Hamel’s Memory (1)
The reason Yi Ha-eung knew what the Joseon government was up to was simple.
On the way here, he had leaned on local magistrates, military garrisons, and the occasional acquaintance among the officials. For a nobleman traveling in Joseon, that was perfectly ordinary.
What Taesu and Cha Un-hong had failed to grasp was not that Joseon’s security was especially tight, but that this was not an age when news raced across the land.
Once Yi Ha-eung had heard Taesu’s account alongside the military secrets his friends had passed along while talking business, he was able to piece the situation together.
“That foreign vessel you said stripped you of every weapon and dumped them into the sea—what was it called? Siramarang, was it? In any case, it’s at Geogpo, and another smaller ship seems to be headed for Gangjin. Then those two were working together, and the one that fled when it saw you must have been the same lot.”
“They didn’t seem hostile to us.”
[No, no. Those bastards are surely the wickedest of all the wicked under heaven. Worse than the heretics of the Franks.]
Yi Ha-eung seemed to think much the same.
“They already kidnapped the Jeolla Naval Commander. How, then, could they escape the charge of piracy? Besides, the Englishmen slaughtered plenty of Chinese with their steamships a few years back.”
“To sell drugs, you mean?”
“Drugs? Ah—opium, you mean. Yes, men like that cannot be trusted.”
Even without knowing history, it was hard to argue with that. After thinking for a moment, Taesu asked, “So the Jeolla military garrison is going to fight them? There goes the business.”
“No. Not quite. As you said, they haven’t killed our soldiers or plundered the people yet. They said the ship had drifted in and asked for relief, so Gangjin will provide grain and water.”
At that moment, someone came running from far off.
He was one of Yi Ha-eung’s men. Short in stature, but with long, hard-looking arms.
A moment later, Taesu figured out what had forged that body.
The bow slung across his back. Even to Taesu’s better-trained eye, it looked expensive.
“My lord. We’ve run into a bit of trouble.”
“What trouble?”
“Well, you see…”
As he spoke, the man sneaked a look at Taesu, whose presence was impossible to ignore.
Then he nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Aren’t you Park Axe?”
“Huh? You borrow money from me?”
“Y-you damned peddler filth—watch your mouth! How dare you speak so familiarly to our lord?”
By then, Taesu had already realized who he was.
Truly, it was fitting for them to call themselves the Four Heavenly Kings, since they never came out together all at once but instead kept popping up one by one. The fact that each of them specialized in a different weapon suited the name, too.
“You friends with Jang Sun-gyu and An Pil-ju?”
Yi Ha-eung hurriedly stepped in. In the past, two of the so-called greatest thugs in the world had been utterly crushed in exactly this sort of situation. Right in front of his eyes, no less.
“This one is called Ha Jeong-il. He’s helping me with my affairs. His family are interpreters, so he’s had experience traveling long distances, which is why I brought him along. In any case, tell me—what’s the matter?”
“That Park fellow says he’s in no position to receive guests.”
Yi Ha-eung used the proper form of address so Taesu wouldn’t mistake whom he meant.
“Bidadang, that fellow? Is that an order from his father? A house that has long produced excellent military men, and still enjoys broad favor here—surely he wouldn’t do such a thing.”
Bidang was the courtesy name of Park Jae-bin, the man who would later become famous in late-nineteenth-century Gangjin for running Park Pharmacy.
He was still not even twenty yet. When he had come to Seoul to sit for the civil service exam—and failed by the way—he had somehow become acquainted with Yi Ha-eung.
In other words, he was not a merchant but the son of a scholar and physician’s household. Still, just as Taesu’s former Dobansu had been a local yangban, a well-known provincial nobleman could speak to merchants more effectively than even the biggest magnates could.
As for Choe Je-u, Taesu’s chief steward, the two were destined to become bitter enemies.
This family would later organize a government militia to fight against the Donghak peasant armies that swept through the south.
They weren’t the type to fight at Ugeumchi or anything grand like that; mostly, they grabbed whoever was passing through town, interrogated them for ideological purity, and killed them. That was what militias did, after all.
