The Loan Shark Park Axe (1)
“Since we’re already on the boat, why not stop by Ganghwado while we’re at it? The son of that house you were lodging with—the one where you were staying—comes to the market too, and he’s mentioned you a few times.”
At the words, Taesu considered whether he had any reason to go.
Even Cha Un-hong, for all her caution, could not have foreseen Kim Byeong-gi’s suspicions about a trip to Ganghwado at this point.
As Yi Won-beom had once told Yi Uk, it was perfectly ordinary for yangban to stay and study at a temple. The monks would be forced to carry meals, run errands, and endure beatings from drunken scholars, but in Joseon that was not the beginning of a revolutionary tale. It was the beginning of a healing story.
The smuggling-ring incident involving Jo Gwan-seop could not be dug into as long as Kim Dae-geon was keeping the Kaesong merchants pinned down. As for this latest Kim Sang-jun affair, it had been buried so thoroughly that not even ghosts would know where to start.
From Taesu’s experience, no one ever risked his own face and ran himself ragged for a subcontractor over some uncertain possibility. The top man always knew when to quit.
More than anything, what mattered now was cleaning up after the Kim Sang-jun matter. Taesu shook his head.
“I promised that once I left Ganghwado, I’d come back one day when I’d become prosperous. It seems that time isn’t yet.”
By that standard, Taesu was still a long way from “becoming prosperous.”
He rummaged through the luggage Kim Sang-jun had failed to recover when the fellow was “swept into the water by the storm.”
Inside were not only the silver ingot Taesu had once given him to buy promissory notes, but also a fair amount of light valuables. There was no shortage of Kaesong’s prized red ginseng, either.
The red ginseng would have to be handed to Cha Un-hong for disposal, but the marten pelts and silver were resources Taesu could use immediately.
After giving Kim Sun-won two marten pelts as a silence fee, Taesu turned the boat back without another word.
* * *
In a fight, a true professional wins before the fight even begins.
Masters subdue their opponent before the opponent can strike.
And a truly clean crime? The proper method is to make the investigators lose the will to investigate at the outset.
If you’ve tucked them into an expensive room and kept their cups full, they should be so relieved they can commit whatever crime they like without worry; instead, the so-called black-tights crowd always wastes time stringing wires across windows and forging alibis with ice knives. Their intelligence only goes so far, which is why they end up getting caught by a high schooler.
It was a principle even the dead Kim Sang-jun had understood and followed. And Cha Un-hong had decided to pay it back in kind.
Cha Un-hong’s weapons came in many forms.
There were her personal ties with the university administration office through Director Gong, and the behind-the-scenes support of the Kaesong Merchant Alliance, which had always disliked Kim Sang-jun.
But if one sought the sharpest weapon, one should look not at oneself, but at one’s enemies.
Her strategy, built on exploiting Governor Kim Hak-seong’s mistake, was especially effective.
The money Kim Sang-jun had used as capital came from Kaesong’s education fund.
So when Governor Kim Hak-seong ordered the promissory notes burned, he was, in effect, ordering the creation of a vast unrecovered debt against the education fund.
Kim Hak-seong sank into anguish. It was the sage’s hour that comes after a brief flare of scholarly impulse.
Joseon might look down on commerce, but that did not mean money could be handled like straw. It was one thing to say that profiting through fraud and violence was immoral; it was quite another to pretend Joseon did not keep meticulous accounts, as its national policy of frugality made plain. If a magistrate ran a fiscal deficit, he was hauled up for impeachment down to the tiniest unit, not just in nyang but in puns.
In the meantime, the fact that Cha Un-hong secretly delivered part of the property Taesu had recovered from Kim Sang-jun to the governor’s office through the Song Merchant Alliance was a perfect model of public-private cooperation.
“When Kim Sang-jun was driven into a corner by the official order, he hurriedly sold off his assets. By law, they ought to be confiscated as illegally concealed property, but since this is not something merchants can decide lightly, we bought them cheap with the intention of serving the state.”
