Bobusang (1)
That bastard sat down beside me without even asking.
Then he pointed at the dried pollack hanging off my backpack.
“Truth be told, I caught the smell of fish from ten paces away. If you’ve got a sharp nose, they say even a temple will serve you salted mackerel. Let’s share a meal.”
A complete stranger suddenly asking to eat together on the road. This was Joseon.
In modern times, even the most extreme extrovert would find the situation off-putting. I even considered just getting up and walking away.
But the moment I saw the lunchbox the boy produced, I revised that decision a little.
“You look displeased, but surely you don’t think I’m asking for free food. This is Kaesong’s famous Songdo Ddeokgangjeong.”
Inside were familiar red bean rice cakes, soaked in some syrupy liquid that looked suspiciously like honey.
It was the first time I’d seen such blatant simple sugar since coming to Joseon.
I’d already learned this at the Kim family’s place, but Joseon dried pollack was on a completely different level from the soft jerky-style snacks back home. If you wanted to eat it, you had no choice but to soak it or boil it first.
“We don’t have time to soak it. If we miss the boat leaving this afternoon, we’ll waste a whole night. I’d like to make a fire, but….”
I smiled with the look of a man who had just found his opening.
“Go gather some firewood. I’ll light it.”
“Ah, do you have flint? I’ve lost mine, just at the right time. This is fortunate.”
Flint? Ha. Primitive people.
A little later, after a pile of twigs and leaves had been gathered, I dramatically produced my survival waterproof matches from my backpack.
I did have a more convenient Zippo lighter, but it used special fuel, so I wanted to save it whenever possible.
I struck a match and lit it. Sure enough, the boy watched with wide-eyed fascination.
Ah, do you Joseon people not know? This is—
“Matches?”
How did he know?
When I asked him more closely, it turned out he had said seokryuhwang—sulfur on paper ends—as if that were some similar thing, and I’d misheard it as “match.”
According to the Mountain Spirit, there was already something used for similar purposes: paper tips coated with sulfur.
[Even so, it doesn’t catch fire in an instant like that contraption of yours when struck.]
I didn’t seem to be losing face as an isekai hero after all. While the pot came to a boil, the boy handled the rest of my matches as if he’d found a treasure.
“The people of the Southern Barbarian Nation—Nambankuk, Portugal, as you’d call it—have been selling maps in China for quite some time now. I’ve seen a few myself, but never one made like this. Where did you get them?”
“Well, I bought them from something that came in through China….”
Technically, that wasn’t a lie. They were products made in the People’s Republic of China, brought in by a Korean distributor.
“You said this was your first trip, but it sounds like you’ve got plenty of connections.”
Having nothing but a shopping-mall account to my name, I avoided his eyes.
Come to think of it, maybe I shouldn’t be pulling out magic items from another world so carelessly. If I did, I might get mistaken for a spy like Kim Dae-geon.
So I took out the vegetables Wonbeom had given me instead. The boy also unwrapped some kind of rice-ball thing with practiced hands, and before long a porridge that was, nutritionally speaking, more than decent was ready.
* * *
After we wiped out the pollack porridge and every last bite of the Kaesong rice cakes, a livelier step returned to both our gaits.
The boy nodded when he heard my frank confession that I’d never been north of the Imjin River—well, of course I hadn’t.
Then he pointed toward the ferry landing.
“The landing over there is called Imjin, so this here is the Imjin River. By rights, boats crossing a major river should be paid for by the state, with the people simply enjoying the government’s grace. But here, the seonse—the boat tax—collected by the Tongjunggcheong is so brutal that you’ve got to slip the boatman a bit of fare.”
“It would be nice if there were a bridge.”
At once, the Mountain Spirit came down on me.
[Are you an idiot? What kind of miracle are you expecting to span a river a thousand paces wide? Even if you built one, this season’s Imjin would smash it to pieces; the rocks themselves would be shattered and carried away.]
But the boy’s explanation that followed wasn’t technical at all.
