The Great Expansion of the Monetary Economy (1)
At the tavern by the Imjin River ferry, an old boatman stood ringed by a crowd.
He was the very same ferryman who had once witnessed the meteorological miracle of transporting Taesu and Cha Un-hong across the Imjin River.
“That incident, you say? How could I forget it? I never imagined that fellow was Park Axe after all, but truth be told, even I—who grew up on this ferry, spending my life poling boats up and down the Imjin—had never seen the like of it.”
Having opened with that, the ferryman glanced around. A sharp-eyed listener promptly brought him a bowl of takju.
His throat loosened after receiving the superchat, and the ferryman immediately served up content for his viewers.
“So then that man stood tall against the storm, lifted his axe, and said as though delivering a sermon:
‘Do you truly not know under whose command I travel? Can you not see, with those eyes of yours, that the mountain gods of Geumgangsan, Inwangsan, and Jirisan stand at my left, while the Dragon Kings of shipwreck, drifting currents, and wind’s heart stand at my right? Back away at once and prostrate yourselves!’
And then he brought the axe down on the river three times, and his majesty made heaven and earth tremble.”
It was a documentary in the guise of a deepfake. One spectator, no longer able to wait, asked hurriedly, “S-so what happened after that?”
The ferryman held his breath and leaned forward.
“Listen well. In the time it takes to breathe once, the rain stopped. Do you understand? Not even a fox rain or a summer squall can cease so suddenly, and yet that dreadful storm simply cut off all at once.”
The crowd shivered at the return of an age of myth they had long thought forgotten.
Taesu was not the only one who had been thrust into the spotlight.
The winner’s brilliance made the loser loom all the larger as well. The ferryman had lowered his voice out of respect for the Imjin River’s river-god, Haebak.
Even Namsan’s mountain spirit, who had feared that the spiritual pillar of Joseon’s people would be lost, seemed now to be able to pass on in peace.
The ferryman drew his tale to a close in much the same vein.
“By that same reasoning, it’s only natural that the French heathens who came sailing in and invaded Ganghwa the other day were driven back. One command from Park Axe and the sea itself would’ve turned upside down!”
At that moment, another channel, having been waiting for its chance, pushed forward.
He was a Ganghwa peddler, like Taesu, often required to cross the Imjin River.
“From here on, let me take over the story. I followed Park Axe to Chojijin and fought the barbarians there myself.”
Everyone was so astonished that they showered him with twice the superchat.
The peddler brushed aside the sullen ferryman and spoke with growing excitement.
“When the Western warships reduced Chojijin to rubble with a single cannon blast, we were so frightened we couldn’t bring ourselves to go any farther. But then Park Axe raised his own axe, pointed it at Chojijin, and said he possessed the power to avert calamity—so no cannon shot, arrow, spear, or sword could possibly trespass. And then he took the lead.”
This one knew how to tell a story too. The listeners’ eyes grew bright.
“I followed him, of course! Ah, from that moment on, it was beyond words—truly beyond words. Every time he swung that axe, both the barbarians and their rifles and cannons were cut clean in half!”
In everyone’s mind, the image rose of a barbarian warrior wielding a giant axe as wide as a road.
“The barbarians fought like mad. For reasons known only to themselves, they smeared themselves with filth from the waist down and charged in; the smell alone was foul enough to gag a man. Then Park Axe ordered us to fall back.”
Someone could not restrain his excitement. “Th-then that means the rumor about—!”
The peddler hurriedly cut off the spoiler comment.
“Exactly that. Park Axe pointed to the Big Dipper and commanded the Thunderclap General and the White Horse Marshal General, and then flames and explosions went off everywhere. The barbarians were torn to pieces without leaving a trace! I truly thought Chojijin itself was being ripped up by the roots!”
No one stopped to ask why the same thing, when done over there, was called cannon fire, but when done here was somehow a meteor swarm.
The peddler had pulled out a French military cap—the proof of the “barbarian torn to pieces”—and put it on his head for all to see. The crowd could only marvel at it.
“And after that, as everyone knows. How could the barbarians possibly ever stand upright again after that? Park Axe rowed out alone in a little skiff toward that fortress-sized Western warship and drove them off with a scolding.”
Gasps broke out all around.
“Why, that is nothing less than the old deed of Seo Hui!”
The peddler assented with dignity.
There was no need to ask who Seo Hui was and display one’s ignorance for no reason. It was enough to know, from this point on, that he was the sort of man Park Axe resembled.
Among the Golden Fleet, many had witnessed the rendezvous between Taesu and Erigon.
Some of those who had been close enough to risk their lives for a good look also saw Taesu dragging out a Westerner tied up like a hog.
And the retreat that followed, Erigon’s withdrawal, was seen by far more people.
Of course, because of the Golden Fleet’s nature, not a single high-ranking officer—including Yu Su—was present. For that reason, their testimony was never accepted anywhere.
It was an “unofficial history” that could not be publicly recognized, not even for the sake of the Chongwiyeong, much less the king’s dignity. Naturally, it was never recorded in the annals or in diaries.
But by this age, Joseon’s official records had already become relatively unimportant.