They had certainly been bought cheap. After all, it was property acquired with a single swing of the axe.
Governor Kim Hak-seong, not being a fool, did not ask too closely where it had come from. Even when he was asked—through Director Gong—to pardon Cha Un-hong for being unable to pay his respects to the governor’s office because of an “illness,” he graciously let it pass.
If Kim Sang-jun had sold off his property, the purpose was obvious enough. Had Kim Hak-seong rashly confiscated assets that might be needed to cover a loss in Seoul, he would have found himself in a very awkward position indeed.
Since the Kaesong merchants had so neatly solved that problem for him, it was only right that a man who understood the meaning of “face” so well should receive not reproach, but compensation.
“Though the Bungbong Sangsi and Yanghyeongo were established by the king’s grace, during the reign of King Yeongjo, Governor Seo Jong-geup entrusted the fields and lands of Yanghyeongo to Jinsa Yi Hwi-dong and former county magistrate Park Gyu-hwang, and had them manage the profits therefrom.”
It was called a fiscal reform, but it was really classic state-capture behavior.
That was why Joseon scholars fought over posts with no salary, or hung around wealthy households praying they might snag even the lowest petty office. Once inside, the perks kept stacking up one after another.
But if the economy was saved, wasn’t that enough? In truth, Joseon’s governors were surprisingly enthusiastic when it came to economic development.
Among them, Kim Hak-seong, who maintained the spirit of learning from the old to apply to the new, took measures that went even further than those of Yeongjo’s era.
“The education fund is still money, whatever else it may be. No one understands profit better than merchants. Select the educated men from the Song Merchant Guild and entrust them with the work as before.”
They might not be jinsa, but among the Kaesong merchants there were plenty who had bought their way through the preliminary examination. Some of them, like Cha Un-hong, were even the sort who could have passed the first round honestly enough if they had simply taken the test fairly.
They cheered for the enormous capital infusion. Of course, Cha Un-hong herself could not step in directly, so she had used the Song merchants as a collective shield—but that was fortunate in its own way, since it allowed her to win the Song merchants’ support.
* * *
Cha Un-hong sent Taesu a letter describing the whole process.
Because it was a private letter, it had been brought by her trusted maidservant Gapyun-i. Slaves could run around as they pleased.
And Taesu had to put on a fraud of his own in order not to betray the trust the two of them had placed in him—that he would at least be able to read a little vernacular script.
The Mountain Spirit snickered as he read the letter aloud. Then he said:
[To orchestrate such a feat in the name of an invalid brother—impressive. But if you cannot even visit the magistracy and cannot step out on your own when matters become urgent, then in the end you will be nothing more than a local notable in Kaesong. You are young, so you do not yet understand, but this means they want you to hurry up and become someone they can show to the world.]
Taesu was about to answer that she should stop talking nonsense about family planning because the girl in the seat beside him in school gave her an eraser and that was that.
But the Mountain Spirit’s cowardly next attack shut him up.
[To have someone else read a letter no different from a love missive—what shame is this? Have you sworn enmity against letters themselves? How is it that you do not even know vernacular?]
Taesu was not illiterate, not even in Korea.
He could definitely read Hangul well.
That is, if it were printed in standard orthography, in typeface.
A few words were visible, but there were too many connected spellings, and with no spacing or punctuation, it was impossible to read.
Handwritten brush script was another matter entirely. Without training, it was much like a non-English speaker trying to read cursive.
As Taesu glared at the paper like it had murdered his parents, Gapyun-i, who had been ordered to watch his reactions closely, only grew nervous.
Earlier, she had already been scolded for saying, “That man didn’t touch the young lady, so what if he touches me?” She did not want another beating after reporting this kind of reaction.
The Mountain Spirit clicked his tongue.
[A script one can master in half a day, is it not? Study today itself.]
Maybe that was true for a Joseon-born person, but it was hard for a modern Korean like Taesu.
His deeply ingrained modern Korean and Hangul only got in the way. A handwritten premodern Korean document was still something only specialists—or those who had learned how to read it—could handle even in modern times.
