Three Friends (1)

Right. In the end, after all the circling, it always came down to the economy.

A few days after that first cabinet meeting—which had manufactured not solutions but an unholy mountain of fiendishly difficult homework—a group of men came charging gleefully into my office, hauling a sheaf of documents thick enough to stun an ox.

"The question, above all, is whether there's anywhere we can wring money from right now."

They were Park Yung-hyo, Minister of the Interior, together with Kim Hong-jip, Eo Yun-jung, and Yi Sang-jae of the Ministry of Finance. The moment they stepped through the door and laid eyes on me, they heaved a collective sigh.

"What's the matter with all of you?"

"We trust that Your perceptive Excellency will understand perfectly."

The most sour-faced man in the room was Eo Yun-jung, Vice Minister of Revenue—the one currently being crushed under the greatest share of this particular misery.

"Reform? Of course we must reform. But reform needs people to carry it out, people to supervise it, and people to plan and disburse the budget. Without those, nothing turns."

"And if the government goes out recruiting that manpower itself? That is an operating budget. Budget. It means we start spending money all over again."

"This is rain in a drought, Your Excellency. We have to be careful."

They howled about the shortage of personnel, ticking off the bureaucrats gutted by the Imo Incident and then gutted all over again by the Gapsin Revolution.

"And you said you wanted a land reform that would serve everyone—one that nobody would oppose? Then it's simple. Have the state buy up every last acre of Joseon and redistribute it fairly among the peasants."

"Public opinion is already on the new government's side, Your Excellency. You seem to be agonizing over the conservative Confucian literati and the old yangban clans, but consider the people's absolute support for you. Those men are fireflies before a full moon."

"Can you not hear it, Your Excellency? The voice of the people crying out for revolution?"

Reform, they insisted, was reform no matter how well you did it—someone was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠going to curse you either way—so there was no point testing the water. Just ram it through.

Whine, whine, whine. Ugh. So loud.

I silenced the finance officials—who had been complaining about everything from A to Z—with a wave of my hand, and sank into thought.

Boil their grievances down and it was simple: there wasn't enough money. The treasury was so threadbare they could barely even begin a reform. And the cause of that, in the end, was the threadbare treasury of the dynasty we had just overthrown.

Fuck.

Even here you're haunting me, Gojong.

"Pay the Japanese legation first, before anything else. We cannot give a foreign power an opening to interfere with a regime we've only just managed to stabilize. As for the rest, I'll work with the Public Security Committee on how to handle them. We'll confiscate their property if we have to, and make them cough it all up. Don't worry about that."

I had been listening to their litany with a straight face, but the scene kept overlapping with one I had watched to the point of nausea in the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea, in the life before I died in a nuclear blast. I pressed my throbbing forehead and asked, irritably:

"And besides—the enormous wealth we recovered from liquidating the Royal Household Treasury is slowly flowing back into the national coffers, is it not? Even if it falls short of the picture the Vice Minister of Revenue has in mind, it shouldn't be quite as futile as pissing on a frozen foot, should it?"

The rebuttals came at once.

"Yes. The problem is that it genuinely is that futile, Your Excellency."

"And it's all in kind. Gold, silver, Sangpyeong Tongbo—if we're lucky, it comes back as Qing cash."

"Even so, Your Excellency, around the treaty ports the fisheries and salt flats have so much yen circulating among the people that some households are even paying their dues in Japanese currency."

Yen was already flooding the civilian market in bulk?

"That doesn't sound like good news… Anyway. You're saying there's more in-kind property than we expected, but that we can still dispose of it at a fair price, aren't you?"

"…The truth is, Your Excellency, the Ministry's consensus is that we may not need to dump it in a hurry."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

I shot back with something like, There's still hope, though, right?—and Eo Yun-jung, who had a talent for answering Nope without missing a beat, explained.

"We are currently surveying the confiscated land and buildings."

"Well, of course you are. The cadastral survey is due to be publicly announced in a week."

"But it would be best, Your Excellency, to set aside for now any hope that issuing land title certificates will be a great help to the government budget."

"Huh?"

"The Ministry's position is that the effects of the cadastral survey and land reform will make themselves felt across many sectors, over a long period of time."

What I had counted on most was the immediate revenue from disposing of confiscated assets once we finished liquidating the Royal Household Treasury and the crown lands. The Board of Taxation was considerably less optimistic.

"Now, Your Excellency—if you would be so kind as to look this over with us."

Yi Sang-jae, Chief of the Documents Section at the Ministry of Finance, who had come along with the others, presented me with a summarized file in a manner of perfect courtesy.

"…That isn't a small amount, is it?"

