Bobusang (3)
Taesu had earned only a single yang from honest trade so far—money from selling wild boar meat. The four hundred yang Kim Dae-geon had given him for the ginseng was hard to call pure commerce.
And yet here sat Cha Un-hong, who claimed she was handing out 2,200 yang at a time as nothing more than “investment dividends.” In the guise of a young girl, no less.
She never explained how she had become a tycoon at such an age.
Instead, she cheerfully settled Taesu’s promissory note on the spot.
When he took the silver that had been overvalued by another twenty percent on top of its face value, Taesu was almost ready to believe Cha Un-hong could stand up and declare herself the mother of Joseon—and he’d accept it. That was a merchant’s ethic for you.
Cha Un-hong smiled and said, “Wouldn’t it be stranger if I really were just a messenger? Do you think a house with that much money wouldn’t have a fast, seasoned courier? Why would I send a young girl out to court needless danger?”
“Isn’t coming here yourself more dangerous?”
“Who would think I’m Cha Un-hong? You just heard it come out of my own mouth, and you’re still suspicious.”
Once they had shed the disguise of bobusang, they no longer even used the peddlers’ habit of calling one another comrades. Taesu focused on the composure behind that smooth transition.
“Above all, you can’t trust a subordinate with something that might get you beheaded. The fewer mouths that can chatter, the better.”
She meant Kim Dae-geon.
At this point, Taesu was convinced Cha Un-hong was the real deal. This wasn’t information a mere errand-runner would be allowed to know.
Her explanation made sense, too.
But as far as Taesu knew, there were almost no people in the world who could logically understand something and still go ahead and do a completely insane thing like this.
[I know one, though.]
Ignoring the Mountain Spirit, Taesu asked Cha Un-hong, “Then what exactly do you want me to do? Help Kim Dae-geon escape? The man’s already left safely. What happened after that, I don’t know.”
“That’s all right. I know the rest. I told you for another reason.”
“And what’s that?”
“Because among the people who could stand with me, there isn’t anyone who knows the West better than you.”
Taesu stiffened, wondering whether she had seen through his background.
But being a “person from the twenty-first century” did not automatically mean being equivalent to “someone who knows the West well.” Even among modern Koreans, there were few who could confidently claim to know Western civilization better than Kim Dae-geon, the interpreter of the Treaty of Nanjing.
Cha Un-hong’s reasoning was perfectly sensible.
“Not just this red sash, but the shoes you’re wearing and the inner layers of clothes you’ve got on—they’re all Western goods. I hear that when the sinner-priest ran away, he covered the ship with some devilish smoke…”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’ve got nothing left.”
“Haha. I’m not a heretic, so I don’t need it anyway.”
“Weren’t you close with Kim Dae-geon?”
“Good heavens, no. I merely lent him money.”
Islam was looked down on quite a bit in Korea, but compared to Catholicism’s image in Joseon, it was practically aristocratic. At the very least, Korean Muslims weren’t trying to land the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and topple the government. In any case, Hwang Sa-yeong had really screwed things up.
Catholicism was a nuisance to every political force in Joseon. Even to rebels.
That was why Cha Un-hong had only given Kim Dae-geon indirect support, even though he would have made the far better partner for her than Taesu did.
“Still, people who’d pay dearly for such things are easy enough to find.”
“So you want me to smuggle for you too?”
“No. Peddlers like that are already crawling all over the country. This isn’t some petty scheme. I’m talking about a strategy for the fate of the nation.”
Taesu, who couldn’t hear the Mountain Spirit’s snort, looked at her in silence.
Cha Un-hong went on seriously, “China has been sailing here by sea for a long time already, and even the Qing Empire—the mightiest in the world, so they say—has had to make peace and cede land before the Western barbarians’ great warships.”
Even if someone had told him that she was talking about the First Opium War from six years ago, it wouldn’t have helped Taesu much.
Unable to lose face as a modern man, he said solemnly, “Whether we like it or not, there’ll come a time when we have to deal with Westerners.”
“Just as I thought! You’re a man who can speak sense. If we seize that road first and monopolize the trade, how enormous would the profits be?”
It was tempting even for Taesu, whose goal had always been wealth and success.
“You may have heard this from the ginseng middlemen we roughed up, but even just the Western cotton the smugglers bring back by trading ginseng to Qing people is a cash cow that leaves Kangjin cotton and even the finest hemp cloth from Andong in the dust.”
“Hm? A minute ago you said you weren’t going to smuggle.”
“I mean making it no longer smuggling. Laws against trade are only what you make of them. If the nation’s law doesn’t prohibit yanghaeng…”
The sound of teeth clacking came from the pipe mouthpiece Cha Un-hong was holding between her lips.
“Or if we can abolish those laws ourselves, then everything becomes legitimate. Why should that be impossible? Even these current ruling-clan nobles call only the paths through which they wield power ‘the law.’”
The earthen bowl in Taesu’s hand shattered.
When a crane hands a fox a bottle and tells it that if it only works hard through “fair competition,” it can have some soup, what is it supposed to do?
