The Maiden of Soyang River (1)
Taesu and Cha Un-hong headed north through the many districts of Yeongseo, just as they had planned.
Wherever they went, he bought salt; elsewhere, he sold red ginseng; and in other places, he drew customers by showing off the Edo trinkets Ryoma had given him as souvenirs.
If they ran into someone in trouble, Taesu would gladly write an IOU for one hundred nyang, or two hundred if need be.
There were plenty of places to cash it in, whether he crossed west over the mountains into Chungcheong Province, followed the river down into Gyeonggi Province, or went south to Samcheok-bu.
Just as Cha Un-hong had said before, Taesu’s standing was now entirely different from when he had once traveled through the Three Southern Provinces.
The rumor spread in an instant through the peddlers’ guild branches at markets all over the region.
“Dobansu Park Axe is here!”
People flocked to the market without even needing to be called.
The roads Taesu traveled, and the roads of the people he had helped with his IOUs, became the very network the future Gangwon Province Baekimbang would use.
And once it was clearly autumn, he arrived in Chuncheon, the final destination in Gangwon Province unless one counted Geumgangsan.
* * *
If you asked what Gangwon Province was famous for, the answer was medicinal herbs.
And tobacco counted as a medicinal herb, too. It would be easy to dismiss that as a premodern oddity, except even modern Korea handles cigarettes and ginseng under the same company.
The tobacco produced in Gangwon Province was naturally traded first at the Chuncheon market.
A gang of tobacco sellers put on a show of the East Coast peddlers’ peculiar culture.
They stood their carrying frames upright, beat time with their staffs in a dum-duh-dum rhythm, and stamped on the mill straps—the harness used to carry the frame—like pedals.
Taesu thought they would have looked no worse than a modern drummer. They were the sort of talent that never got to bloom because they were born in an age without clubs and died before their gifts could blossom.
This was the famous seonjilkkun nori, one of Gangwon Province’s, especially Chuncheon Market’s, attractions.
“Now then, in Joseon tobacco grows far beyond Seoch’o alone. I have roamed all eight scenic views of Gwandong—Seorak, Chiak, Yeongwol, Geumseong, and Anhyeop alike—gathered up tobacco leaves from every corner, sliced them fine with a cutting knife, soaked them in honey water, and brought them here. Try some!”
Cha Un-hong, picky when it came to tobacco, selected the good-quality leaves with strict care.
“Hm. This is decent enough. Still, compared to that strange Western tobacco you have, even Pyeongando’s Seongcheon fragrant leaf tastes flat.”
“...I told you, that’s only for holidays. I can’t get any more of it now anyway.”
Modern filtered cigarettes would not appear until the 1930s, so neither of them would live long enough to see them, but cigarettes themselves had been invented earlier.
Cha Un-hong seemed to be thinking along the same lines.
“Ah! Then why don’t we make and sell them ourselves?”
That caught Taesu’s interest, too.
“But how would we make them? They’re not just some thing you wrap in paper.”
“Then let’s take a closer look.”
Taesu, lured by the scheme, ended up taking out another cigarette. After Cha Un-hong smoked it with obvious pleasure, she took apart the remaining butt.
“I don’t really know how it’s made so precisely either. But in the end, the heart of this cigarette is that the space between the wrapped tobacco leaf and the mouth is hollow like a flute, so the smoke gets sucked in through it. It’s just a very short bamboo tube.”
“Hollow? Isn’t it filled with something soft?”
It was baffling. A modern man who should have been explaining otherworldly things in a way that made sense was somehow being dragged down to the level of a nineteenth-century person.
But Cha Un-hong solved the problem in a thoroughly nineteenth-century way.
“In my opinion, it doesn’t need to be there at all, and if necessary, we can stuff it with cotton or the like. If you press it, doesn’t it feel like cotton?”
Taesu thought this was a bit much, even for Joseon.