“A bridge would be nice for us, sure. But the boatmen who’d lose their livelihood would come swarming in and tear it down. The magistrates in all eight provinces may read widely and try to imitate the old methods of flood control, but that’s precisely why it’s hard to find even a single plank bridge in a stream.”
So the Luddite instinct existed even without the Industrial Revolution.
I thought of what would happen if something like that occurred in Korea and asked, “And the government just lets it happen?”
“The authorities don’t really have any reason to bust their backs trying to build a bridge either. The boat tax is a pretty sweet revenue stream, after all.”
The boy’s lips twisted.
“There’s no business more profitable than the government’s. One boat means twelve men paying tax. They collect from everyone who was ever a boat owner—from the moment the boat first touched water until long after it’s rotted away and disappeared.”
Joseon was a meticulous document state. As countless anecdotes proved, it took record preservation absurdly seriously.
So even if you reported that a boat had been sold to someone else or scrapped because its life was over, the tax ledger would never, ever let it disappear.
Rather than the Annals, which could be altered if necessary—both Crown Prince Sado’s and King Cheoljong’s black marks were erased by royal order of King Jeongjo and Queen Dowager Sunwon—the tax ledger was eternal.
No one actually suffered if the Annals were erased, but if the ledger disappeared, the mighty would lose money. And if you wanted to touch the state’s most important records, the only option was to pay bribes—often more than the tax itself.
The lower clerks and soldiers were no less thorough. If Joseon had adopted a system where collected taxes and civil servants’ bonuses were linked exponentially, there wouldn’t have been a single delinquent taxpayer left standing.
In this way, the national treasury wasn’t maintained by launching some “modernizing industry,” selling opium, or waging war like some barbarian state.
It all came down to brains.
I desperately tried to restore my common sense.
Still, wouldn’t the state gain more from building a bridge? Even if you gathered every person who’d ever owned a boat, there’d still be fewer of them than the number of people crossing a bridge. Wouldn’t it make more sense—and cause less resentment—to just charge a bridge toll?
[Then collect both. Why do you insist that there must be a bridge before you can take a toll?]
What nonsense. Even a country that charges ship tax without any ships couldn’t possibly collect bridge tolls without a bridge….
As I protested in my head, I stopped dead in my tracks.
The Mountain Spirit gestured with his chin.
[You can just collect it over there.]
In front of my eyes stood something you’d often see in historical dramas: a city gate and its watchtower.
Joseon didn’t need ships in order to collect ship taxes.
Joseon didn’t need roads or bridges in order to collect tolls.
The point wasn’t the tax’s official name, but the muscle to collect it in the real world. The infrastructure needed to take money was a barricade, not a bridge or a road. Practical Joseon never forgot that.
This Jinseomun, the west gate of Imjinjin, was the physical embodiment of Joseon’s tax policy.
When the time came, two soldiers in baggy helmets walked out from a gate that looked like the hinges might fall apart at any moment.
“What are you, a bunch of peddlers hauling salt boats? The toll—gwanse—is five nyang.”
[It isn’t as though tolls are against all law and custom, but five nyang? These are outright bandits. That’s the equivalent of a small boat’s yearly boat tax.]
I gripped the axe at my waist.
* * *
Back during the Japanese invasions, King Seonjo fled north only to come face-to-face with this Imjin River on a rainy day.
The man who later built Imjinjin was King Yeongjo, so at the time there wasn’t much of anything here. With the rocky cliffs of the Imjin, the rushing current, and heavy rain all at once, it was a situation ordinary people couldn’t possibly hope to cross.
But Yi Yeon, better known as King Seonjo, was no ordinary man. As the swiftest of monarchs, he even outpaced the raindrops and bounded across the Imjin River, and in the end Joseon won.
As Seonjo’s choice showed, this Imjinjin was both a strategic crossroads and a naturally treacherous bottleneck.
That the Tongjunggcheong, one of the central Five Military Commands rather than a provincial garrison or county office, held on to Imjinjin made perfect sense in that light.
