Before This Cup Grows Cold (3)

For a brief moment, Kim Jeong-hui could think of nothing but the stupid idea that even Guan Yu might have used some trick like this.

It was the younger Yi Ha-eung who adjusted to reality first.

He said, looking utterly drained, “...It was probably a Western contraption. I saw a few of them—whether he traded for them or hacked men to death with an axe and took them, I couldn’t say.”

“How fascinating. At the very least, that means he doesn’t contradict what you were saying earlier about the West, Chusa.”

Cho-ui’s subtle jab, repeating what Taesu had already said, was obvious enough.

Cho-ui was already on Taesu’s side. Kim Jeong-hui barely swallowed the words, Is it because we’re both lowborn, then?

His self-control proved useless. Cho-ui simply said it himself.

“I’d be shaming the two great men of the country by saying this, but for a base fellow like me, there’s no disgrace in keeping company with a peddler, is there?”

Cho-ui took a sip of tea from the thermos filled to the brim.

Then, with a faint sigh, he set it down.

“I’ve said it many times before: even a single cup of tea is enough to taste the boundless joy of beopheui seonyeol.”

He wasn’t saying the tea had been laced with opium. His thought, famous as it was, held that tea and Zen were one and the same.

“But tea is at its most exquisite only for an instant. As the Japanese tea masters say, you must immerse yourself in that moment as if it will never return in your lifetime—and yet this very vessel, with tea that stays warm forever, makes one forget such attachment altogether, doesn’t it? Park Axe is something else.”

Kim Jeong-hui glared at the thermos Cho-ui held out to him.

After a not-insubstantial pause, he took it and drank.

More than Cho-ui’s words, the warmth itself said everything.

Kim Jeong-hui let out a scholar’s lament. “Age only hardens a man’s stubbornness. I don’t know whether I am the one in error. Indeed, Cho-ui, who has mastered the way of tea, is granting me enlightenment through tea.”

“Teacher?”

Yi Ha-eung sniffed at the tea. He wondered if it might be one of those drinks that were only tea in name, like liquor disguised under the guise of King Yeongjo’s tea etiquette.

But Kim Jeong-hui’s eyes were clear.

“I’ve never heard of such iron among the Westerners in China. Unless one goes directly to Taeseoguk, this is probably something only Park Axe has.”

Even if it wasn’t found in Europe, the conclusion was the same.

“Then it’s a valuable item?”

“Exactly. And there’s another meaning as well. Park Axe has no intention of hiding the fact that he met with us and played his little game. If he believes he’s right, he doesn’t deceive; he stands openly and unashamedly, and he doesn’t spare either wealth or life. He’s an ancient chivalrous man.”

And when he said he didn’t spare life, he wasn’t only talking about his own.

“If we dawdle any more like cowards, then by the time the tea grows cold and he comes back, the thing he takes won’t be Huaxiong—it’ll be our heads.”

“Uh, I’m not trying to nitpick or anything, but this tea doesn’t go cold, does it?”

“Exactly. Park Axe himself won’t grow cold, so if we make it cold, that’s what’ll happen. He’s asking to see whether we have any spine. Insolent bastard.”

Kim Jeong-hui’s eyes flashed.

“But I know a way to keep the tea from going cold.”

He drank down about half of what remained in one gulp.

Now, unless someone split open his belly, that tea wasn’t going anywhere.

“If one can risk one’s life, why not one’s dignity? A Confucian scholar cannot be less than a band of chivalrous men.”

Just as Cho-ui had rebuked Taesu earlier, only chivalrous men knew the value of integrity.

If only they had possessed morality, how could the world have been ruled by scholars?

There had always been plenty of scholars no less gallant than any martial hero.

“Yeyang of Qin swallowed charcoal and rubbed lacquer onto himself for his lord. Compared to that suffering, what is it to stand shoulder to shoulder with a merchant? No humiliation can compare to the shame of failing to fulfill Crown Prince Ikjong’s will.”

