Chapter 216
His Majesty has given me the justification I needed.
I had been growing somewhat uneasy about retiring before the age of sixty after becoming a dangsanggwan so quickly, but I had gained something in return.
Hwang Hui and Jo Malseng had promoted me to dangsanggwan and then pulled the stunt of saying, ‘Congratulations on becoming a dangsanggwan. I’ll pick up a restorative tonic from the Naeuiwon, so wait just a little.’
Once they returned from vacation, I now had the justification to throw an overwork bomb at them.
“Heh heh heh, I won’t let them off. I absolutely won’t...”
In Joseon, the land of loyalty and filial piety, justification was sometimes more important than life itself.
In other words, depending on how I wielded it, I could now shower the people who had forced me into a promotion with mountains of overwork.
“I have become a dangsanggwan and the ruler of overwork.”
Although I had forced myself to change my perspective, I no longer thought my promotion was absurd or ridiculous.
In fact, I even found myself feeling happy.
The thought that I could take revenge—or something resembling revenge—by burdening my father-in-law Kim Manduk, Hwang Hui, and Jo Malseng, who had secretly pushed for my promotion behind my back, with enough work to make their backs buckle...
A natural smile spread across my face.
"I will never die alone."
Well, since I had become a dangsanggwan anyway, I might as well lower book prices and establish a mass-printing system.
Once Hunminjeongeum was created, I would establish village schools throughout the country to educate the people, and make official documents throughout Joseon use Hunminjeongeum as much as possible so that the people would no longer suffer because they could not read government documents...
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could lay the foundation for turning Joseon into a country with a zero percent illiteracy rate?
"Is Minister of Works Yi Cheon present?"
"He is in the Dangsang Hall at the moment. Please follow me."
Before I became a dangsanggwan, if I wanted to meet a minister, a clerk or government slave had to convey my request, and the minister had to accept before I could see him...
Now that I was a senior third-rank dangsanggwan, I could simply meet him directly. How nice.
I was delighted that one troublesome step in getting work done had been eliminated.
"Minister of Works Yi Cheon."
"Ah, have you come? I was worried because you looked rather haggard after being away for so long, but you look very well today. Your complexion is healthy, and you have a broad smile on your face. It is quite a pleasant sight. Has something good happened...?"
"Has His Majesty not entrusted me with the weighty responsibility of serving as Deputy Director of the Hall of Worthies? Interpreted another way, this means that His Majesty favors me greatly. As a subject, how could I not be delighted? That is why I am in such a good mood that the smile has not left my face."
After receiving notice of my promotion to dangsanggwan, I submitted a resignation memorial.
I was not in a position to refuse the promotion, but in Joseon, where failing to observe propriety could legally get one of one’s limbs broken, I had to at least pretend to refuse.
In response to the resignation memorial I had submitted out of propriety, His Majesty King Sejong wrote the following.
I have always been deeply troubled by my own lack of virtue and my inability to care for the people attentively, but ever since you began making up for my shortcomings, I have felt reassured.
Therefore, if anyone envies you and harasses you, tell me at once.
I will personally write that scoundrel a 5,700-character reprimand explaining why I must make Kim Daebung a dangsanggwan.
To think His Majesty’s favor toward me was so profound...
"Having received His Majesty’s grace, should I not now devote myself to repaying even one ten-thousandth of the favor I have received?"
A sudden cold sweat ran down the face of Bulgok Yi Cheon standing before me.
Anyone watching would have misunderstood and thought I was killing someone.
No, in fact, that would not have been a misunderstanding at all.
I really had started this project intending to grind several people into the process.
"While working at the Hall of Worthies, I read a document outlining the papermaking process at the Jojiseo. The material used to make paper is bark stripped from paper mulberry trees."
"That’s right. The paper mulberry bark must be stripped, beaten, boiled in lye, dissolved in water again, lifted out with a bamboo screen, and dried before paper can be made."
"It is truly unimaginably complicated."
"Still, what can we do? There is no way to do it more efficiently than this."
In practical terms, reducing or altering anything in that process would be extremely difficult.
However, that did not mean there was no way to drastically reduce the labor involved in production.
'The reason paper is so expensive in Joseon is that every one of those steps is done entirely by human hands.'
Of course, Joseon had no power machinery such as steam engines, so complete mechanization was impossible.
However, even partial mechanization using animal power from oxen and horses or water power would dramatically improve efficiency.
If machines such as waterwheels were put to work, far larger quantities could be processed in a shorter time than if everything were done with human strength alone.
"Ah, in that case, I’ve roughly designed several useful machines."
"...... Deputy Director Kim, wasn’t it only yesterday that you advised His Majesty that paper had to be mass-produced? And you have already designed several machines?"
"They are not particularly complicated machines."
I am purely a humanities major.
How could I possibly draw blueprints that could be used immediately?