And when the Donghak army attacked the Gangjin garrison, the garrison commander ran off, and the Gangjin fortress fell in three days. The Donghak troops at the time were remnants of the defeated forces from the Ugeumchi battle.
Come to think of it, if the garrison commander had stayed, it would have fallen even sooner.
Maybe not if it had been the kind of commander Taesu might have built. But at that time, the Joseon army was still King Gojong’s army.
Seo Byeong-mu, the Gangjin military commander, disguised himself so thoroughly as a refugee that he vanished, just like a man whose king had abandoned his wife’s corpse and fled. Not even Donghak sorcery could break that military-grade stealth.
As was the usual fate of government-backed militias, the Park family became bait. They fought to the very end, only to be slaughtered one after another, and their house was burned in Donghak’s revenge.
If not for the pharmacy records left behind by his surviving son, Park Gi-hyeon, the family might have been forgotten entirely.
In any case, for now they were just a respectable local yangban family with broad influence in the neighborhood, and later on Park Jae-bin would even hold a post as a local tutor for young children—a provincial version of the district schoolmaster at Gaeseong.
He was also a staunch Neo-Confucian, which meant he and Yi Ha-eung got along surprisingly well. That was why Yi Ha-eung couldn’t believe such a man would turn away a guest from far away.
Ha Jeong-il answered, “Ever since that foreign ship business blew up, the market at the garrison has been in an uproar.”
Well, that made sense. What caught Taesu’s attention, though, was the odd part rather than the obvious one.
The garrison market? There’s a market inside an army base?
He didn’t ask Cha Un-hong, for fear she’d ask whether he was really that ignorant as a merchant, but someone else supplied the answer.
[Of course I’ve heard of it. If the military supplies goods to soldiers, isn’t it better to have a market inside the garrison itself?]
So civilians just swarm into a military base and open a market? What if spies or enemy agents get in?
[And if spies or enemy agents don’t come in, does that make it especially resistant to invasion? A man has to eat, first and foremost. Nothing is more important than a market in a garrison.]
The Mountain Spirit was right.
Hendrik Hamel’s job during the seven years he was trapped here was not as an arms administrator or a cannon inventor.
He was the weed puller of the garrison market.
King Hyojong may have wanted to use Westerners to make flintlock rifles and Dutch cannons so he could exact revenge on Qing, but to Joseon’s sensible commanders, that was no different from buying a knife and posting a threat online with a photo attached.
The Eoyeongcheong gunners Hyojong had worked so hard to train ended up giving massages not to Injo’s waist, but to the Shunzhi Emperor’s. No Joseon king had ever done more for Qing than Hyojong.
Rather than spending money making weapons they couldn’t even use, shouldn’t they focus on survival first? Joseon’s army was a financial institution, and a military garrison was a complex economic district, so of course the market was the most important facility of all.
While Taesu was shivering at the sight of this transparent, people-friendly, advanced military district, Yi Ha-eung asked, “Are the regular troops making trouble? Demanding grain, vegetables, alcohol, and the like for relief?”
“Not yet. The soldiers lend goods to the army on credit all the time, and without the military commander’s direct order, they can’t just do something like that on their own.”
“Then what?”
“As soon as news of the foreign ship spread, the grain merchants began buying up rice in bulk and hoarding it. They know rice will be in high demand, so they don’t plan to send it up to Seoul. They mean to sell it here at a premium.”
Not even Taesu had taken that to mean they were refusing to feed guests because Park Jae-bin’s house lacked rice.
Rice wasn’t just grain. It was money. The cash flow of a huge group like the military peddlers had been jammed up by the Han River merchants.
The local notable Park Jae-bin—or rather, his father, Park Cheon-ik—must have heard merchants pleading their case.
Yi Ha-eung looked at the man who was, in one way or another, deeply entangled in this foreign-ship affair, and who was also the person in present-day Joseon who had driven off foreign ships more than anyone else.
Then he handed the jarred food Cha Un-hong had given him over to Ha Jeong-il.
“Let’s go have a look first.”
* * *
Since Yi Ha-eung had come in person, Park Jae-bin couldn’t exactly turn him away to his face.
