regions of Joseon, where rice could not be grown.
As expected of King Sejong—he understood supply and demand and immediately put the principle into practice.
"That is correct. Therefore, His Majesty ordered us to investigate what the specialties are and compile a gazetteer so that we can publicize them throughout Joseon. And since he also ordered us to conduct a census... it might be useful to refer to the Qin dynasty's fifteen-household system."
I thought of several other things that would be useful to do while compiling the gazetteer and told Byeon Gye-ryang about them.
Each time I told him about another kind of information that could be included in the gazetteer I had conceived, his face seemed to grow stiffer and stiffer...
I suppose that was just my imagination.