Tourist Buses
Honestly, Hwiyeom figured that even if public transportation held enormous potential, turning a real profit right away would be no easy feat.
People, once they taste convenience, will gladly open their wallets to keep enjoying it—but getting them to take that first step always takes time.
The fare for a single bus ride was five nyang in copper coins.
With that kind of money, you could sit down at a tavern for a bowl of noodles or soup and call it a meal.
In modern terms, it was roughly the value of five to eight thousand won.
Not an outrageous burden—but not cheap enough that you'd hop on for no particular reason, either.
So he had expected demand to be thinner than people might assume.
The company shuttle buses made sense; those ran free as an employee benefit, so decent ridership was understandable. But the city buses were actually making money?
Were that many people really riding them?
Reading the report, Hwiyeom finally understood why.
"…Inside the bus… sharing food, holding singing contests and dance contests?"
With long benches running along both sides and the center left open, people could certainly stand up and dance, or even spread a mat and eat. Technically possible.
But safety?
When Hwiyeom's look of pure disbelief settled onto his face, Lee Jinmyeong scratched his head, embarrassed.
"…Everyone says that compared to an ox cart, this is more comfortable than their own bedroom…."
"Haha…."
Was this a tour bus?
Whether the twenty-first century or the sixteenth, people's sense of safety was not so different—no, the sixteenth century had a far more hard-boiled approach to safety. Hwiyeom forced himself to let it go.
"We'll need to insert a boarding notice: 'We are not responsible for falls or injuries sustained while standing and moving about.'"
"Already done."
"Good work."
In the end, the citizens of Seongdo had reinterpreted the bus not as a mere means of transport, but as a place of gathering and fellowship, a venue for meetings and socializing—and they were making very enthusiastic use of it.
"But doesn't that become a nuisance to people who purely want to get from one place to another?"
"For now… pure transportation demand isn't that high. Outside commuting hours, that is. So I thought we ought to go after this kind of demand as well."
"…I see."
Reading the report, Hwiyeom felt that Sichuan was starving for play.
There is a term for it: Homo ludens.
"The playing human"—an academic phrase for the idea that human beings are animals who pursue fun.
When people are busy just scraping by, there is no room for that. But once income rises past a certain point, they inevitably fixate on entertainment.
If society is not mature enough, and there is no outlet for those desires, cultures of gambling and binge drinking tend to flourish. Some even claim that Korea's seventies-and-eighties drinking culture and bomb-shot culture arose because the culture of play failed to mature in step with sudden economic growth.
This… besides the Lasubaegasu Plan, we're going to need something else that can let people vent their desires….
Anyway, if people were riding the buses as both transportation and a venue for fellowship, that was not a bad thing.
Surely better than getting roaring drunk with girls at a brothel.
I'll need to make sure they don't try that kind of thing on the bus.
Hwiyeom spoke.
"Some shameless bastard might try to put his hands on a bus attendant. Don't we need a countermeasure?"
"Wouldn't it be enough to dress the attendants in green robes stamped with the Dang Family crest? I don't believe anyone in this Sichuan would dare touch a person of the Dang Family…."
"What about martial artists?"
"Martial artists would know the Dang Family's terror even better, so they would keep clear. High-ranking officials, perhaps… but people of that sort would never ride a coach with commoners, so it should be fine."
"Hmm…."
Hwiyeom privately graded Lee Jinmyeong's response a solid B+.
"We'll go with that level of precaution for now and watch how things develop. Build handling procedures into employee training as well. Protocols for when a molester or idle wastrel attempts physical contact. And… if the conditions allow it, it would be better to post attendants who have trained in martial arts."
"In that case, what about using female agents from Jijuso? The buses keep circulating through the city, and the attendants are constantly in contact with people, so they would have real potential as Minjeongwon black agents as well."
"Hmmm…."
Replace all the bus attendants with agents.
It was an absurd idea in general—but limited to Seongdo alone, it was not impossible.
"Look into it positively. Put in an inquiry with Secretary Han and Jijuso, and report back with the results."
"Yes."
And so the Sichuan Province bus business, starting from Seongdo, flourished until fixed routes reached every county-level city and eventually even the countryside.
That the whole thing took a mere six months… well, rumor has it that the staff of the Innovation Hall and the forge workshops, ground down day and night under the ferocious pressure of a certain young lady desperate to marry soon, wore themselves to nothing building carriages. The truth lies somewhere beyond the horizon….
Once the summer rainy season had passed, Noksan launched a large-scale road maintenance effort.
The roads inside the cities—provincial capitals, municipalities, counties—they walked every day and could judge their condition with their own eyes, so there was little to do there.
Above all, a road that no one walks soon sprouts weeds, crumbles, and simply turns back into dirt. A road that people keep using, by contrast, holds its condition with surprising reliability.
Conversely,
the roads between counties, the roads outside the villages that people did not travel often, had fallen into bad shape during the rains when foot traffic cut off entirely.
Even Noksan's staff, who patrolled the checkpoints and roads daily, had stopped their rounds during the rainy season because of the danger.
They cleared the mud, debris, and stones covering the roads, found places where concrete blocks were cracked or broken, tore them out, and laid new ones.
In some spots the underlying soil had washed away or the gravel had been swept off, leaving paving stones loose or completely overturned.
Noksan's people cleaned and repaired the roads thoroughly,
and merchants traveling between cities watched them work and called out greetings.
"Good work~ Whew, for once the road tax doesn't feel wasted."
"Hey, Brother Son, saying it like that kind of hurts my feelings."