Had I heard that right? Ten percent?

I'd thought surely not—and it was good heavens. One-tenth of all the farmland in Joseon had belonged to the Royal Household Treasury?

They were always singing about slush funds, slush funds. Are these sons of bitches even in their right minds?

So it was out in the open at last.

This country had been King Gojong's personal scale-model garden from beginning to end. Playing at soldiers. Playing at banks. The whole lot.

But was this really a case of not having enough money for reform? To my eye, it looked like quite a lot.

"If the palace estates amount to a tenth of the nation's farmland, then even if we only granted those plots to the tenants working them right now, the next land-tax haul would be enormous, wouldn't it?"

"In the short view—yes. It might."

"That's assuming they actually pay, and pay honestly."

I looked at my ministers with an expression caught between astonishment and disbelief. They shrugged, smiling awkwardly.

"There is generally a reason, Your Excellency, why labor-provision fields and military colony fields do not yield tax. From straw sandals to wicker baskets, the labor fields are woven into the ordinary people's lives; you couldn't cut them out if you tried. The military colony fields are typically allotted along the borders and on the islands, as farmland meant to settle places where no one lives. The basic condition of those lands, therefore, is that no rent is collected."

"Most of them exist to supply goods dirt-cheap to nearby counties and towns. Like the capital's Price Office, they furnish raw materials at a loss, without regard to profit, in order to keep prices stable."

In other words, the fields and hillsides that fed the market with raw materials had never had any clearly collectable tax in the first place. They had simply been listed as palace estates in name only.

The state was encouraging hidden, unregistered land? Does that even make sense?

"No, wait—however you slice it, dodging taxes like that—"

"Your Excellency."

I was about to demand how they could possibly have run things that way when Yi Sang-jae opened his mouth in a hurry.

"If we hadn't done at least that much, the number of unregistered hidden plots across the country would be three times what it is now. There are a great many farmers who voluntarily surrendered their land to the Royal Household Treasury precisely to keep it out of the court's tax rolls."

"On top of that, the line between the nation's granaries and the budget has grown so blurred of late that the chaos has only accelerated. If our new government starts arbitrarily rewriting how the budget is spent, the way the previous dynasty did, the people's livelihoods will go into a tailspin."

"The treaty ports and the counties around them can find their own living from the benefits of trade. The people on remote islands and along the frontiers are in a far more awkward position. The cabinet's opinion, Your Excellency, is that we preserve those arrangements in their original form until those people have found an adequate way to live."

"…"

Listening to their explanations one by one, I felt a tangled clump of hair slowly start to come unknotted.

So what they're saying is: don't go poking around and tearing things up the way Gojong did when he stuck his hand in and made a hornet's nest. Watch quietly, for now.

Put simply, the court under Gojong had been so starved for money that it had raided the Board of Taxation's spending plans—plans that should have functioned normally—the way a man picks his own pockets, and public sentiment had been gutted in the process. Corrupt officials had run rampant on top of that, in an age when a bribe wasn't even called a bribe, and the people had suffered a triple hardship.

But while the new government, next up to have its belly slit open, is too busy getting its bearings to notice, the farm households that are no longer being taxed two and three times over are quietly getting their ordinary lives back.

In other words: we had left them alone through the brief, chaotic stretch of the regime change; prices were recovering little by little on their own; so sit still and watch.

I folded my arms and regarded the finance officials who had flocked to find me, with a look of mild, unimpressed skepticism.

"So we just leave it for now?"

What is this, a classical economics lecture? Are you people worshippers of the famous invisible hand?

When I opened my mouth in that listless tone, Kim Hong-jip smoothed the back of his neck and answered.

"The palace estates, the mines, the fisheries, the sawmills, and the salt flats are a different matter. Ah—and I'll give instructions to dispose of the shops and warehouses as well, at a reasonable price, to the Federation of Korean Economic Persons."

"If you handle those, will it actually help the reform? Right now?"

"Mm. The buildings and the mines will take a little time, I'm afraid. And the mines will produce friction with the existing operators and contractors, so the government will also have to dispatch people to assist with the lawsuits in those counties."

"Understood."

Even Kim Hong-jip—autocratic as he usually was, but whose work was always clean—had stepped forward to back his colleagues. I nodded.

Perhaps I looked too pitiable doing it, because Yi Sang-jae offered another way forward.

"Ah—what would you say to taking up again the central bank proposal you rejected last time?"

"No. Absolutely not."

I could feel that he meant it kindly. I still shook my head at once at the mention of founding a central bank.

