Chapter 77
Three months had passed since Kim Daebung had rounded up all the thugs in Hanyang and turned them into the dung-hauling Chuito Corps.
At first, when they saw the local layabouts being dragged off by soldiers, they worried that some bloodbath was about to break out.
Even if they were troublemakers, most of them were just drunkards who spent their days gambling and loafing around.
They hadn’t committed any truly heinous crimes, so if they were being hauled away to be killed like that, it seemed a bit much.
But now every citizen of Hanyang wholeheartedly approved of His Majesty’s bold, sweeping measure.
Kim Dalsu, who lived on the outskirts of Yeonggyeonbang, was one of them.
"Because of those punks who did nothing but act like thugs, I was scared something might happen even in broad daylight. Now I don’t have to worry about thugs at all, and that’s great."
Before, on his way to work at the merchant guild, if he took the alley shortcut on an unlucky day, he’d often run into thugs.
They wouldn’t kill anyone, because if they so much as spilled blood and it led to a death, they’d be arrested by the Loyal Guard and executed for murder by hanging or beheading...
They were bastards who stripped people of all the money in their pockets and the clothes on their backs.
On top of that, there were times when thugs hired by another merchant guild competing with the one Dalsu belonged to would smash up every shop in the area.
But now those scoundrels had long since been transformed into the Chuito Corps by His Majesty’s grace.
"Today is his day off, so I might as well take some rice and go have a drink."
Right after he got married, he and his wife had been at it day and night, but the heat of the honeymoon had long since cooled.
Even so, he was still a man, and at night he made sure to show what he could do.
Just as he was about to scoop some rice from the bin before heading out, a familiar voice reached his ears.
"I’m here to haul dung! I’m here to haul dung and collect the ash!"
As soon as Dalsu heard that, he swung the thatched-house door wide open and quickly let the Chuito Corps member inside.
It does smell a bit because the work is filthy, but unlike the men who used to haul away the ash, the dung-hauling Chuito Corps doesn’t cause trouble.
"I’ve finished hauling all the dung. Where’s the ash?"
"You see the pile over there, don’t you? But leaving the dung aside, why do we even have to go to all this trouble gathering ash like this..."
"It’s because ash is an important ingredient used to make saltpeter. And the law changed recently, so if you dump ash carelessly, you’ll get ten lashes, so you’d better gather it properly."
Dalsu’s neighbor Cheol-su was caught by a passing constable for dumping ash carelessly.
With no excuse possible, Cheol-su was caught red-handed and immediately taken away by the constable; he went to the Hanseong magistrate’s office and came back after taking ten lashes.
Better to gather the ash properly and hand it over than end up like that.
"Go on ahead."
"Yes, then I’ll be back in fifteen days."
As the dung-hauling Chuito Corps member stepped outside, his wife, who had been napping in the room, rubbed her eyes and got up.
"Did the Chuito Corps just come by?"
"Yeah, they came, hauled the dung, and left."
"They’re such hardworking, filthy-work-doing people. Thanks to them, we don’t have to go through the trouble of hauling the dung away and dumping it somewhere far off."
"It sure is nice not to have to lug the dung pail anymore."
Before, on his days off, Dalsu had to carry the dung pail himself and dump out all the dung and urine, but now the Chuito Corps took it away on their own, so it was much easier.
"Now that the Chuito Corps haul away all the dung and urine, the neighborhood hardly smells of dung anymore."
"The well water doesn’t smell bad anymore either, unlike before."
Mentioning the well water made Dalsu think of how unusually few people had suffered stomach trouble this summer.
Normally, as summer went by, it was common for people to drink bad well water, get stomach upset and diarrhea, and for some even to lose their lives.
This year, none of the people around Dalsu had suffered because of water.
Lately, the physicians had been making such a fuss that he’d learned one thing: you had to wash your hands with water before cooking or eating, and every two or three days you had to wash your body with lye water and plain water.
They said that would prevent all disease.
He decided to try it, and sure enough, not only he himself but even his children had been living without minor illnesses.
"When I was young, my mother used to say that even the king couldn’t cure poverty, but these days that’s turned out to be nonsense. I work for a merchant guild, so fine, but my brother-in-law in Gwacheon farms as a tenant, and he says the taxes dropped so much that life has gotten a lot easier."
The taxes tenant farmers paid had been cut to only two-tenths of what they used to be, an enormous 80 percent reduction.
Thanks to that, people in Joseon were saying that as long as there wasn’t a famine, they no longer had to worry about starving to death, and they were shouting "Long live His Majesty!" without anyone telling them to.
"And maybe the king was also taking care of the people’s illnesses, so they didn’t get sick?"