And yet Cha Un-hong had, in fact, almost exactly described the prototype of the modern cigarette that would become hugely popular not too long after—what was commonly called a Russian cigarette, the papirosa.
A papirosa wraps tobacco in paper and attaches a disposable cardboard mouthpiece in front of it.
Leaving aside the fact that the ratio between the filter and the tobacco was reversed compared to modern cigarettes, and that the “filter” was really just an empty tube rather than something that actually strained the smoke, it was almost the same thing.
And in the premium versions, that cardboard mouthpiece was stuffed with cotton. In the modern age, that would simply become cellulose acetate.
“Then let’s build the Gangwon Province Baekimbang and make our own Songbang there, too. I was already thinking we should do something other than red ginseng.”
“That’s fine, but if we’re doing that, wouldn’t Pyeongan Province tobacco be better?”
“Seoch’o is something you can sell even without making it, because there isn’t enough of it to go around anyway. Gwandong tobacco isn’t bad either, but compared to Seoch’o it’s still second-rate, so we ought to sell it on the convenience of the horizontal bamboo—no, wait, if the cigarette holder is paper, should I call it a horizontal paper instead?”
The plan was to turn a tobacco that wasn’t a first-tier brand into cigarettes and compete on convenience.
Taesu and Cha Un-hong entrusted the Chuncheon branch with purchasing and gathered the tobacco together.
It was partly to save time, and partly to deliberately foster the Chuncheon branch.
Even if they were called branches, peddlers were not, at their core, a bureaucratic organization. Not every branch could be like Kimryangjang or Wonhongju Yukgun Sangmusa.
Most of them were little more than peddlers’ rest stops. More often than not, there wasn’t even a branch chief or a deputy chief.
This place was no different. So Taesu deliberately pumped money into it by having Chuncheon branch handle the purchases on commission.
Of course, that weakness could also be an advantage.
[If the branch is this flimsy, it’ll be that much easier to elect Lee Jinhong as Dongbansu. And since Lee Jinhong isn’t from here, it’ll be harder for him to toy with you or throw his weight around as he pleases.]
The former shaman, Lee Jinhong, arrived a few days later.
By then, he had become a true peddler. He said, “Then, for the Gangwon Province Baekimbang in Chuncheon, I shall do my best to step forward as Dongbansu in the shadow of the Dobansu’s reputation, however lacking we may be. As for the Songbang you mentioned, I’ll gather up the people who grow namcho—tobacco.”
“Do you know anyone for that?”
“Joseon people generally like tobacco, but shamans especially smoke a great deal of it. I was no different.”
The use of hallucinogens by shamans has been a global phenomenon from antiquity to the present.
It’s just that in Joseon, there were few native plants that would “get you high without killing you when eaten” in the first place—hemp won’t do a thing if you simply burn it—and since there were no Englishmen around, tobacco was the best substitute available.
Come to think of it, this was an era roughly equivalent to “America shoving nuclear missiles in your face and making you buy fentanyl at gunpoint.” Tobacco was hardly something anyone had the conscience to fuss over.
“Then I’ll leave it to you.”
“Yes. Cigarettes made entirely of paper are fascinating. With these, one could smoke while walking or even in the outhouse.”
Thinking about Joseon-style latrines, Taesu felt a sudden, unpleasant fear that this would somehow turn him into someone like Itkyu.
Lee Jinhong continued sorting through the sample cigarettes as he went on. “You already have enough on your plate with all these unprecedented enterprises, Dobansu. You won’t have to watch laborers loafing on the porch pretending to work tobacco, either. Haha.”
Taesu hit Lee Jinhong. He’d been reminded of that representative of the Room of Spirit and Time, the one who had said he’d count every minute spent going to the bathroom as an hour and dock it from your wages.
Fortunately, Lee Jinhong and the branch people withdrew, humbled by the righteous fury of Park Axe, who did not change his attitude just because he now had people working under him.
Still, there was something worth taking from Lee Jinhong’s words.
