Roots Spreading Further
Under the banner of welfare that Taesu had ordered, Promised Land was mostly in charge of disability support.
The high death rate of premodern medicine is common knowledge.
So, of course, there were plenty of disabled people as well. It wasn’t just a matter of poor medical technique, either, but of plain old lack of public-health common sense.
Cases like a broken leg being used over and over until it healed crooked, or a person thinking an injured eye would simply grow back like skin, were all too common.
That said, there were so many of them that they weren’t defined as “abnormal” the way they would be in the modern era.
And because the Jungdang kept boasting that it would make the lame walk and open the eyes of the blind, quite a few people had drifted to Promised Land bit by bit. It was maddening, really, because I couldn’t even deny it.
The Catholic gathering was supposed to be an absolute secret, so how had that been possible? Thanks to Choe Je-u.
If the problem was that it was Catholicism, then they’d just call it something else.
In principle, all religions other than Confucianism were forbidden in Joseon, but unless it was something with a Taliban-grade criminal record like Catholicism or Jeonggamnok, they usually turned a blind eye.
Besides, the group was already too large to keep secret anymore.
Choe Je-u took Christian doctrine, added in his own mastery of the Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist traditions, and then hung out a sign that read Donghak of the Axe Against Western Learning.
[Back then, Choe Je-u spoke to you of the self and the one true lord—what your hometown calls the ego and the singular god. In a way, the two fit rather well together, would you not say? And naturally, the one true god ought to be me.]
The theological logic the Mountain Spirit rattled off with such excitement meant nothing to Taesu. Frankly, he didn’t want to understand it either.
What he did understand perfectly was the cry of the gathered believers, pleading just like Bartimaeus, the blind beggar from the Gospel of Mark.
“Son of David, have mercy on us!”
Choi Yang-up, who was not the son of David, looked utterly cornered. This was the highest form of divine magic, something impossible for a man who wasn’t even a priest.
But how could he abandon the believers who had come all this way? Choi Yang-up wasn’t a modern man, so he couldn’t simply say that Jesus only loved those who paid their tithes.
After some hard thinking, a good idea came to him.
Choi Yang-up was Joseonese, after all.
Here, he would use The Book of Governance for the People.
As with Kim Hongbeom John, the former military administrator, he too seemed to have been drawn into the orbit of Park Axe and Choe Je-u and was increasingly resorting to human methods rather than the methods of faith, but there was no helping it.
The lame were hired to weave nets for Promised Land’s food supply. Farming didn’t work on Promised Land, but fishing did.
As for the blind, tradition dictated that they be made into pansu, or fortune-tellers.
But Choi Yang-up could not violate the stern command of Exodus.
Do not let the sorcerer live.
Why, then, was the freakish physically minded shaman who had gone off traveling still alive? For the same reason the Twelve Apostles failed to bring down the polytheistic heretic Roman Empire. Whether he lived or died was decided by “that bastard’s” side of things.
At any rate, a deacon couldn’t very well mass-produce fortune-tellers.
So the blind were assigned to the choir. Joseon people did love singing, after all.
But choir wasn’t a position you got simply because you sang well. They still needed training.
Choi Yang-up, thoroughly schooled in French education, knew Captain Charles Barbier’s “night writing,” the predecessor of modern braille.
Those letters, which could be read with the fingers in complete darkness, had more than enough military value. The Foreign Mission Society, that dark-state academy for spies, would have known that well enough.
Choi Yang-up adapted it in a simple way and matched it to vernacular script.
Thus, for the first time in Joseon, the blind received formal literacy education.
But to educate them, first you needed a place to do it.
Normally, non-disabled education came first and disabled education emerged later, but here it happened in reverse.
To read braille, you had to know letters. And if you were going to teach letters anyway, it was better to use the educational resources for multiple purposes.
With Choe Je-u’s help, Choi Yang-up converted the old Tongoe Young building on Ganghwa-do into a school.