Falsification and deletion in histories written to suit the powerful were rampant, even without Japanese pressure.
Cases like Crown Prince Sado and King Cheoljong, or the famously unrecordable crustacean allergy of Shin Chi-un in King Yeongjo’s reign, were prime examples.
Instead, it was private records that revealed the mosaic of the age. Just as people turn to suspicious conspiracy YouTube channels when they no longer trust the news.
Taesu’s deeds—officially recorded only as “the militia and the wounded aided the army”—were spread in this way under the surface.
That accelerated the creative power that is both the strength and the weakness of private records.
And there were people from Kaesong there as well as from Ganghwa.
To be honest, Taesu had not actually done much in the way of heroic deeds in Kaesong.
He may have dealt with Kim Sang-jun, but Taesu himself was a loan shark too.
Debtors were more likely to remember him for invading their homes and hacking apart their gate with an axe than for any contribution to the local community.
But seeing the mood now, it seemed that Park Axe was someone different from the man they had known.
More accurately, he ought to be. Human beings are social animals.
For that reason, the people of Kaesong also cautiously began opening their own channels.
“I—I’ve met Park Axe too. He lends money to market folk at low interest, and he also takes in parentless children and feeds them.”
“Maybe it was because of those dung-covered barbarians from before, but there were signs of dysentery inside Songdo Fortress. Still, after Park Axe gave the order to boil water before drinking it, no one fell ill after that.”
“Dysentery is a vicious disease even the most famous shaman can’t do anything about. How strange.”
“Looking at the gods mentioned earlier, how could diarrhea possibly stand a chance? Perhaps those French dung-barbarians were struck down by the vengeful spirit Park Axe set loose.”
Unfortunate as it was that, after the River God’s slayer and the Big Dipper wizard, a medical innovation that in England would not appear for another decade was treated as being in the same class as the two of them, the people of Joseon did not miss the point.
Technology could be handled one way or another. What mattered was the person using it.
“To save others by force is to be hyeop; to bestow favor through wealth is to be go.”
“And if one possesses both hyeop and go, that is ui. In these harsh modern times, he is truly a rare man!”
The people of morally minded Joseon were stirred by a tide of righteous knight-errantry rising north and south from the Imjin River.
To a modern person, there seemed to be no gain beyond the trivial spoils taken from the French soldiers.
But Joseon was not a capitalist state; it was a moralist one.
Thus it was clear that virtue—reputation—was a far more important form of wealth than money.
By that measure, this war had brought Taesu more profit than any business ever could have.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
At the Ganghwa relief camp, young peddlers came flocking in, eager to join Dongmongcheong and serve under Park Axe.
“This time, the court has said it will judge the spirit of the people of the fortress and has ordered us to keep defending against the barbarians, so I’d like to lend a hand under Head Merchant Park.”
“I can’t compare to Park Axe, but I’m confident with a steel club in my hands. Please take me in.”
It wasn’t only the strong who came. Taesu was still getting mixed up about this himself these days, but the Bobusang were not thugs; they were merchants.
The greatest help of all was the private-owner network the peddlers possessed in Ganghwa and Gyodong Island—in other words, the smuggling routes.
Joseon’s tax collection was as obsessive and precise as an online shopping mall’s ad algorithm.
But the state’s official organizations were never large enough to carry it out on that scale.
When it came to taxes, the low-ranking clerks who first come to mind are, unfortunately, not the answer.
Clerks were civil servants too. Even including them, Joseon’s administrative apparatus was skeletal. And once you got up to the local magistrate’s assistant, he was such a high-ranking figure that ordinary commoners could hardly expect to see him.
What Joseon needed, then, was a more delicate subordinate structure.
Preferably one built the way Joseon liked things best: privatized.
Those people were the private owners.
Originally, in the early days of the dynasty, they had been merchant officials who cooperated with the roughly bureaucratic capital owners to manage tribute payments smoothly.
From their very first appearance in the Veritable Records of King Jungjong, they debuted as corruption offenders, and together with the capital owners they formed the backbone of the famous “Joseon tribute corruption.”
But even the Great Law of Equal Levies, instituted to smash tribute corruption, did not eliminate them.
Instead, they transformed into professional distributors who handled Joseon’s tiny lower administration by proxy. Ban multilevel marketing all you want; it just becomes network marketing in disguise.
These civilians were called by various names depending on their field—gangjuin, seonjuin, changjuin, and so on. The guesthouse proprietor Taesu knew was one of these private owners, specifically a traveler’s proprietor.
They circulated grain tribute, controlled local specialties, and resolved the economic friction between the capital and the provinces.
At this point, they were the capillaries of Joseon—unremovable. Without the private owners, one could not even begin to discuss the collection of Joseon’s non-agricultural sectors.
The private owners of Ganghwa knew the details of this war with the French better than anyone else.
“Wasn’t it all just Park Axe doing everything on his own? The government troops did nothing but strut around and shake us down.”
“That Park Axe fellow has apparently been made head of the Ganghwa relief camp’s Dongmongcheong.”
“Not only that. He’s young and hasn’t been in the camp long, so it seems there’s even talk of making him bansu, the camp’s representative.”