Park Jae-bin wore a troubled expression—more troubled, perhaps, because of Taesu’s appearance, which looked as if he could slaughter everyone in this family by himself, than because of anything else. “My lord, I’m sorry to have made you come so far, but my father is unfortunately away at the moment, so please speak with me instead.”
“How could a young man like me order around an elder with so many years behind him? Don’t mind it. So. I hear the Han River merchants are running roughshod over the place?”
“It’s not just a matter of a day or two. Since the Jemin Granary on the Yeongsan River disappeared, the grain of all Jeolla-do has been at the mercy of the Han River merchants for ages now.”
Park Jae-bin sighed.
Jeolla-do’s tribute rice transport, once famous as Joseon’s rice-copying machine—“scatter one mal and reap one hundred forty”—had originally been handled through coastal granaries and river granaries in inland waterways such as the Jemin Granary on the Yeongsan River.
People naturally gathered there, and markets sprang up. It was the same with Wonsando; granary towns made excellent hubs.
But things changed somewhat when King Sukjong, following the latest trend, abolished the grain dispatch system and once again privatized tribute rice transport.
The Han River merchants, who had been expanding their influence in that field, found a useful line in the legal code.
“In districts without a granary, the transport of grain may be entrusted to private merchants.”
Any fool could waste time searching for provinces without granaries.
Why not just get rid of the granary? Like General Motors burning down every streetcar in America just to sell more buses.
After all manner of lobbying, violence, threats, and manipulation, Jemin Granary disappeared.
Each Han River merchant then built warehouses wherever it suited him along the Jeolla-do coast.
For merchants based in Seoul, river granaries were unnecessary. They only increased the distance. And boats for the river still had to be separate from sea-going vessels.
From the standpoint of a business pursuing rational profit, that was an unacceptable expense.
Of course, it was the common people who had to haul things all the way to the sea. The sensible Han River merchants tacked on extra tax to those people in order to recover the cost of the sea warehouses as well.
Needless to say, bitter complaints poured in. More than once, even proposals from the level of provincial governors were submitted, urging that Jemin Granary simply be restored as a public granary.
But the matter had been cleanly settled during the reign of King Jeongjo, who deeply despised “the impudent habit of crafty commoners making a fuss.”
“If the granary is restored, the Han River merchants will lose their profits, so let’s leave it as it is.”
“Very well.”
Who on earth could claim that merchants were treated poorly in Joseon? What a perfect country for business.
The people all came to understand why Great King Yeongjo had thrown his own father into the rice chest. It had all been for the development of commercial Joseon.
As in the conflict between the Kaesong merchants and the Gongsi merchants, the Joseon government had protected the interests of its “partners,” the Han River merchants, with ruthless thoroughness.
As always, Joseon was absurdly pragmatic.
It was almost hard to believe it had any principles at all.
Those merchants’ coastal warehouses were spread all over the shoreline. Naturally, there was one here in Gangjin as well.
And now the Han River merchants using Gangjin as their base were stripping the grain away clean.
Whether to relieve a foreign ship or raise an army, in wartime it was obvious the grain would sell for more here than in Seoul.
After listening to Park Jae-bin’s complaints, Yi Ha-eung’s agreement, and Cha Un-hong’s murmured additions, Taesu fell into thought.
In the end, he would have to go up against the Han River merchants.
He could leave other regional merchants in place as allies or partners, but not them.
Not only because they were the core driving force behind the capital’s great old aristocratic families, the political faction Taesu ultimately had to push aside, but for business reasons as well.
The heart of Taesu’s plan to unite the peddlers was to seize control of the coastal sea routes.
And the Han River merchants were the very group already carrying out that task. By the late nineteenth century, when commerce and economics had developed to near-completion, it was no longer easy for a modern reincarnator to find an ecological niche.
A decent person would have thought of the obvious solution: build up the newly started peddler fleet and compete directly with the Han River merchants.
But Taesu was not that kind of person.
He had seen plenty of operators in the same position as the Han River merchants.