The idea, I suspected, was to print government bonds under a bank's name, press them into the people's hands, and secure cash that way. In a peaceful age, perhaps. In the nineteenth century—where you could hardly survive without the heart of a beast—it was a method that would never, ever work.

"If we found a central bank and start issuing bonds without first securing adequate gold reserves, as we discussed in the original plan, we would simply be handing a foreign power the pretext it needs to plunder our economy."

"Ah—that was a thoughtless remark. I spoke beyond my—"

"No. I understand exactly what Chief Yi was thinking. Completely."

Fine. Suppose we did found a central bank. Suppose we did print the bonds.

Where was the guarantee that the people who bought them would all be our own Koreans?

The largest holder of our government-issued bonds might well turn out to be Japan—or Qing. That cannot happen.

That would be manufacturing a weakness we didn't even have, and offering it up ourselves.

In the nineteenth century, economic invasion was genuinely easy. Winning was easy. If you had more ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠money, you won.

Bonds? We'll buy them! Just do as we say! That was the basic diplomatic method of the age. Direct. Simple. Admirably clear, wasn't it?

And even if we went to the trouble of issuing them under the name of Patriotic Bonds, there was still a mountain of people who would trade them in for yen or Qing cash the moment someone offered double the price.

Hah. This is why ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠nationalist education matters.

One way or another, the finance officials wanted me not to reinvest immediately the breathing room we had gained by liquidating the Royal Household Treasury and returning it to the national coffers—to watch how the situation developed instead. I ordered them to withdraw for now.

"We pray you will render a wise decision."

"Shoo. Out. All of you."

Once I had cleared every last person from the room, I sank into thought.

"I can't tell whether they have no experience, or whether they're just extremists."

In the end, this was the position of a Ministry of Finance painted entirely in Enlightenment Party colors.

To cut to the conclusion: from where I stood, both options were complete shit.

Yeah. Both of these are garbage.

It was genuinely bizarre. In what country did a finance ministry bounce back and forth like this between communist-style planned economy and a worshipful devotion to capitalism and classical economics?

"Ah. Come to think of it, my previous life was pretty much the same."

I turned the problem over and over, and at last decided to play the joker I had left.

Its name:

The French diplomat and the American Minister Plenipotentiary entered the country four days later.

It was a secret diplomatic meeting that could have been a scene from a spy film.

"A pleasure to meet you."

They arrived in the late hours before dawn, while the sky was still dark. With the Yellow Sea trade networks beginning to collapse under the effects of the Sino-French War, the entry of Collin de Plancy—the French vice-consul stationed in Shanghai—and Lucius Foote, the American Minister, had been a thoroughly hair-raising affair.

"And it is an honor to have invited you both to this table."

I welcomed the two men who had come in a wide loop from Shanghai to Nagasaki, then from Busan through Wonsan, and at last into Hanyang, and gestured for each of them to take a seat.

Exhaustion was written plainly on both their faces. And yet a strange, bright anticipation had them almost feverish; their eyes, at least, shone like the morning star in that hour before dawn.

"Thank you."

"We are grateful for the hospitality, Your Excellency."

"Haha. The government is still in such chaos we haven't even been able to throw you a welcome banquet. I promise you a proper celebration—a grand one—on the day your legations officially open in Hanseong."

I apologized with a look of genuine regret. After all, in the original history a man like Minister Foote ought to have been granted two fine mansions in Jeong-dong and begun his work in comfort. The aftermath of the revolution had turned the whole Jeong-dong quarter into a shambles. So for the moment, the two of them were eating and sleeping in the State Guesthouse that had once housed envoys from Qing.

"I give you my word. We will build both nations' legations, at our executive budget's expense, on a fine site in Jeong-dong."

Before they sat, both men offered me a formal bow.

"Not at all. The excessive hospitality that has followed us all the way from Busan leaves us scarcely able to show our faces, Your Excellency the Tongnyeong."

"We are truly grateful for Your Excellency's consideration in personally sending an envoy all the way to Shanghai for the sake of establishing relations with our French Republic."

"Haha. I see the Foreign Ministry staff have been laying the gold leaf on my reputation a little too thick."

Watching the two of them observe full protocol and acknowledge me—all of eleven years old—as a head of state, I quietly added a few extra points to Foreign Minister Park Jeong-hyo's evaluation.

As expected: people who were good at their jobs quietly took care of what needed doing, even when no one was watching.

Now, then. Time for the real business.

I looked at the two men seated across from me, smiled, and opened my mouth.

"Sitting here across a table like this, it seems to me that our ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠three countries have a great deal in common."

"In common, you say?"

"Of what sort…?"

The first step in winning them over was, of course, lip service.

At my words, both men's pupils trembled violently.