There they also taught vernacular script, arithmetic, and basic French as a side matter—Choi Yang-up didn’t want to keep handling smuggling work by himself forever.
Sadly, this school did not become the cradle of Joseon Catholicism.
There were many Catholics in Promised Land, but it wasn’t an exclusive religious reservation. In the first place, the Catholics were a kind of guest, living off Park Axe’s domain.
The Tongoe Young building was large, so they had to ask Choe Je-u for help. That meant non-Catholics too, especially the people Choe Je-u had gathered under the excuse of construction laborers and the like, ended up staying and learning there.
There were enough of them that the school had to maintain religious neutrality in proportion alone. Naturally, Choi Yang-up couldn’t drive them out.
In the middle of all that, there was another change he hadn’t expected.
The Ganghwa area was steadily transforming into the region with the lowest illiteracy rate in all Joseon.
And even a slight increase in literacy dramatically raises the possibility of systematic management.
Because work can then be handled “by paperwork.” That allows far more administrative output from the same number of people.
It was exactly the same kind of transformation PCs brought to office work.
Computers were sprouting up like weeds in Promised Land.
The drawback—that people could read letters but knew no higher learning—wasn’t really a drawback at all.
They were only going to use word processors; high-spec computers were unnecessary. After spending three days drawing charts with magic and then passing them around with a command baton during meetings, even a 286 would feel like a godsend.
Choe Je-u was the same. He made excellent use of novice students.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
[Aren’t you ashamed? Even the boss doesn’t study, yet the underlings are living so diligently.]
“I’m not the boss.”
Taesu grabbed at the wording while ignoring the substance.
But the Mountain Spirit blocked his excuse by showing him Goerido and Seogeomdo too.
He really was the boss.
In the sense that he had become the head of everything.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
In the dwarf village of Goerido, they were trying all sorts of experiments based on the foreign goods that had reached Seogeomdo.
Dwarves were famous for loving alcohol, after all.
So the one responsible for firing up the craftsmen and urging them onward was Kim Yang-won, the fighting poet. Using his career as a kept man to good effect, he made a living as the village’s liquor dealer on Goerido.
The owner of the tavern, Kim Yang-won, brandished his Samneungjang and barked at the craftsmen.
“Why can’t you make one just like the British cannon!”
He was talking about the Bloomfield-pattern six-pounder naval gun Taesu had once brought in through de Thierry.
Because Kim Yang-won was so famous for his weapon, people might easily misunderstand and think Injo had foolishly encouraged only melee weapons in the seventeenth century. But Injo knew a thing or two about cannons as well.
Injo, who remained a warlord to the very end, ordered that cannons be made out of paper in his later years. And paperpunk Joseon actually made them.
Kim Yang-won, who was thoroughly versed in Injo’s armaments, had even made cannon from paper, so he could not understand why they couldn’t do it with iron.
The problem was that most of the people from here were counterfeit-money craftsmen. They had melted cannons down plenty of times, but actually making one was another matter.
The craftsmen looked troubled.
“We know how to handle guns, since that just means repairing matchlocks, but if you suddenly tell us to make artillery... Besides, what kind of money does a cannon even bring in?”
Kim Yang-won drove European logic into them with European-style force, explaining that in the nineteenth century, cannons really did make money.
The craftsmen, beaten into shape by that Westernized Samneungjang, soon began to complain.
“For us, it’s difficult. Unless you bring in Chinese men like those leatherworkers, or at the very least a blacksmith from Seoul...”
Of course, it was absurd.
First of all, there was no way some Seoul blacksmith had the skill to make an English cannon.
And besides, why would a privileged merchant ever come to Goerido, when the counterfeit artisans here were the ones who’d seen Park Axe cut iron with iron, and who would be executed if they left?
But Kim Yang-won smashed through their little scheme.
“Fine. You say a Seoul blacksmith, do you? Good. Let’s bring one and see whether he still has something else to say.”