With a grand groan, Taesu followed the final instructions in the letter.
When he dropped the letter into the brazier and burned it, Gapyun-i asked carefully, “You told me to bring back a reply, though…….”
The Mountain Spirit burst out laughing again. The language of the country was so different from that of the twenty-first century that they simply could not understand one another; the child could only grow frustrated no matter what she tried to say.
[If only I could possess you like yesterday and write it for a moment……]
[No. Didn’t you say it hurt then? If my power is damaged too much, recovery will only take longer. It’s not even that urgent.]
He sounded like a parent berated for asking their child to send a text on their behalf.
After cursing the Mountain Spirit, Taesu suddenly had a good idea. He took the brush pen tube from Gapyun-i and drew out the brush with solemnity, like a man unsheathing a sword.
A skill that should have first stunned the high officials when the captured Kim Dae-geon displayed it during interrogation—the astonishing feat of writing foreign words in a single elegant sweep—ended up being performed by a completely different man for a completely different purpose.
Cha Un-hong received the reply and marveled at it.
“So that’s why he wrote it like this, because it was something urgent. Right. He said to just thank him by word of mouth? And that woman…… send the siblings home too? Then there’s nothing else pressing.”
The meaning of the foreign script that even Gapyun-i couldn’t read was obvious enough. Thinking she would have to ask him to read it properly later, Cha Un-hong turned to Gapyun-i with a girlish look.
“Well? So even if he can’t read true script, he’s not an ignorant man, is he?”
“It looked like he was holding a brush for the first time…….”
“If he learned anything in the West, he probably handled those steel pens they use a lot. In the end, my judgment was right. You keep your mouth shut from now on.”
Gapyun-i, whose face showed the envy of even a faithful handmaiden like Hanyang’s legendary Ktong, had in fact begun to suspect that Taesu might be a foreigner from the very start.
But with enough sense to know when to stop, she abandoned the thought. She did not want another beating.
* * *
From that unpleasant experience with the letter, I gained one useful fact.
Just as I couldn’t read Joseon Hangul, Joseon people had a hard time reading modern writing.
I prepared several modern Korean ledgers, filled to the brim with loan records and larded with foreign words and English. Since the kids had all seen me diligently writing in my room, there would no longer be rumors that I was illiterate, just as the Mountain Spirit had slandered.
Taesu Finance immediately kicked into operation.
The office was the tavern outside the market. Yu-jak and his sister were sent home as promised.
Yu-jak seemed a little disappointed, but his older sister was still the legal owner of the tavern. And once I arranged for the profits from operating it as a tavern—specifically, as a place famous for its savory jeon—to go to her after rent and labor costs were deducted, she kept quiet.
And there was value in that arrangement. For the lending business aimed at small merchants in Kaesong’s Namdaemun Market, the information gathered by the market-rat gang led by Yu-jak was an enormous help.
“People say Jo from the tobacco shop in the south market has fallen into concubinage and squandered his entire fortune,” one report went.
“Mr. Yi from the Cheongpyo Store—the Chinese cotton-cloth shop—entrusted money to the embassy entourage last winter and stacked away the silk he got back this spring. Looks like he’s planning to sell it at a high price somewhere soon.”
“Mr. Kim from the Fish and Fruit Shop recently bought yellow croaker from Hwanghae-do, but someone offering it cheap took the advance payment and ran. He lost quite a bit. He’s been grinding his teeth, muttering something about some cult or other…….”
The last one was a little unsettling, so let’s ignore it. In any case, just as Director Gong had been indispensable to Cha Un-hong’s success as a shadow merchant, I too needed to foster a second-in-command like this.
While Yu-jak worked hard, I reviewed Kim Sang-jun’s list of promissory notes.
At this point, these notes were naturally useless, but that wasn’t their purpose.
First, I marked everyone here who had gambling debts as the lowest possible credit risk.
[Aren’t those exactly the kind of people most likely to borrow money?]
That was precisely why they were out.