This was the opening wedge of a very important change.
Taesu had already given them clocks imported from Seogeomdo the year before, and now he was also giving them something that his ancestor, Lee Yeon, had once been able to use only for himself some two hundred and fifty years earlier: an unprecedented concept.
Control over time.
* * *
In this era, tobacco, like pipes, was something you sat down and smoked leisurely for long stretches—sometimes for dozens of minutes at a time.
Cigarettes could not be smoked that way. They were far stronger than pipes or tobacco holders, and much shorter, too.
The smoking time that disappeared because of that, as Lee Jinhong had said, became labor time.
The reason “smoke for a little while and toss it” cigarettes first appeared in the mid-to-late nineteenth century was not unrelated to the Industrial Revolution.
For the first time in history, humanity had entered an age in which working longer meant reaping more profit.
Farming and livestock were not that kind of work. No matter how many overtime sickles you swung, once you cut all your own paddies, that was the end of it.
But a textile machine produced more cloth the longer it ran.
From that point on, time began to acquire quantitative value.
Clocks were the same. Since time had now become a truly valuable commodity, capitalists robbed workers of it.
They did it simply by installing clocks in the factory. From then on, their time was governed by the clock’s owner, not by themselves.
This “conceptual Industrial Revolution” naturally was not limited to objects like cigarettes and clocks.
With the aid of psychic communication, reliable talent, Joseon’s chaos, and above all his own iron will, Taesu conquered the Three Southern Provinces at a pace almost like that of even Lee Yeon himself.
Whatever Park Axe entrusted to others, or set in motion, changed as quickly as the speed with which he ran.
And that was not limited to the peddlers and merchant guilds directly under his influence.
Taesu’s goal was to connect the nation’s commerce.
Im In-son, the Chungcheong Province Hobansu, who had set sail in step with Taesu’s southward march and quickly opened a route all the way to Jeju.
Park Jae-bin, the Jeolla Province Wanbansu, who had broken free from the military camp years before history said he should have.
Bak Seol-chae, the Gyeongsang Province Yeongbansu, and Naesang Jeong Ja-beom, who had not changed the basic distribution routes so much as altered their nature away from dependence on the navy and tied them directly to exports for Japan.
All of them had to move in step with Taesu.
Even those who were hostile to him were the same. The biggest reason Taesu had not yet clashed head-on with Gangsang was that Gangsang and Taesu moved at different speeds.
The changes that began from the very bottom would gradually spread upward, influencing what lay above them.
I’m not talking about a revolution.
The top has no choice but to be affected. Joseon is a country of privatization, after all, so the people below are the ones who actually do everything and subcontract it upward anyway.
Taesu couldn’t give Joseon ironclads and machine guns.
But instead, he gifted it the possibility of moving at a speed that could one day resemble the insane world outside.
If they could match RPM like that, then Joseon’s gears might mesh with the outside world, unlike the broken wreck left behind by the original history.
* * *
In any case, Taesu himself wasn’t thinking about that yet.
He was too busy with the immediate tasks in front of him: cigarettes, and the construction of the Gangwon Province Baekimbang and Songbang.
Lee Jinhong planned to look for trading partners through a merchant who used to supply tobacco for shamanic possession rituals.
“With just a few handoffs, I should be able to meet the owners of tobacco fields all over Gangwon Province.”
From there, they could push for supply contracts the way the merchant guilds did.
“Though if we cut in and seize the fields outright, the namcho merchant innkeepers who receive the tobacco in Seoul will get angry... and they’re tied to Gangsang as well. Yeongseo isn’t that far from Seoul, after all.”
Taesu didn’t have a neat answer for that.
That didn’t mean he could go on a preemptive rampage and chop everyone up with his axe. Unless there was a clear pretext like there had been in Gangjin, that would be another matter.
“No choice. If anybody picks a fight while I’m away—make sure it doesn’t get noisy. Throw them in the river or bury them in the mountains, I don’t care. I’ll handle Gangsang by next spring somehow.”
