Hamel’s Memories (2)
O Chi-hyeon, the Jeolla provincial magistrate general in charge of Gangjin’s military garrison, was simmering with righteous outrage.
“How dare these insolent upstarts violate our frontier? This will not end like Ganghwado!”
The king had ordered him to provide relief, but O Chi-hyeon had no intention of listening to some impossible command.
If he provided relief, all that money would have to come out of Gangjin.
In other words, his own money would be stolen.
And if anyone asked why it was his money in the first place, even King Yeongjo—the enlightened sovereign who, for the sake of his moron nephews from the same maidservant clan, kept sending rich districts’ sons off to become generals so they could pay for their old age medical bills—would have had to cough awkwardly.
In Joseon, a military garrison was, by nature, a feudal estate belonging to the commander. Joseon was a state of military-civil fusion, which meant every province was also the estate of whichever provincial governor ruled it.
And among them all, the Jeolla provincial military command was one of the rarest prizes of all.
So this was like moving into a better apartment on borrowed money, only to hear that a radioactive waste dump was going to be built right next door. Then again, high-level nuclear waste and the British probably killed people at about the same speed.
O Chi-hyeon was a Joseon man, so he was willing to endure for the king’s sake. If he’d been a modern Korean loyal only to real estate, there would already have been a rebellion.
As it happened, O Chi-hyeon was an unquestionably loyal subject.
His career, which began when he marched out as a junior officer during Hong Gyeong-rae’s Rebellion, proved that O Chi-hyeon was on a completely different level from those parachuted-in silver-spoon fools like Yi Yeosong’s descendants.
He never forgave traitors who embezzled from the state coffers.
Back when he’d been magistrate of Hampyeong, he’d once found that a tax delinquent’s relative lived in neighboring Naju and, never mind jurisdiction or protocol, launched a raid and looted the place outright. It was his money, after all.
One might ask whether that wasn’t a violation of the Three Major Corruptions, specifically the practice of family tax collection, but such a question would never arise.
In Joseon, relatives were one body. Wasn’t Kim Jwa-geun and the Grand Queen Dowager a shared destiny, too?
But there was another problem besides jurisdiction.
The “relative in Naju” from whom O Chi-hyeon had collected taxes happened to be the manager of a royal stud farm.
The workers at the stud farm immediately reported it to the Office of the Royal Stables, which handled the palace horses.
A lowly magistrate had no choice but to bow before the king’s majesty. All shepherds believed in the iron monarch King Sunjo.
Yes—the very king whom even the Song merchants looked down on.
And a magistrate ranked far above the Song merchants.
O Chi-hyeon respected the king exactly as much as a high school student respected a teacher. Father, king, and teacher were all one, after all.
Are you insane? Let’s see who’s closer—the king or me.
So O Chi-hyeon dragged out his troops and raided Naju again.
The stud farm manager’s wife, children, and nephews were all beaten to death with the club or thrown into prison one after another. Official records would describe O Chi-hyeon’s ironclad resolve as that of a man “running wild like a mad dog,” and no one could stop it.
Especially not the current O Chi-hyeon, the Jeolla provincial military commander who now controlled the economic lifeline of the richest district in the country—and therefore, yes, was now allowed to use the club.
According to the Daejeon Tongpyeon, once a man had served even once as a general of provincial commander rank, he “could not be subjected to punishment.” So short of treason, O Chi-hyeon was untouchable.
Which meant, in truth, it wasn’t entirely the fault of the incompetent monarch Yi Hwan.
This incompetent dynasty had simply given birth to Yi Hwan.
* * *
Joseon deployed its navy separately at each coastal garrison. It didn’t concentrate all its combat power at a single port.
That was why Yi Hee-jang, the Jeolla Left Naval Commander, had only been able to bring out half his total strength.
O Chi-hyeon first gathered that fleet together. While he was at it, he also contacted the remaining survivors at the Hae-nam naval station.
Of course, as military commander, his official responsibility was the army, not the navy.