It’s uncertain whether Crown Prince Hyomyung had any particular intent to open the country.

Still, it was true that the hopes Joseon’s court and society had placed on him were enormous.

Even while he was serving as regent for Sunjo, not even a token objection had been raised. That sort of approval would have been hard to earn even under King Sejong.

The ministers had “stamped their feet and fervently applauded.” It wouldn’t do to say rude things like, No wonder no one could expect anything from a rusty iron monarch whom even dogs and oxen looked down on.

Those hopes were elevated into something almost mythic by Crown Prince Hyomyung’s early death.

The dead can’t make any more mistakes.

Crown Prince Hyomyung was completed as Joseon’s final unfinished sage-king.

And for the powerful families who hated sage-kings most of all, he had become a threat they could no longer kill because he was already dead.

That is why the Hyomyung faction was still a meaningful political force. What they shared in common was not so much Silhak or opening the country as it was this: the enemy of the powerful clans.

Politics is not decided by what one prefers.

It is decided by what one hates. In the end, as Park Axe had said, opening the country and foreigners were secondary matters to them.

Yi Ha-eung, though not a member of the Hyomyung faction, agreed as well; he had joined hands with them because their goal—strengthening royal authority and crushing clan politics—was the same.

He finished the rest of the tea.

“It is warm.”

It was warm. Warm like the fire Park Axe had been running around setting everywhere.

As Park Axe had said, politics did not have to happen only inside the court.

Not that they were unable to enter it; on reflection, the court simply wasn’t worth that much.

The Hyomyung faction had gone from scholars to chivalrous men and joined the ranks of the chivalrous.

Just like Qin’s Yeyang, whom Kim Jeong-hui had mentioned.

And Yeyang had done the same for a lord who was already dead.

Kim Jeong-hui said to Yi Ha-eung, “So the Prince of Heungseon said he would follow Park Axe?”

That had been the plan.

But even after surviving all this madness, Yi Ha-eung found himself briefly wondering whether he really needed to keep following Park Axe around with such discomfort. He particularly had no desire to see that axe again.

They weren’t pledged to become his subordinates. There was no reason they had to trail after him.

But...

Yi Ha-eung couldn’t shake the sense of foreboding he had felt in Gangjin.

Putting the practical matter first, it was true that wherever Park Axe went, the Joseon army was being shattered in his wake.

And if there were no Joseon army, Park Axe’s faction would likely become the strongest armed force in the country.

No, from this point on, Yi Ha-eung himself would have to support that.

What kind of group was able to operate separately from the court, hold on to power by cutting down anyone who resisted them with military force, and keep itself intact that way?

At present, there were only two on earth.

One was Japan’s shogunate.

The other was the British East India Company.

Yi Ha-eung knew only the former, and that alone was enough to keep him from shaking off the sheer, brutal terror of it all. If he had known the latter as well, he would have been four times more frightened.

He had to make sure for himself.

Besides, without Park Axe, Yi Ha-eung didn’t even have a proper way to get back to Jeju right away, let alone the fare to do it with. In the end, he made his decision.

“Very well. I intend to go with you.”

“Then I’ll write you a letter of introduction. Give it to Park Axe. Just so happens I think my friend Hwanjae, Park Gyu-su, will be summoned by the king before long. There isn’t much time left. You must not let Park Axe slip away.”

Cha Un-hong was also the grandson of the very Park Ji-won whose writings had moved him so deeply.

The destruction of General Sherman.

The Hyomyung faction’s ace in the hole, now nearly an endangered species.

Hwanjae Park Gyu-su.

The Hyomyung faction was serious.

The fact that Taesu had simply picked out a convenient otherworldly tea-drinking item as an apology, and had only gifted it to Kim Jeong-hui’s tea circle, was no reason to belittle this success.

From Taesu’s perspective, this meeting could become a major turning point.

Support from the Baektap faction’s network of Silhak scholars for the construction of a trading company was one example, as was the reinforcement of the intellectual class that Park Axe’s merchant guild had lacked so badly—at least from Taesu’s point of view, because he found them irritating.