Kim Yang-won knew why the Chinese tanners who were driving a revolution in Joseon’s shoemaking industry were here.
There was no opium in Promised Land, but there were plenty of ways to addict a man besides drugs.
Kim Yang-won contacted the Seoul taverns where his influence reached.
Soon enough, craftsmen who had been treated in exactly the same way as victims of a yakuza rip-off were dragged in.
Kim Hongbeom John, the military administrator who wanted to exorcise vampires with cannons, also cooperated enthusiastically.
Kim Hongbeom’s former job had been soldier and owner of a Seoul ironmongery shop. They were all people he knew, so convincing them was easy.
“The Seoul ironworks are already nearly ruined these days because of all the street stalls, aren’t they?”
That was certainly true.
Since King Jeongjo, who always pursued a free-market economy, had issued one edict after another abolishing the tonggong monopoly, Seoul’s market had really and truly become a free-for-all mess.
The fact that tonggong had been issued repeatedly meant, in other words, that it hadn’t worked very well. One pointless brawl after another erupted between the ideologues shouting that street-stall suppression was nonsense and the entrenched privileged merchants shouting that they should stop talking rubbish.
To a modern person, Jeongjo looked right. They needed to accelerate modernization and commercial development, so how could an old-fashioned guild be allowed to shelter regulation?
The problem this time was that while the ironworks lost their old privileged status, their obligations weren’t removed.
“If you’re going to do the government’s work, you won’t get paid for it, and might even have to borrow money just to hand over what they demand. You may as well work here and live a life better than most.”
The ironworks had to deliver iron at half the market price.
At a rate that didn’t even cover production costs, all they accumulated was debt.
They had tried petitioning His Majesty the former king, who was excellent at accepting complaints, but as had already been proven in the Song merchant Yang Tae lawsuit, nobody listened to King Sunjo’s orders.
And that “nobody” included officials first and foremost. In the end, by the time Cheoljong came around, it had become not half price but outright confiscation—and the charcoal was stolen as a bonus.
The blacksmiths, who had already been dragged in while cursing the king and drinking themselves into a rage, fell for the pitch.
Not because working here meant their debts would be erased and they’d get tavern vouchers too. Not even because they were being threatened with counterfeit-money charges if they ran away after coming here.
When they thought about it, there wasn’t a single reason they owed loyalty to the Joseon government.
They still couldn’t copy cannons.
But everyday goods like scissors and needles, which sold even better than cannons, were being made more precisely and more quickly.
Taesu didn’t even have time to complain that these bastards were using his money to build a gangster warlord force.
Because at Seogeomdo, the external smuggling port, something that might actually have been serious was happening.
No one had invaded. It was just that the person who wanted to invade had serious worries.
It was Charles de Thierry, determined to realize in Joseon the dream that King Taejo had failed to achieve in New Zealand.
“The British dogs came to Joseon? This is getting a little urgent, isn’t it?”
Through his broker network on the Chinese side, de Thierry was able to learn more details about the recent incursion by the Samarang and the Royalist.
He thought it was ridiculous that the Royalist had launched a rebellion just to go pirate and attack the Samarang, but in any case, Colonel Belcher of the Samarang seemed to have spoken well with Joseon.
Apparently, while the matter was connected to the British, the Joseon authorities had even granted permission for a ship to recover the grounded Samarang’s parts and wreckage.
No matter how much debt they owed from piracy, the fact that Britain had “asked for permission” at all was absurd. It meant a significant diplomatic advance.
“Then... that won’t do.”
Having done some politics in New Zealand, de Thierry could also guess who the “British agent” might be.
He could barely correct the information that the bastard wasn’t actually 007 but a Maori great warrior, even after getting the line into Shanghai.
If the British got a sudden case of political correctness out of their greed for Joseon, they would simply say that any Maori at all could become Her Majesty’s 007. New Zealand was British territory now.