I’d seen people quit weed before; I’d never seen anyone quit gambling.
These guys were never going to repay. If they were stupid enough to fall for rigged gambling, then they had no value as potential business partners either.
They’d only increase the risk. In my view, the reason Joseon usury rates were so murderous was this very risk. There must have been plenty of people who lived only for today, which meant plenty of cases where the money never came back.
[Why not just go beat the money out of them like you always do? Or sell them into slavery. Both are legal.]
Do you get blood from a stone? Just as office workers hate writing reports, loan sharks don’t exactly enjoy swinging clubs if they can avoid it.
If the money comes in without any conflict, there’s no better method than that. More importantly, human trafficking is pointless if the slave’s market price is lower than the debt itself.
And there was a major advantage to this sort of risk management.
If the interest rate was high because the risk was high, then by the same logic, the rate could be lowered when the risk was low.
If I was a newcomer trying to seize the market, then discount pricing was still the best weapon.
Before long, I began running promotions for daily and monthly loans aimed at carefully selected, healthy small business owners.
The market-rat kids, who knew the market inside and out, made a huge difference as they roamed around like motorcycles, tossing out advertisements in passing. It wasn’t because I couldn’t read or write, obviously. It was because Joseon didn’t have business cards.
* * *
Because Joseon had no internet, the information Taesu could gather about market trends was limited.
But the amount of “reliable information” was about the same whether the internet existed or not. Taesu asked Cha Un-hong and set Taesu Finance’s interest rate at 20 percent per month, just slightly higher than the rate used by Kaesong’s market network.
It was an outrageously aggressive rate. At 20 percent, it was originally a five-day rate—a single pasu, as the Mountain Spirit had first said.
The “clients,” centered around the small merchants of Kaesong’s twenty market guilds, rushed to borrow money one after another. Taesu’s unreadable ledgers kept piling up too.
The money Taesu was lending out so cheaply had a “definite” use beyond business expansion. Most people were using Taesu Finance to roll over the debts they had previously borrowed at usurious rates.
It would have been nice if, after that, they faithfully paid the interest, but there are always people who mistake kindness for a right.
Here too, it was usually the people who believed themselves smart who did this.
Because of his little-known relationship with Cha Un-hong, the Kaesong merchants saw Taesu as nothing more than an outsider trying to gobble up the market through a loss-leading sale.
Perfect marks.
The old Kaesong merchant establishment did not tolerate outsiders. This was Kaesong—the place where even Japanese merchants under colonial rule would have had to lick their wounds and retreat.
By Kaesong’s good old custom, even the Kaesong market network took pride in repaying its money a few days before the due date.
But outside Kaesong, things were different. They thought it might be fine to stiff a clueless wandering brat a little.
Following the custom of the time, I sent several employees to collect from overdue borrowers by making “phone calls,” and one of them came back with a rather impressive blockage report.
One of the kids who had been beaten up sat in the tavern yard and bawled his eyes out.
It wasn’t just a simple beating. The flesh on his buttocks and thighs had been split open, soaking his trousers with blood, and one side of his face was so swollen he couldn’t even open his eye.
Only because he was one of the market-rat kids who had lived a hard life, even among Joseon children, had he come back this far. If he had been a modern kid, he might have died on the spot.
Son Yu-jak said, “He’s one of the stray punks who doesn’t even have his name registered with the Hwando Brokerage Guild in Kaesong and hasn’t paid respects to the local notables. He got hit for acting arrogant, gathering a little gang and shouting at his elders.”
Of course the market-rat gang wouldn’t have been politely collecting debts.
Still, Taesu followed the basics of organization. He wasn’t stupid enough to make a show of distinguishing too clearly between our side and the enemy’s.
“Who was it?”
“A guy named Choi, from the house across from Manwoldae in the inner city. He comes around the cattle market often.”
“Take me there.”
Author’s Note
1. Strictly speaking, even in Joseon it wasn’t actually legal for private citizens to beat debtors. If you took them to the authorities, they’d beat them for you instead.