But those were secondary, technical gains.

The real gain lay elsewhere.

Roughly half of the purpose Taesu had hoped to achieve through the unification of the Bobusang had been accomplished right here on Jeju.

It was the political mobilization needed to keep the Bobusang from being encroached upon.

Taesu had spoken as if he were simply rejecting political interference.

But if Taesu refused all connection with the court, then yes, the court would be unable to remotely control him—but Taesu would also be unable to send push notifications to the court.

In the end, the relationship was mutual.

For the Bobusang to become an “independent political force,” it had no choice but to interact with other political forces.

The Bobusang of the original history, before Taesu, had wanted political power too.

But because they clung to authority, they were easily subordinated by the powerful.

Even in secondhand deals, if the other side looks desperate, you raise the price immediately. And their counterpart was none other than the Heungseon Daewongun–King Gojong father-son pair, whose manners were as frozen as an ice age.

In the end, without even realizing it, Taesu had been practicing the politics of a merchant who refuses to cave in and thereby drives the price up.

It was rather fascinating that this upheaval had happened not in Seoul, but in Jeju, the farthest place from it.

Taesu studied the whitewashed pile of stones and the metal rod planted in it.

Described that way, it looked almost like a grave or an altar.

The people of Jeju had thought so too. But the object, which had been recorded as “some Western man stacked stones and carried out a savage tribal rite,” had actually been a surveying marker installed by Samarang two years earlier.

He didn’t know why foreigners who wandered into another man’s land and spied as they pleased were so full of themselves, but Colonel Belcher and the British had insisted to the Jeju officials that this thing must be left strictly alone, “so the natives absolutely won’t touch it.”

So it was still there.

And Taesu pulled out the rod, then kicked over the pile of stones.

“Let’s take this with us. We can probably get a dozen spoons out of it.”

In a country before the Industrial Revolution, metal was precious in a way modern people could scarcely imagine. Taesu was a fine merchant now, too.

Cha Un-hong agreed.

“If the ones who planted it in the first place, those Samarang fellows, know what kindness is, they won’t have anything to say about it.”

Of course, Taesu wasn’t doing this just to collect scrap metal.

The reason he had gone out of his way to vandalize a relic of the British Navy was so that Jeong Guk-seong, the mokja—a government ranch worker—who had gathered the people of Daejeong-hyeon could shout,

“Even the magistrate feared the foreign ship and let two full years pass without daring to touch that stone tomb—but now look at that man!”

As Kim Jeong-hui had said, Jeju’s unease over Samarang’s incursion two years earlier had been no small thing.

The crowd murmured in admiration.

Jeong Guk-seong got to the point.

“A great merchant from Kaesong named Cha Un-hong plans to establish a songbang here in Jeju, buying not only yangtae but horses and cattle, tangerines, abalone, and seaweed. It is said that because Park Axe of Ganghwa lets peddlers do the carrying, he saves them the labor and can therefore pay us an even better price. How could we pass up such a chance?”

Cha Un-hong murmured with a satisfied expression, “Looks like the gift you brought won Chusa and the others over. The fact that they put up with your abuse and still helped arrange this says as much.”

Taesu also felt proud of his own salesmanship.

He’d worried that if things went wrong, they might sulk just because they’d had a little argument, but as expected of a modern ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠man, the “free gift” he’d introduced was an excellent marketing tactic.

When Taesu returned, the Kim Jeong-hui tea circle had completely changed its attitude.

Through fellow exiles and other connections—Jeju was often used as a place of banishment—Kim Jeong-hui arranged buyers for the cotton cloth, iron goods, grain, and other wares Taesu ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠had brought in.

Those were goods people had always come to Jeju to buy. The Park Axe merchant group seized margins that were more than enough to more than make up for the expense of Hobae-su Im In-son having temporarily suspended business on Wonsando in Chungcheong and come all the way down here.