There were still moments when it felt a little strange—merchants who once would have trembled and begged for their lives without daring to meet their eyes if they crossed paths in the mountains, now cracking jokes. But Noksan's staff snickered and fired jokes right back.
They far preferred this peaceful life to the old one.
Many among them had by now met decent young women, married, and started families.
"…Uh…."
A coachman driving another carriage spotted the station chief and froze solid.
The station chief put on a good-natured smile and laughed heartily.
"Hey now, I'm not a bandit, so don't be so scared. This road's under construction—go around that way, brother."
"Th-thank you…."
"Take care!"
Even with the station chief's friendly reply, the coachman hurried away as if he had seen something uncanny.
"Chief, I told you not to step forward. Your face is just too fierce."
"Whose side are you on, exactly?"
The station chief clamped his joking subordinate's head under his arm and playfully choked him as he spoke.
"I hear carriages are going to be traveling a lot more now. We'll need to maintain the roads hard."
The staff nodded at the chief's words.
"I took the wife and kids around the neighborhood for a few loops myself. Pretty amazing, I'll say."
"Buses are running across all of Sichuan now, so next comes the connection to Yunnan.
Let's get ready ahead of time so we don't get swamped later. Deputy chief, put in an advance order for interlocking paving stones."
"Yes, Chief."
The station chief's foresight proved correct.
Within days, an order came down from Hwiyeom at headquarters: bus routes connecting Yunnan Province and Sichuan Province would be added, and bus routes would also be established within Yunnan Province itself.
Meanwhile, not everyone was happy with the current situation.
While everyone else went wild for the convenience of the buses and their use as play spaces, there was exactly one group of people fretting about it—
the coachmen of the livery stables.
Traditional livery stables were, in modern terms, something like limousine service companies.
They were mainly hired on a term basis by wealthy clients to drive their carriages.
Any household of a certain size usually kept its own horses and had family-affiliated coachmen as well.
But just as people with private cars still take taxis, the stable coachmen knew the local roads cold—unlike family coachmen who only ran fixed routes—so they had a competitive edge.
When the buses first appeared, the livery stables were not particularly worried.
Their customers were the rich, and the buses targeted commoners—so they did not see them as competitors.
But as time passed, they realized how complacent that thinking had been.
"…Why aren't the bookings coming in?"
Revenue had plummeted.
"What's the cause? We said those buses were only for commoners and that the rich, stuffed with privilege, wouldn't give them a second look."
"…Well… even among the rich, riding the bus has become something like the act of an enlightened scholar… a kind of trend."
"What?"
When they pressed their subordinates, the real story was this.
At first, yes, the bus passengers had been limited to commoners.
But as people of the Sichuan Dang Family, including Hwiyeom himself, kept riding the buses, perceptions gradually shifted.
In Sichuan, the standing of the Dang Family—especially Hwiyeom—was now such that calling him above even the Provincial Administration Commissioner would not be an exaggeration.
A Court Lecturer who enjoyed the Emperor's favor and even influenced national policy; a military genius who had held back even Chagatai's three hundred thousand cavalry.
As a governor of the people, he had brought unprecedented peace and prosperity to Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou—a born vessel of a people's official. Even the great clans could not dare look down on him.
On the contrary, a phenomenon of trying to follow his footsteps began to appear.
"They say the Sleeping Dragon of Sichuan rises before the first rooster and reviews business reports, then after breakfast rides the bus around his affiliates to examine current issues in person.
As a scion of a great clan, I too shall emulate him and rise in the world."
The sons of great clans rose at dawn, dressed carefully, studied their books, took breakfast, then began riding the buses around under the pretext of observing the people's livelihood and gauging the direction of state affairs.
You could call it a kind of noble-class commoner-life experience.
Naturally the commoners felt uncomfortable and avoided buses that great-clan scions were riding, so the great clans started clustering together on buses of their own.
Lee Jinmyeong was not about to let that slide.
Claiming equality and insisting that great clans and commoners were the same would, in the extreme class society of the Gyeong Empire, be equivalent to declaring, "I harbor rebellious intent."
Instead, Lee Jinmyeong created a luxury bus to satisfy the great clans' desire to be different—to feed their vanity.
"Call this the Premium Bus."
They made the exterior more splendid and luxurious, and upgraded the interior materials as well.
Inside, facilities allowed attendants to serve simple tea and snacks.
The price soared several times over to one jeon of silver—about a hundred fifty to two hundred thousand won—but for the great clans this was actually good news.
A price burdensome to commoners meant they were receiving a more differentiated treatment reserved for themselves.
Now the young scions of Sichuan's great clans, much like modern students lining up to study at famous study cafés, would meet on the Premium Buses, hold discourses and debates inside—or rather, pretend to study while wandering off-topic and shooting the breeze—and it became the fashion.
Since the Premium Buses did not run fixed routes, they would leave the city entirely, stop at scenic spots in the suburbs, and like camping cars, spread out a play area nearby.
As a result, the livery stables had nowhere left to stand.
"…What do we do?"
At this rate, they would sit around sucking their fingers until they starved.
"We need to make a move somehow…."
Then it happened.
One of the stable's coachmen came carefully to the stable master.
"Um… come to think of it, Master."
"What."
"I have something to tell you."
"If it's not important, save it for later. My head's about to explode."
"Well… it could cause major damage to the Sichuan Dang Family…."
"Huh?"
The stable master sat up straight.
"What is it?"
"Well, that is…."
"Speak clearly."
After hesitating a moment, the coachman said,
"Among Noksan's staff… there seem to be some who used to do bandit work in the green forests."
"What did you say?"
The stable master's eyes began to gleam with a mad light.