Should it sit there worrying about how to efficiently shove its tongue into the narrow neck, then lick up the trickle of soup that drips out like a chick’s tears, and console itself that it’s living so diligently?
Taesu’s method was to grab the bottle upside down and crack the crane’s skull open.
But unless some idiot as stupid as the Ganghwa Namsan Mountain Spirit went and stuck his head into Taesu’s axe again, doing the same thing this time would only bring ruin.
Taesu realized it today as well.
Whether in Korea or in Joseon, his status was rock bottom all the same.
If he kept going like this, the only solution would be the same as before—and that would only bring about the same result.
But Cha Un-hong was saying he could clear the dishes from the banquet table and even carry them back up.
Come to think of it, merchants were the very class that achieved the most dramatic leaps in status anyway.
In the nineteenth century the name of the ruling social class was “munbeol,” but by the twentieth century it would be “chaebol.” In both cases, it was still a status determined by birth.
At least in the history Taesu knew of Korea, changes like that hadn’t come through something as neat as a chaebol liberation revolution.
Not always, but the class a society needed was more likely to receive preferential treatment.
If such a society didn’t exist right now, then they could make one.
You couldn’t simply say society was being ruined by selfish greed, either. By 1846, the West’s advance into the East was no longer a prediction but reality. Joseon’s need for reform at this point was a sore spot that countless connoisseurs had lamented.
Cha Un-hong pressed the argument. “The sea ban may have lasted four hundred years, but it was never a law from the beginning. In Goryeo, ships from all over the world came to Byeokrando. If the tide turns again, then we Songdo merchants, the ones who inherit that tradition, are the very people who can be of great service to the country and preserve the foundation of the state. The same goes for you, since you’re of our kind.”
Taesu, being a modern man, could only nod along. There was a reason the Enlightenment faction had been crushed in actual history.
The Mountain Spirit, who had seemed to give off anti-reformist vibes ever since Kim Dae-geon came up, snapped, [Hmph! A shameless bending of learning to suit one’s own desire. It was the same when the wokou begged for trade with the Three Ports. All this talk of the profit of so-called hwae—commerce—was always nothing more than a merchant’s sly trick.]
‘Free trade isn’t supposed to be good? It makes a lot of money…’
[Nonsense. Does a crowded port mean prosperity? If the court does not uphold its dignity and supervise through the state offices, what profit could possibly come of it? That was exactly what Goryeo was like. It gathered pirates from every direction without the ability to handle them, and the losses they caused were greater than any gain! Dress it up however you like, it is nothing but treasonous longing to restore the Wang clan!]
In other words, these were the two opposing positions in the so-called theory of Goryeo as a trade state.
Of course, the Mountain Spirit’s last-minute claim about a Goryeo restoration movement was close to a forced fit.
If the mood in Kaesong had really been “Make Goryeo Great Again,” there should have been at least one rebellion in its name. That would have been even truer in the nineteenth century, when Joseon was basically falling apart and Kaesong was making a bit of money off ginseng.
But just as twenty-first-century residents of Jongno-gu weren’t going to rise in rebellion to restore Joseon, the people of Kaesong weren’t exactly fired up about bringing back Goryeo, either.
For one thing, there was no one to crown. The Wang clan, allegedly descendants of dragons who had scales growing under their armpits, had mostly gone extinct except for a few descendants trained by subsidies from Joseon.
That was because the rationalist state of Joseon didn’t tolerate conspiracy-theory creatures like reptilians. Fantasy-royal nonsense like “only dragon-blooded heirs are rightful kings” was, frankly, embarrassing to put forward as a political cause in this era.
Cha Un-hong seemed to think similarly. Her goal wasn’t Goryeo.
After a moment of silence, she said quietly, “I had originally intended to take things slowly as well. But the instant I saw you calm a storm at the Imjin River all at once, I decided you must be under Heaven’s mandate.”
Taesu fell silent as well, though his purpose was different from Cha Un-hong’s.
‘Hey. You’re the one who shat this out.’
[Eek! No!]
At this point, it would have been impossible to say that this wasn’t Heaven’s mandate, but the Mountain Spirit’s meddling instead. Never mind the silver already in his pocket—the atmosphere alone made it impossible.
“The mandate to calm the storms that will soon sweep through this kingdom. In Joseon, there are only two people who can carry that out: you and me.”
He also could not possibly confess that he knew no more about the West than the average Joseon man, aside from a few scraps of English.
Taesu nodded heavily—or perhaps hopelessly.
The Mountain Spirit shrieked, [I told you to live with ambition, but are you really trying to become king? Do you not know what Heaven’s mandate means? I brought you here, and now you’ve set chaos loose among mankind!]
‘...Calm down. Do you really think he meant for me to become king? He said it himself just now. The thing we’re doing together is making money.’
It had only been a short meeting, but Taesu could tell that Cha Un-hong’s seemingly bold behavior was actually built on realism.
The Mountain Spirit, meanwhile, seemed terrified that his temporal-line mistake had made him a wanted criminal on the run from the dimensional police station.
The Mountain Spirit hurriedly asked, [Then?]