De Thierry hurried to try contacting Vietnam.
There was Captain Lapierre there, the man who had annihilated Asia’s strongest navy, the Vietnamese fleet.
They either needed to launch a preemptive invasion of Joseon immediately, or if that was impossible, then at the very least sell Joseon a massive quantity of weapons.
Defending his own country from Britain.
The founding king-to-be, Charles de Thierry, first set about winning the affection of his “future people.”
He suddenly began dumping Western goods at bargain prices. Choe Je-u was overjoyed at this rare sight of a smuggler offering discounts.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
At this point, de Thierry still hadn’t reached Vietnam.
But I knew there was a French warship there, because he’d once mentioned it as a counterweight.
I grew tense. For a moment I thought about calling Yi Seong-nyeo right away and telling her to bury that French bastard.
But that wouldn’t make the letter come back, would it? Even the Mountain Spirit stopped me.
[There is no need. Why do you think those French bastards failed to send more ships after that? Surely you do not believe your shameless little speech at Chojijin was so effective that they actually took your words to heart and sent only non-combatants?]
I realized it too.
De Thierry didn’t know it, but something was wrong back in France itself.
As a matter of fact, France was, as always, in the middle of its own folk festival. The July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe would fall to a revolution before long.
The only problem was that the one who came after him was that fake Napoleon, but until then things were safe enough. Just as the Mountain Spirit had intuited, Captain Lapierre was busy enough keeping Vietnam in line that he had absolutely no intention of going to Joseon.
[Indeed, it may be worth soothing that anxious fellow and squeezing a little more out of him. We still need the goods he brings.]
“Fair enough. Still, I’m worried.”
[Well, it probably won’t happen, but if a full French fleet really does come to Ganghwa, you can just dump the matter on the court and run off after stripping it bare, can you not?]
The Mountain Spirit’s outrageously sleazy plan brought me back to my senses. When your brains fly out the window, you actually become a little calmer.
Besides, this was still only a threat that didn’t exist yet. If I looked at it coldly, the king’s erectile-coup nonsense was a far greater danger.
There was no need to stop the Bobusang unification work and rush back immediately.
On the contrary, the unification work was more necessary than ever.
My power had now grown from a restlessly unstable mass of commoners into something I could only call a tree.
According to the lyrics of Yongbieocheonga, the song of the nation’s creation, a tree with deep roots does not shake in the wind.
And right now, foreign unrest and domestic turmoil were preparing to blow in like a headwind from both sides.
If the common people—if the grass, that is—became the storm’s target, they needn’t worry much. They could just lie down.
But Taesu and his companions were people who had refused to lie down from the very beginning.
So the trees they had stood upright as could be uprooted by a strong wind.
To grow into great trees without being torn out, they needed roots that ran deep and wide.
The work of going “deep” had, by all appearances, been handled well enough by my companions so far. That’s what I decided to believe.
I would be in charge of going “wide.”
I realized I was already sitting in front of the porter, and I got up, brushing myself off.
As Cha Un-hong had said, the journey had, in a sense, reached its turning point.
From here on, we had to hurry north, toward Gangwon-do.
Author’s Note
1. There is a claim that Captain Charles Barbier developed braille for artillery night firing because he was a soldier, but Barbier himself said he developed it for the visually impaired.
This was passed down to the next generation, to Louis Braille, and became modern braille. It was already complete by 1847, but because of political conflict at the blind school where Braille was studying, it would be hard to say that it had yet spread widely even in France. That is why it appears in the story as Captain Barbier’s writing.
2. Injo’s “paper cannon” is believed to have been influenced by Sweden’s “leather cannon” (which the ministers called a southern barbarian technology). Of course, it was not made entirely of paper; rather, the cannon was made thinner to reduce cost and weight, then reinforced on the outside with paper (or leather in Europe). There is even a test-firing record, and it seems to have worked well.