“If it’s gone that far, then Park Axe is practically the bansu already. Ganghwa is close to Gaeseong’s Beolgasan, so it doesn’t even have its own separate representative anyway.”
“More than anything else, the court is said to be assigning the Gyodong waterways watch and defense to that Ganghwa camp instead of the useless government troops...”
So for the private owners, it was obvious where their “protection tax” ought to go.
Government troops or peddler guilds—it was all the same gangster racket. But the peddler guild was leaner, and therefore cheaper.
By then, the opposing boss—Jinmu-sa Nam Yi-hyeong—had also been dismissed for responsibility over his miserable defeat, making the decision even easier.
The soldiers of Jinmu Camp were enraged by the missing tribute money and the increasingly rude treatment they received.
“What, now we can’t even collect injongmok from the navy anymore? Those peddler thugs swaggering around as if they’re righteous militia is practically treason. We ought to see how big their guts really are!”
“Since when did merchants start flapping their mouths about the court’s decrees and whatnot? We’ll have to rip out those insolent tongues before order is restored.”
But that ambitious experiment in human anatomy failed.
The peddler guild had beaten the French.
Jinmu Camp had not beaten the French.
Therefore, logically, there was no way the Jinmu Camp navy could beat the peddler guild.
The sailors who came to teach the insolent private owners a lesson ran into a few packmen in a dark alley.
“You, you bastards, how dare you lay hands on government troops—! Aaaagh!”
“How is that? One blow and his skull split right open, didn’t it? At this rate, I might be about equal to Park Axe myself, don’t you think?”
“Forget it. I heard Park Axe split a troublesome naval vessel clean in two with one axe swing just the other day. Stay low. Hurry up and ditch it and run.”
No one worried about what would happen afterward.
The Joseon military’s personnel management was like a giant open chat room that had been running for about half a year.
No one knew the actual number of serving troops. The army was similar, but the navy was even worse.
By the time the fish and crabs in the Ganghwa strait had suspiciously plumped up, the Ganghwa relief camp’s finances had also fattened considerably.
The “defense zone adjustment” desired by the court also took place naturally.
Jinmu Camp now only needed to defend Ganghwa Fortress and the Gyodong Tongoe camp building, which suited its abilities. The rough 3D labor of roaming the open sea and reefs was best outsourced, after all.
That was why Joseon could never give up privatization.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
It was about time to find a new line of business.
In a year’s time, I’d have to start “trading” with France.
But I still had no basic plan for what to sell, or whether I even had enough capital to put up as seed money if I did sell anything.
Interest income was not the sort of income that made you rich all at once.
Money from the private owners?
Honestly, I even doubted whether it made more than the cost of building a “border defense” on a smuggling route. Starting a business always required a lot of capital.
[You’ve got those gold axe and silver axe gifts I gave you.]
That’s too much even for me to use like Cha Un-hong level money.
If the government were sane, they’d be desperate to expand military spending.
The moment that much money came to light, crimes that didn’t exist would suddenly spring into being. Besides, I’d practically been contacting foreigners openly.
Then Son Yu-jak, having watched my face anxiously for a while, came over.
“Is something troubling you, sir?”
Yu-jak didn’t know about the smuggling business. It wasn’t that he lacked ability or trustworthiness—it was a moral issue. Kids didn’t need to know about ugly things like that.
Still, Yu-jak seemed to keep wanting to stick his nose into ugly business.
“There was a rather unusual man among those who came to see the head merchant. Lately, I’ve had the feeling the head merchant will be doing something out of the ordinary, so I kept that fellow waiting separately.”
The people coming to see me these days are all perfectly ordinary.
For instance, missing debtors suddenly started showing up to pay me back. I guess the Dongmongcheong head position carries a pretty respectable credit rating.
Let’s use a little historical knowledge. Soon I remembered the most unusual person among those I knew.
Did Ha-eung come looking for me?
[You mean the title is “gun.” If he needs something, he’d call you. Why would that fellow come here?]
What kind of title is “gun”? Ah, right, it is a title.
While I was mulling over the meaning of a democratic republic, Yu-jak took my silence for permission and quickly showed the guest in.
I had no choice but to receive him.
The man, who introduced himself as Hwang Cheol-un of Pyeongan Province, was indeed unusual.
After asking that the others be sent away, he suddenly put forth what was, to me, the very pinnacle of the “late Joseon monetary economy expansion” I’d only ever seen in textbooks.
“Whatever goods a merchant sells, in the end it’s all to make money. Then what business could possibly be more profitable than simply making money itself?”
“What are you saying?”
“I mean we should mint money. I’ve already gathered the master smiths, and if the famed Head Merchant Park would lend his support, buy the copper with me, and use your connections to set a large ship adrift on the waters off Ganghwa, we could make tens of thousands of nyang there without a soul ever knowing.”
The ghost listening to that scheme inside me was so flabbergasted it shut its mouth.
I was the same.
In Korea, I’d watched one by one the fates of the fools who shouted, “The money is being duplicated!”
Author’s note
1. Hwang Cheol-un was, at the time of the story—meaning in 1846—a real person who was executed for manufacturing counterfeit coins.