And when the talk turned to Jeju’s specialty yangtae, the very thing they had originally come for, and to establishing a songbang to distribute it, they slapped their hands together in approval.

Kim Jeong-hui, unable to move around ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Jeju himself, could hardly resist wanting a contact point with Taesu.

Indeed, a man of strategy.

That was right. It had to be strategy. If he made a crude axe-brute his associate, Chusa Kim Jeong-hui’s dignity would be ruined.

But Kim Jeong-hui was also an outsider here, and the local commoners had no need to involve themselves in business matters if they did not want to.

Once they joined the songbang, they would inevitably have to travel back and forth to the mainland. Thinking of commerce’s status, it was like telling a salaried office worker to start doing Philippine online gambling from now on.

What Kim Jeong-hui had in mind were the people who were neither “commoners” nor in any position to be picky about things like “online gambling halls.”

“I’ll speak through Cho-ui to those who bear the island’s six grueling forced labors.”

The six hard labors were the ranch hands, the reclaimed-field workers, the tangerine growers, the boatmen, the women divers, and the fishermen.

All of them were hereditary slave labor, forced down from generation to generation.

And that was only Jeju’s own burden; since the islanders were still Joseon people, they also had to bear Joseon’s corvées on top of that.

So they were said to be “born carrying ten forms of labor at once.”

If they were sick and couldn’t harvest abalone or fruit? They had to buy it and pay it in person. The advanced financial state of Joseon, which had monetized its taxes, had also prepared corvée monetization.

If Joseon had expanded to the sea and carried out plantation labor the way the West did, then one need only look at Jeju to imagine what that alternate history might have been like.

And that was only the official burden. Add in the valuable local produce extorted by the magistrate as gifts upon his return to the capital, and the illegal skimming by the local bosses who had ruled in the days when Tamna had been an independent kingdom, and there was no end to it.

Yet those who bore these six labors were not even treated well for it.

Even Jeju commoners despised and ostracized them as lowly laborers.

Those assigned to the six labors couldn’t even join the village mutual-aid society. The first rule written in the bylaws was basically, Get lost, low labor scum.

Modern people might find funeral societies a little suspect as businesses, but in those days they held a status comparable to health insurance and employment insurance combined.

For various reasons, the households of those assigned to the six labors were in dire straits.

What they needed, in the end, was extra income.

And one more thing: a backer who would at least prevent unofficial plunder.

To the Jeju six-labor workers gathered in Daejeong-hyeon right now, Park Axe looked as though he could provide both.

As for money, that was beyond question after they had seen the massive trade taking place in Daejeong-hyeon, and the fact that he was close with Seoul noblemen who had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠held high office meant he had power too.

Under Jeong Guk-seong’s agitation and command, “Cha Un-hong’s Jeju Songbang” was created in no time at all.

And Park Axe, who had been granted full authority by Cha Un-hong, connected this songbang with Park Jae-bin, the wanban-su from Gangjin.

There were hardly any Bobusang on Jeju. It was more efficient to have the island managed together with Jeolla’s Baekimbang, much like an administrative district of Joseon.

The songbang temporarily set up in Jeong Guk-seong’s house had Kim Jeong-hui’s magnificent Chusa-style plaque hanging above its entrance.

It was the kind of commission the fastidious Kim Jeong-hui, who had suffered on this barren island, could not afford to miss.

The gentry who had come to see what sort of trouble the laborers were making, having come prepared to wring a profit out of it, were completely cowed.

Was Park Axe educated enough to keep company with Chusa?

And if even the great monk Cho-ui is here, maybe it really is true...

A Buddhist monk is usually no different from a shared charging cable for scholars. Anybody can go over and recharge their appetite for violence and wealth.

But if it was Cho-ui, a monk with a title even from the king himself, then he was a VIP-only charger. One had to respect that sacred power.

The gentry gladly offered the mats they had brought to the opening-day banquet of the songbang.

It looked as though the Jeju branch of Park Axe’s merchant group would flourish as well.

Author’s Note

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