They would never tolerate a latecomer. If someone made drug coffee and business took off, they’d build a franchise right next door like a storm and drive the newcomer out before buying up the recipe. That was their idea of “fair competition.”
In that case, Taesu intended to give them “fair competition” as well.
Park Jae-bin, who had until then thought the giant beside Yi Ha-eung was merely a bodyguard, was startled when he suddenly opened his mouth.
“I am the Dobansu of Balgasan.”
“H-huh? The leader of the Songdo peddlers? You must have been hurt when you were young, so your speech isn’t very polished, but I’m speaking with his lordship right now, so…”
Taesu proved, right then and there, that he was in perfect health.
Crack! He chopped down with a knife-hand strike while still seated, and the writing desk split clean in two. Park Jae-bin shut his mouth at once. Yi Ha-eung pretended not to notice.
“There are a lot of peddlers among the military merchants, aren’t there?”
“Th-that’s true, yes. But, my lord, who exactly is this man?”
When he asked directly, Yi Ha-eung could no longer keep pretending.
“This man is Park Axe, the one who drove off the foreign ship at Ganghwado. Not long ago, he even overpowered the foreign vessel stranded at Geogpo, took all their guns and swords away, and threw them into the sea.”
Only then did the way Park Jae-bin looked at Taesu change. Cha Un-hong, meanwhile, briefly drifted into thoughts about what human perception even was.
Taesu, who had no particular connection to such complicated thinking, said simply, “I’ll solve your problem. In return, do business with us.”
“What? Hold on. Your strength is impressive, but do you mean to beat the Han River merchants to death or something? If that was all it took, we’d have done it already! Those bastards all have backing in Seoul!”
It was unfortunate, but even Cha Un-hong had similar worries.
And Taesu, even more unfortunately, poured oil on those worries.
“Are you going to keep getting trampled forever?”
“What did you say?”
“Even if it isn’t this incident, if the Han River merchants want to, they can torment you whenever they please.”
Though the military merchants were a powerful group, they were still bound by regional limits in the end.
Local merchants were extremely vulnerable to threats from outside their region. Every part of them was tailored only to their own homeland.
“Our peddlers were the same. Because we wandered around relying on markets built by others, we were pushed around by other people’s moods. But now we can build our own market. You have far more wealth and a far older tradition than we do, and yet you’re still going to sit around hoping others will be merciful?”
Park Jae-bin’s face hardened sharply.
But Taesu showed no sign of slowing down.
“Right now you’ve still got the garrison, so you won’t go under. But what of the sight of a garrison driven into panic by a single Western ship? If the state were to abolish the garrison, would you just sigh and say there’s nothing to be done?”
“You mean this Jeolla garrison, which has stood since the days of King Taejong, could disappear…?”
History said it would disappear. At the hands of the descendants of Choe Je-u, Taesu’s subordinate standing right in front of him.
And Taesu didn’t need to know history.
“An English ship that hadn’t existed from the days of Taejong to the present has appeared, hasn’t it?”
Yi Ha-eung and Cha Un-hong’s shock had honestly drifted close to the territory of outright rudeness.
Yi Ha-eung made up his mind again.
This man isn’t ignorant. He’s just—ah. His limbs are so absurdly strong he never had to use his head. I must make him one of mine.
When it became clear that Yi Ha-eung wasn’t likely to help him, Park Jae-bin asked cautiously, “So what exactly are you telling us to do?”
Taesu recited a line every boy dreams of saying at least once in his life.
“Become my comrades.”
Author’s Note
1. The records concerning Park Jae-bin of Bidang and his family are real, but the claim that he had not yet opened his pharmacy and was a leader among the Gangjin merchants is fictional. It is also likely that, at his age, he would not yet have used a courtesy name.
2. The expression “let’s leave it as it is” is taken directly from the wording of the Veritable Records of the Border Defense Council.
However, King Jeongjo’s decree about “abolishing the rude habit of crafty commoners making impudent noise” was not about that matter, but another one entirely. He was speaking to the people of Yeosu-eup, who had petitioned for administrative independence so they could stop suffering double exploitation from Suncheon-bu and the Left Naval Command.