Reports were also reaching Sejong that this year, the number of people in Hanyang suffering from waterborne epidemics or diarrhea had dropped noticeably.
But they still had no idea what the cause was.
All of this was like how Kim Daebung had blackmailed the lord of Tsushima with a top-secret Japanese secret no one in Joseon at this time could ever know, and turned him into a meek sheep—no, a slave.
It was because Kim Daebung had secretly spread health advice disguised as the superstition that washing your body often was good for your health.
The ignorant commoners just figured, anyway they weren’t getting sick, so it was a good age and it must be the king’s grace, and let it go at that.
"No matter how good the king is, do you really think he can stop even the evil spirits that spread plague? Put those silly thoughts aside, and first of all don’t even think about going out to play just because it’s your day off. Instead, bring straw from the shed and make some straw sandals. We should be saving up money too, so we need to buy at least a patch of field near the house."
"Can’t I get away with it just for today?"
"No. Make the straw sandals."
"No, I heard the new fish market in Noryangjin is selling cheaply, so maybe some dried pollack that you and the kids like..."
In actual history, fish markets outside Hanyang—the outer fish market—didn’t appear until the late seventeenth century, but with the enforcement of the Bang-won Law and the rapid growth of commerce, a fish market had sprung up in Noryangjin as well.
Thanks to that, Hanyang’s licensed markets had ended up facing an unexpected rival.
"You think I wouldn’t know you’d use buying dried pollack as an excuse to drink until just before curfew and come home? Enough. Hurry up and make the straw sandals."
In this way, Kim Daebung’s gunpowder policy was slowly changing the daily lives of Hanyang’s people.
**
A fool and a genius are separated by only a sheet of paper, Thomas Edison said.
Likewise, there’s only a sheet of paper between a genius investor who gets rich through bold, decisive coin investments and a fool who ruins his family with coins and keeps going to the Han River to stare at the water.
If the investment succeeds, you become the god of coin investing; if you invest and fail, you become human trash.
Even if you do exactly the same thing, if the result is good you get praised, and if it’s bad you get ignored—that’s the human world.
People say results matter, but so does the process. But reality isn’t like that.
If the result is good, then as long as you didn’t commit a crime in the process, everyone will praise you.
The first person to make potato chips was a restaurant owner who liked to mess with customers, so he committed the outrageous act of slicing potatoes absurdly thin and frying them, just for fun.
The funny thing is that they turned out so delicious he made a spectacular comeback as the inventor of potato chips, even succeeding in taking five wives.
In other words, if the result is good, nobody really cares what the process looked like.
"What matters is the result: if you wash your hands and keep clean, you won’t catch epidemics. What does it matter whether you call it germs or whatever?"
I have no intention of dismissing the hard work of the people who research the causes and treatments of disease and make all kinds of antibiotics and medicines.
Because of their efforts, people in the twenty-first century can enjoy health and longevity.
But that aside, I’m someone who doesn’t know much about medicine.
So as an administrative official, rather than arguing for the reasons and necessity of maintaining hygiene—something that’s hard to explain and impossible to make people accept...
I think it’s better to build a hygiene system based on the result that people who practice hygiene management get sick less often.
Bluntly put, even if I earnestly explained the importance of hygiene management, no one other than King Sejong would care enough to even pretend to listen.
His Majesty King Sejong is the sort of person who endlessly pursues new knowledge, to the point that he could devour even a novel written by AI, so he’d be willing to listen to me for a long time and understand what I’m saying...
‘Why should I even bother?’
And conveniently, the institution I belong to is none other than the Ministry of War.
The Joseon Ministry of War, the department that could make every soldier do exactly as told...
Among the fifth-rank officials, I decided to use a trump card that only I could use.
That was to have a lowly fifth-rank jeongrang go straight to Jo Mal-saeng, the Minister of War, who was a second-rank, no, first-rank official, and make an appeal.
You might think that wasn’t such a big deal.
In company terms, it was no different from me, a section chief or deputy manager, barging straight into a conglomerate chairman’s office to report directly to him.
In Joseon, where if you failed to observe proper etiquette your head would be smashed in on the spot, this was an outrageous act beyond imagination, and if I pulled something like this off, the beautiful custom of top-down chewing-out would surely follow...
"Minister of War, my lord."
Jo Mal-saeng smiled the moment he saw my face.
"Why, if it isn’t our Ministry of War’s lucky charm, Kim Jeongrang. Well then, what can I do for you?"
"... I recently heard a superstition circulating among the common folk, and it doesn’t seem like something we can simply brush off."
It was none other than a superstition I had spread myself.
That if you wash your body clean, evil spirits won’t cling to you and you won’t get sick.
The time had come to spread this across all of Joseon.