But O Chi-hyeon came from a naval family so prestigious it had produced three consecutive commanders of the Three Provinces Navy Command. He was practically a junior Yi Sun-sin. The navy was no problem.
Besides, he was the sort of man openly recorded as having “taken bribes in front of the palisade and the watchpost.” He had never liked rigid bureaucratic divisions of jurisdiction in the first place. A commander obsessed with form was bound to lose.
So by the time the survivor king Ogeul finally arrived in Gangjin after a thousand hardships, he found himself in exactly the same position as Captain Lapierre of the Glorie, who had run aground off Buan.
“The Joseon navy has us completely surrounded!”
“Stay calm. They’re only maintaining a watchful posture. We came here for ‘peaceful purposes,’ didn’t we? Hey, bring me the Joseon naval commander! Damn it, I wish Joseon had telescopes.”
Then at least he could make out the face of Commander Yi Hee-jang, who was standing on the deck from here on out.
He was struck by a pang of regret for not having given Joseon a telescope along with the world map the last time he’d visited.
Though if he had, it would probably have vanished midway just like the world map, so there was no real reason to regret it. In any case, even without a telescope, the Gangjin garrison knew perfectly well that the idiot descendant of Yi Yeosong was aboard.
And so, even amid the ugly tension, negotiations began.
“You are the pirates who have thrown the Chinese frontier into chaos. What kind of outrage is it to lure a general of one nation and imprison him? Release the Naval Commander.”
“We were exercising our lawful right of self-defense after your Joseon fleet attacked first. We are not pirates, and, um, that’s not even the important part—the point is that as an apology, Joseon should provide water, rice, ten head of cattle, forty pigs, two hundred chickens, ……”
After that, it was just a grocery warehouse ledger.
O Chi-hyeon threw the paper down.
“Are these bastards possessed by ghosts of starvation? And since when have Westerners eaten rice, anyway? Why the hell are they asking for it?”
He was a frontline commander against the West, so of course he was knowledgeable about Western customs. The British cooks, most of whom had seen service in India and China, would have been baffled.
“Perhaps because the Jeolla Left Naval Commander is there?”
“Why is that man even alive? If he were captured by the enemy, he should have hugged a powder keg and blown himself to pieces!”
This wasn’t the Japanese army descending on Joseon. That would have required someone around the level of Won Gyun, whereas this was the Japanese army behaving like it was still a nineteenth-century army in the twentieth century.
“The Naval Commander is not the sort of man who would fail in his duty that badly, so he’ll probably stop eating and starve himself to death. Those barbarian dogs are just planning to sell the rice somewhere else. We don’t need to give them any.”
Thus O Chi-hyeon had Yi Hee-jang perish in righteous death—well, in the passive voice—and began furiously doing calculations in his head.
The truth was, it wasn’t just rice he couldn’t provide.
Rice was money itself, and the prices driven up by the Gyeonggang merchants had spread across all foodstuffs. It wasn’t as though meat and vegetables were still fine.
Who in their right mind, if an oil shock hit, would buy fuel with their own money and hand it to other people?
First he would drag things out like this, and then when that damned English barbarian inevitably caused some trouble, he would show those island pirates the spirit of Admiral Chungmugong.
At this point, those who knew Joseon well might have one question.
Why not just attack the Gyeonggang merchants and loot them with the army?
For O Chi-hyeon, master of the state treasury, that was certainly an attractive option.
And yet, the rougher a thug is when he’s slapping a police officer and yelling, “What can you do to me? I’m a minor,” the more meek he becomes before gangsters who aren’t carrying guns.
He couldn’t touch the Gyeonggang merchants and thus make the scholar-officials his enemies. What the literati feared was not the king, but other literati.
Of course, if that had been the only reason, the provincial merchants who had nothing to do with the literati would have turned the Gyeonggang merchants into one with the mudflats, as Park Jae-bin put it.
The Gyeonggang merchants were not merely exploiters. Just as blood vessels carry cancer cells but also oxygen and nutrients, they were essential to the provinces, too.
Up until now, at least.
* * *
By the mid-nineteenth century, commoners were beginning to participate in local government affairs.