Expecting a mere humanities major to produce immediately usable machine blueprints would itself be an insult to engineers trained in the sciences who actually knew how to build machines.
For that reason, the blueprints I had brought were merely drawings expressing only the 'very rough principles' involved.
"That is too crude to call a blueprint... If we built it like this, it would not work at all."
"I am a civil official. How could I also be well versed in making machines? Still, if the Ministry of Works actually builds the machines I designed, they will help increase paper production, which is why I brought them here."
"They certainly would be helpful."
Yi Cheon looked over the machine drawings I had brought and added,
"Isn’t this machine meant to replace the work of making paper sheets by hand? If we used a machine, how many times more could it scoop at once than a person could?"
"Yes, exactly. Simply increasing the amount we could scoop at once would greatly change both the speed and volume of production."
"And this machine would also allow us to process paper mulberry bark much faster and in much greater quantities, making the work easier."
"Even this alone would reduce paper prices to about half their current level."
In premodern times, cotton cloth was expensive not so much because the raw material, cotton, was expensive as because of the enormous amount of labor required to produce it.
That was also why those wicked English bastards began the Industrial Revolution and churned out fabric like mad.
Since the raw material, cotton, was not particularly expensive, they could buy it, use their newly invented machines to turn it into cotton cloth, and make money as if it were printing itself...
There was no reason not to print money when they could.
That was how they made a fortune by destroying India’s cotton textile market, and they tried to carry out similar schemes in the Qing Empire.
In fact, the reason paper was so expensive in Joseon was also the vast amount of labor involved rather than the cost of the raw materials.
"Until now, Joseon has made paper using only paper mulberry trees, but why must paper necessarily be made only from paper mulberry bark?"
There was one fact that shocked me when I visited Japan in the past.
Convenience-store tamagoyaki.
The reason was that it was absurdly cheap for a rolled omelet made with nothing but eggs.
When I looked into it, I heard that convenience-store rolled omelets were made by solidifying a liquid mixed with protein into something resembling an egg.
It was not harmful to the human body, and the ingredients were cheap, so it could be sold cheaply at convenience stores.
There was also the fact that the meat in Shin Ramyun and various cup noodles was actually soy meat rather than beef or pork...
There are many cases where products resembling the real thing are made using ingredients completely different from what we imagine...
So there was no need to make hanji using only expensive paper mulberry fibers.
"If you really think about it, paper can be made using pine bark, too, and even zelkova bark."
The raw material for paper is plant fiber.
In other words, anything made of plant fiber can be processed into something resembling paper.
"If we went further, couldn’t we collect reeds commonly growing along riverbanks, grind them with millstones, and so on, and make paper from them as well?
"You have a point. But how good could paper made from something like rice straw really be?"
"Of course, the quality would not be good. But this is what matters."
I deliberately cut myself off and smiled slyly.
"We can make paper without using precious paper mulberry trees. Think about it, my lord. If you were a poor scholar... If a copy of the Great Learning printed on rice-straw paper cost two bolts of cotton cloth, while one printed on paper made from paper mulberry trees cost thirty bolts, which would you buy and read?"
"I would buy the Great Learning printed on straw paper and use the money left over to buy more classics, such as the Doctrine of the Mean."
"I am not saying we should abandon the technology for making good paper."
Good paper was naturally necessary.
However, to lower book prices, we needed to mass-produce paper that met at least a minimum standard.
"Whether we use rice straw or whatever weeds grow along the roadside, should we not first print large numbers of books at low prices so that even one more commoner can buy a book and study?"
"That is true."
"Then let us expand the Jojiseo right now."
The fact that His Majesty had given me the justification meant that, as long as I had reasonable grounds, I could obtain ‘compulsory cooperation’ from the high-ranking officials of the Six Ministries.
In other words, every official in the Six Ministries had to follow my orders and overwork themselves—or rather, be loyal and patriotic for Joseon.
"And if you show these machine drawings I made to Hogun Jang (Jang Yeong-sil) and order him to build them, he will produce proper blueprints within about seven days. Since this is something His Majesty is especially eager to see, I trust you will cooperate fully, my lord."
Minister of Works Yi Cheon’s complexion turned pale.
As he stood there, I handed him one more present, like giving a crying child an extra rice cake.
"Ah, this is nothing special. It is simply a document roughly outlining what I would like the Ministry of Works to handle going forward. If anything is unclear or you have questions, send someone to the Hall of Worthies to ask."
Just before the regular quitting time that day, the Ministry of Works reported to His Majesty that its workload had become so heavy that it would have to work overtime from then on.
After hearing this news, I submitted a memorial saying that the Ministry of Works should be able to handle this much work without overtime and that His Majesty only needed to send down royal food to encourage them.
The officials of the Ministry of Works managed to leave work on time again that day.