The Tongjunggcheong was a military command King Yi Hwan, later known as King Heonjong, was building up as a loyal guard force to oppose Angim. Which meant this place was a deliciously profitable source of income.
Its soldiers had the determination to drop to their knees at the first sign of some Qing pigtail barbarian, but when tax dodgers came along they were full of exterminating zeal. Yet even they were guarding this cliff-like gateway with nothing more than the meager equipment standard Joseon troops carried. For Taesu, even with divine favor on his side, forcing his way through alone with an axe was impossible.
Still, the soldiers seemed flustered too.
All they had were the usual Joseon army supplies—meaning not even a scrap of iron, let alone guns or blades. And no, it wasn’t polite to ask whether they planned to fight if they did have guns and blades.
They had been about to shut the gate in a little while anyway and maybe squeeze some extra money out of the ferry mistress with the proceeds. They hadn’t prepared themselves for a grotesque-looking axe like mine, or for forearms that looked like they’d hurt more than the axe itself if they hit you.
The soldiers exchanged suspicious glances and looked toward the one thing they trusted: the gate itself.
But the fortress, with its gatehouse and posts rotting and peeling apart, did nothing to inspire them.
Still, they couldn’t back down here. If gangsters got looked down on in their own turf, the business was over.
The bravest soldier stepped forward and recited the Joseon tax manual.
“Have you got nails in your ears? Pay the five nyang already. And unpack your luggage while you’re at it. Anything useful will be taken to support the military command.”
Taesu’s axe slid up from his waist to his shoulder.
With the axe placed exactly where a single downward swing would do the trick, Taesu asked back in a tone of unmistakable挑衅:
“What?”
The soldiers exchanged glances.
You go.
No, you go first. I’ll follow.
You bastard, are you trying to defy the corporal’s orders?
What kind of corporal is chosen by drawing lots like some dried-up scrap?
Then the boy stepped in.
He placed a hand on Taesu’s arm. The muscles beneath were so tightly coiled they seemed to give off the sound of a plucked string.
“My, my, I knew it would come to this. I heard all about your lofty spirit from across Ganghwa, friend. But wait just a moment.”
After whispering that, the boy trotted over to the soldiers.
“For a wandering peddler who doesn’t even have a granary to store a single picul of millet, what choice is there but to strip himself bare and end up crumpled on the roadside if he pays everything he owns? I’m not saying we should forget our duty to the state, of course, but if you’d give us some leeway, I’ll have our branch at Songdo’s Falgasan speak to headquarters and make sure you gentlemen are treated properly.”
[That boy’s tongue is quite something. Now I see why he clung to you like that pretending to be close.]
Taesu softened, a little, out of curiosity.
What do you mean?
[If he’d been alone, they would’ve stripped him clean. With that pretty face of his, he might even have become the soldiers’ plaything. But with you here, he had room to talk his way out of it, didn’t he?]
Hold on. So I was being used?
[Of course not. You’re the one who got the better end of the bargain. Without that boy, you’d have been swinging your axe around here like a madman and then been seized and killed in short order. Didn’t you hear him mention Falgasan? The soldiers would have understood that meant he had a line to the Songdo chaekim-bang, the headquarters.]
That little kid?
[A child, is he? Well, we shall see.]
Sure enough, the soldiers seemed satisfied with the boy’s negotiation, which restored a bit of their dignity.
“Ahem! Then just pay ten jeon each and move along. Don’t act so stiff with the others. If you don’t meet an indulgent post like ours, you’ll get thoroughly thrashed.”
“Of course.”
The soldiers upheld the single most important principle of public administration: trust.
So even as Taesu passed through the gate with his head held high in deliberate disdain, they whistled and generously let it go.
This sort of thing repeated five or six times before they even reached the boat.
In Joseon, there was no official distribution tax on commerce.
The state simply didn’t have the capacity to keep track of one.
At most, there were delivery and station-post obligations imposed on the licensed merchants of Seoul.
But in reality, a dense tax system that would make even Western countries of the era jealous was operating all the same.