“The town merchants and the village rabble are gathering in government offices, calling themselves the same kind as the ruling class and discussing state affairs. It is truly shameful and horrifying.”
That was the report submitted this year by the secret royal inspector who had come to Jeolla Province.
And when one looked into the reasons, it became clear that democracy does not necessarily begin with revolution.
Here in the Gangjin garrison, the soldiers routinely loaned out everyday necessities to the station men: living expenses, gambling debts, snacks, miscellaneous items for bribery to avoid military discipline, rifles and swords for inspections, and so on.
And the rental fee? Five hundred percent of the item’s value. In a front-line garrison zone, there was nothing they wouldn’t do.
But now it was useful.
When Park Jae-bin produced the ledger, the Joseon officers instantly understood what a “people’s army” was. Strong recommendations—on “communication with local residents” and “a progressive, democratic garrison”—were promptly sent up the chain.
An audience with the military commander, the sort of “conversation with the commander” that was normally difficult to arrange, was secured without much trouble.
“You’re saying you’ll supply the rice?”
Park Jae-bin, sent in his father’s place for safety reasons, bowed politely.
“Yes. Those wicked gang merchants are relying on their power and raising rice prices as they please. At this rate, how are the people of Gangjin supposed to survive?”
“And where do you propose to get the rice? I know full well how powerful the station men are, but it is early summer, is it not?”
It was a season when there simply wasn’t much rice in circulation. That was why the merchants’ brief cornering of the market had worked so well.
But that was only in Jeolla Province.
Park Jae-bin introduced a burly man who had been standing by as his escort.
“This man is a merchant named Park from Kaesong, and he is of the same clan as I am.”
He wasn’t telling him to use some secret code. In Joseon, this meant simply that he was a man Park Jae-bin vouched for.
Since the Park clan’s most common ancestral seat was Miryang, the fact that the two happened to share one by chance made things go much more smoothly. For the first time, Taesu felt the usefulness of the father he had never even seen.
Once a certain degree of trust had been established, Park Jae-bin got to the point.
“This Mr. Park, upon seeing the foreign steamship, could no longer suppress his righteous anger. He has agreed to charter many ships and bring grain down from Chungcheong Province.”
It was cargo originally intended for the Wonsando fleet, which had been planned for sale to the station men.
Supply to the British ships, especially repairs, would take time. The merchants likely believed no one else could provide them with provisions in the long term.
But now things were different. The fleet Taesu had seized from the Hong Gildong of Incheon, Jo Gwan-seop, could carry grain continuously and in sufficient quantity. The same went for meat and side dishes, whose prices the merchants had also driven up.
Once that happened, the rice-hoarding merchants, who had even gone into debt to corner the market, would be in the same position as a dog chasing chickens.
And when the Jeolla-region merchants were hit hard and started to wobble, Taesu’s fleet would take over their role.
They still couldn’t break through to Seoul, but that wasn’t a problem. Wonsando in Chungcheong, where all the nationwide tributary shipments converged, was already practically Taesu’s own territory.
The law said coastal transport could be entrusted to private merchants; it never said the Gyeonggang merchants had to do it from start to finish. They only needed to work out a transfer arrangement with the merchants there.
That was the solution Taesu presented to Park Jae-bin, and even Cha Un-hong was impressed by it.
Park Jae-bin readily accepted it, too. At least this wasn’t some “take 80 percent off the seller’s head with an axe, then call it an 80 percent sale” kind of business model.
Afraid Taesu might start speaking disrespectfully even to the military commander, Park Jae-bin hurried on.
“This isn’t about seeking profit. If the state will provide rice money, then simply calculate it as it was before the merchants raised the price and pay it out in cash. That will be enough.”
O Chi-hyeon clapped his hands.
“Excellent. Your loyalty is truly admirable!”
It really was admirable.
In O Chi-hyeon’s mind, the scheme came together in an instant.
There was plenty of “currency” in the Jeolla military garrison, too.
They minted money here as well.
The Joseon “mint” was not a centralized institution like the modern Bank of Korea.