‘Who else would it be? Obvious, isn’t it?’
It was obvious. Cha Un-hong held out the pipe again to Taesu.
“Tell me about the house you served on Ganghwado.”
* * *
Of course, Yi Won-beom still wasn’t a real candidate for succession to the throne.
At least not in the legal sense, and not in any practical sense either. Kim Jwa-geun, the head of the Shin Andong Kim clan who held the actual and effective power to decide such things, did not think otherwise.
Yet Kim Dae-geon’s escape sent ripples through the palace as well.
They couldn’t keep it off the books forever. Uiseungji Jo Deok-rim first erased the evidence tying his own family to the affair, then reported it while placing the heaviest emphasis possible on the incompetence of the Hwanghae Province troops.
For King Yi Hwan, it was a gift delivered straight into his hands.
The Catholic persecution of the gihye year had taken place during the regency, so in fact Yi Hwan had nothing to do with it.
But from this point on, he decided to raise high the banner of exterminating heresy.
“There has never been a time when the chaos of coastal defense was worse than it is now. If heretics are wandering through the border as if it were their own home, then what reason is there that the palace should not be the same? Rename Chongyungcheong as Chongwiyeong and have them take turns entering the palace!”
What he meant was that he would take Chongyungcheong, the unit originally meant to defend the line around Bukhansanseong and later converted into a royal guard by Jeongjo to bring into the capital as Jangyongyeong, and turn it back into a palace guard.
Taesu had damaged its face a little, but Chongyungcheong still had several solid foundations, just like today’s Imjinjin. Even counting only the standing troops, there were a thousand men.
The ministers, most of whom were Gyeonghwa sajok—capital-region hereditary elites—were horrified.
Of course, building a royal guard was a classic enough project for strengthening kingship.
But the era had changed so much since the early Joseon period that it might as well have been another country.
Triggered urbanization had concentrated Joseon’s wealth and population in the capital region.
Now Seoul mattered more than the king. That was also why the Gyeonghwa sajok stood above the king.
Even if war broke out, the king could no longer flee Seoul carelessly. After all, losing Seoul meant defeat.
But that applied just the same when the king was the enemy.
By attacking Seoul, the king could seize the state itself.
By the nineteenth century, in most of the world, the state had become an independent entity separate from the monarch. It had grown too large and too complex to fit inside the vessel of a single ruler.
What happened when the king was no longer perfectly identical with the state?
Constitutional monarchy, parliaments, and spontaneous state development were actually not the important point.
What mattered was that the king could now attack the state.
Most states only emphasized their function as governmental institutions, but in most countries the king was also the nation’s wealthiest man and its single most powerful holder of armed force.
The signature spectacle of the modern state had become possible: a palace coup.
* * *
No idiot ever asked the foolish question of how the military could kill people who had done nothing wrong, because first of all, the capital elites had done plenty wrong.
The reason a butcher kills pigs is not justice, but profit.
At first, he might choose the troublesome pig first, but that has nothing to do with the fundamental motive. The other pigs may comfort themselves by saying they’ve done nothing wrong, so it’s not their problem, but in the end they still can’t escape the blade.
The powerful men who knew the nature of state violence well were nursing headaches.
So this was why, the instant Jeongjo died, they hurried to disband Jangyongyeong and secure their safety—and now his great-grandson was doing the exact same thing.
But the ministers were in no position to object.
Kim Dae-geon had managed to escape without being caught in Hwanghae Province.
What excuse could there be against men so incompetently and spectacularly defeated?
There were some ministers who tried to steer the discussion toward building a fleet instead, arguing that since the sea had been breached, they might as well create one. But to say that the king could be protected later than the border—not even the capital—was politically dangerous before it was even military.
Under those circumstances, Yi Hwan was able to attempt the reorganization of Chongyungcheong two full months ahead of history.
“Have the State Council deliberate the detailed regulations. Every last thing must follow the old Jangyongyeong model.”
After issuing his stern order, Yi Hwan returned to his bedchamber in high spirits.
Then, as usual, he drew the mirror toward himself.
The face in it was the spitting image of his father, Crown Prince Hyomyeong.
And Crown Prince Hyomyeong was said to have resembled very closely Joseon history’s final absolute monarch, Jeongjo. Sunjo is to be set aside for now.
It was a face that alone carried plausibility. Pure legitimacy, beyond argument.
Yi Hwan adored that face of his.
To love one’s great-grandfather is filial piety, and to love oneself is morality. Among the rumors that seemed to come from the king himself, there was even talk that he was so handsome the palace maids would dare try to seduce him on their own.
“Looks like Jeongjo” and “handsome” might seem hard to reconcile in the same sentence, but Yi Hwan didn’t worry about it.
Because the king was a being beyond logic.
Author’s Note
1. Yeongjo, Jeongjo, and Sunjo were originally all called Yeongjong, Jeongjong, and Sunjong. Yeongjo and Jeongjo were promoted to “jo” during the reign of Gojong, and Sunjo during the reign of Cheoljong. To avoid confusion in the novel, I use the modern names throughout unless the speaker is a contemporary of the time.