“I’ll trust you with it, Dobansu.”
Since Lee Jinhong would have to serve as the Dongbansu of the Gangwon Province Baekimbang, they also planned out the formation of a Chuncheon Songbang he could inherit in the future.
Word was quietly passed around to people who had once run tobacco stalls just outside the east gate, or to those whose tobacco crop had failed that year and needed some way to survive until next year.
They couldn’t join the branch because they weren’t peddlers, but a Songbang was entirely possible. Many people applauded Park Axe’s job creation.
Then something suddenly occurred to Taesu.
It was the kind of thing that could easily be misunderstood, so he had to speak a little more cautiously than usual.
“It’s not like I’m trying to swallow up your business or anything, but isn’t it a bit of a hassle to keep setting up separate Baekimbang and Songbang branches everywhere we go? Why not combine them where we can?”
[So the bastard is finally revealing the schemes of a kept man who plans to eat through my fortune.]
But Cha Un-hong answered more readily than he expected.
“I’ve thought about that too, but you’re the head of the peddlers, not the head of the merchant guild, so it’s difficult.”
Even if each Songbang were divided by financier, the merchant guild still had its basic responsibilities.
Just as with the peddlers, the Songbang had to connect and support its own people. You could use itinerant merchants to hire peddlers, yes, but in the end, the master had to be a merchant guild member, not someone else.
“So unless ‘my older brother dies’ and you, as my brother-in-law, inherit your younger brother-in-law’s business and become both a peddler and a merchant guild man, it’s difficult.”
[She means she wants you to marry her quickly.]
Taesu slammed his axe into the branch pillar. The entire shabby building trembled.
“Why did you do that?”
“Practice.”
“Well, we’ll probably have to rebuild the branch anyway, but why here of all places...? Did something unpleasant happen?”
“No. Let’s go eat something good.”
“Sounds great!”
Leaving the Mountain Spirit stuck in place, Taesu stepped outside.
The edge of the autumn Chuncheon market was a fine place for a walking date.
With the Mountain Spirit absent for once, Taesu created yet another local specialty dish.
He coated chicken in malt syrup and gochujang seasoning, then grilled it over a wire rack—dakgalbi. Since he had eaten sweet buckwheat noodles in Dongnae, he left out the makguksu and chose this instead.
The hamster was happy again. Walking beside him, Taesu said, “If it’s just ‘inheriting’ like you said, that still won’t be enough. Even if it does happen, I’d only be one man among many within the merchant guild.”
“That’s right. Well, if you drag in more big merchants along the way, perhaps you could run it the way a peddlers’ corps does, but...”
“But?”
“In the middle of the Kaesong merchant guild, I’m the only woman. How exactly are you planning to lure them in?”
Taesu nearly dropped his dakgalbi. Cha Un-hong burst out laughing.
“You really are fun to tease. Ah, there are indeed wives who lend money in the merchant circles, the sort of place where people chase profit like the hwando.”
It was hard to get angry at that. Taesu chewed his dakgalbi in awkward silence.
But in the end, karma came back around for Cha Un-hong too.
At least, that was how it seemed.
A young maiden came running at full tilt, then dropped to her knees right in front of Taesu.
“You’re the famed Dobansu Park Axe, aren’t you? I’ll do anything, so please, help me!”
Cha Un-hong dropped her dakgalbi.
Author’s Note
1. Geumseong refers to the present-day area of Gimhwa-gun to Cheorwon-gun, and Anhyeop is Icheon-gun. Not Icheon in Gyeonggi Province, but Icheon-gun in North Korea’s Gangwon Province region.
2. The details of seonjilkkun nori—aside from the fact that it involves beating a carrying frame with a staff while singing—have not survived into the modern era, so I invented them.
3. In the novel, merchants’ associations are collectively called “dung,” but that is only for ease of understanding; in reality, Kaesong merchants used a separate term, jeon-gye.