It referred to the office that managed the scattered workshops where money was struck in government offices and military camps across the country—though in truth, there was no dedicated office in the modern sense.
As the forger Hwang Cheol-un had once told Taesu, “If every dog and ox can mint money, why can’t we?” the production of sangpyeong tongbo was dispersed nationwide.
At Joseon’s level of metallurgy, a single facility capable of handling the currency for the whole country was impossible anyway.
Most of it was handled by the military, where there was always plenty of bronze to melt down, and of course the Jeolla garrison—the cutting-edge economic complex of the age—had its own mint too.
They had copper as well. It just happened to look a bit like cannon metal.
So he would buy rice from these men at a discount.
But he obviously would not sell it to the English. Had he lost his mind? Whether Chungcheong or Jeolla, all the grain belonged to the state.
He would then sell that rice back to the merchants.
The merchants would buy rice at high prices, since they were the ones who had driven the prices up in the first place.
By then, O Chi-hyeon’s plan would kick in and the English would clash with someone, somehow or other.
At that point, all that remained was to turn them into another Hamel. The weed-removal crew in Gangjin garrison market had always been reserved for Westerners.
The garrison and he would make money. And he could also teach those merchants, who had been stirring up trouble in his own territory just because he couldn’t touch them, a lesson.
It was truly a divine scheme that could only have been devised by a family with three generations of commanders of the Three Provinces Navy.
He almost felt as though the legendary commander Won Gyun himself were looking down at him with satisfaction.
* * *
After speaking with the military commander, Taesu soon received Ho Bansu Im In-son and Fleet Admiral Kim Sun-won.
There were two reasons they arrived not long after the royalists, who had been much closer to Gangjin.
First, the royalist ship had lost a great deal of maneuverability when its main mast was destroyed. A temporary mast was little more than psychological comfort.
Second, Kim Sun-won had relied entirely on Taesu’s water-aspected blessing and blithely taken the shortest route without thinking twice. There was nothing to say but that fortune favors the faithful.
“......You’ve both had a hard journey.”
“Well, there’s no way a sea disaster would happen on a route chosen by the Dobansu.”
When Taesu saw their confident faces, he sank into gloomy reflection.
What if something goes wrong someday? Their trust will collapse in an instant.
[You really don’t understand people. If something goes wrong, they won’t blame you—they’ll reflect on what they must have done to wrong you. You should speak that way, too.]
Taesu had sworn he had no intention of turning into some cult leader doling out gaslighting like that. Unfortunately, Choe Je-u was already handling that part.
So Taesu firmly shoved the goat head of the mountain spirit aside and got down to business.
They joined forces with the Gangjin Song merchant personnel and unloaded a massive quantity of supplies into Gangjin. The foodstuffs, as promised, went into the garrison.
Of course, O Chi-hyeon secretly sold them right back to the merchants.
Taesu had no way of knowing, because he was busy contacting the station men according to the original plan.
Park Jae-bin arranged the station men, who had been paying attention to the much larger-than-expected scale of the Park Axe merchant caravan. In particular, Im In-son, who had served as a naval officer, worked hard to persuade Park Jae-bin that he ought to become a full battalion chief, too—after all, the Jeolla provincial governor was called Wanbaek, so why not Wan Bansu?
Meanwhile, O Chi-hyeon’s superlative scheme as the “master of the state treasury” struck true.
The British exploded when they were given the impression that preparations were being made but food still wasn’t being delivered. Not giving them food at all and refusing to hand it over while it sat right in front of them were very different things.
Of course, the Joseon vessels surrounding them were threatening.
But the British army had already seen what Joseon’s navy was like. Hunger whipped their confidence into a frenzy, and now they looked like nothing more than a source of protein.
Captain Ogeul drew his saber like a survival knife.
“Bring the Joseon commander to the bow. And prepare a summary execution platform.”
Even without understanding English, Yi Hee-jang could feel the aura of death and went white as a sheet.
He resented the ancestors who, of all places, had fled and sought refuge in Joseon.
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