This contradiction stemmed from the fact that Joseon’s government system was, in effect, a military regime.
The army was Joseon’s finance ministry, governing body, and production facility. Whether it was even a military force was debatable. Taxation, too, was imposed based not on the economy but on the military.
The toll Taesu paid—the fortress crossing fee—or the confiscation of goods they demanded were only part of it.
The more ordinary taxes, like sales tax and market tax, were a little better.
But then there was the jinse, the landing fee at the ferry, the bokse, charged when you set your baggage down, the seonse, and even the yanghyangse—the levy taken when a deal was completed, for rations and military provisions. Every military unit claimed its own district and collected on its own, scraping together its own seed money for self-sustenance.
And because you had to pay all of it every single time you came and went, there was no way a peddler could ever make money. The obstacles to land transport in Joseon lay less in the technical side—carts, roads, and so on—than in things like this.
* * *
As the Mountain Spirit had said, this Imjin River, now entering the early rainy season, had swollen quite a bit.
It wasn’t a raging torrent, but the muddy water was clearly swelling and spilling over. It’s like my mood, really.
The boatman refused to cross, stressing late-Joseon industrial safety standards I’d never even had guaranteed in the twenty-first century.
This negotiation, too, was handled by the boy.
“Look here. The monsoon is only just beginning, so the water won’t go down—it’ll only rise. We might be your last customers. If you stall just to jack up the fare by a few extra coins, you’ll end up earning nothing and making a mess of it. It’ll be the very picture of a Songdo cucumber peddler.”
I stood behind him, giving the boatman a sorrowful look. In truth, I really was sad, since I’d already been shaken down for plenty of money on the way here, and if he kept dragging this out I was fully prepared to make him just as miserable.
In the end, our heartfelt appeal worked. The boatman spat out a string of curses under his breath loud enough for everyone to hear, then picked up his pole.
His technique was rougher than Kim Sunwon’s, even though Kim Sunwon was no longer active.
I wasn’t sure whether Kim Sunwon had really been a legendary boatman in the past or whether this guy was just angry. A little later, I found myself hoping it was the latter.
If this boatman’s skills weren’t far better than Kim Sunwon’s, we were all going to die.
When we’d crossed about a third of the river, the first drop of rain that hit my face was the omen.
Within minutes, the rain became a storm. No, even in the monsoon season, was this really possible? Meteorologically?
I understood now why that idiom about being “as precarious as a leaf” existed. In modern terms, we were like cockroaches floating in the bowl after the toilet had been flushed.
The boatman blamed everything on us.
“I told you so! Aigoo! I knew it felt fishy! What are we supposed to do about being some nameless dead soul at the bottom of the river!”
What followed sounded vaguely like he was threatening us with the full weight of the Serious Accidents Punishment Act, but the rain hammering at my ears made it hard to hear.
The boy’s voice, muffled under my waterproof backpack, was just as hard to make out.
Really, the only voice I could hear clearly was from a man I didn’t particularly want to listen to anyway.
I sighed.
* * *
The Bobusang boy stopped shouting and widened his eyes.
Taesu moved toward the unstable bow.
He looked like the vanguard stepping out alone before a “wave-like” army.
Then Taesu went one better and actually planted a foot on the prow. Glancing up at me from an angle, he took off his pyeong-gwan hat; his wet hair writhed and clung to his ears and neck.
The boy’s lips parted. He should shout for him to come back to the gunwale and lie down.
And yet, for some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
The boy felt his vision narrowing, his breathing growing short, as he watched Taesu.
Author’s Note
1. Strictly speaking, the taxes listed in the main text—especially the yanghyangse (the suweolse)—were officially codified in 1871. However, they appear to have existed unofficially even before then.
2. “Songdo Cucumber Peddler” refers to a person who wastes effort for nothing and ends up with nothing to show for it because of greed. It comes from a story about a cucumber seller in Songdo who tried to hold out until cucumber prices hit their peak, only to have all the cucumbers rot away. In modern slang, it would be something like the opposite of “if you hold the line, you win.”