Elder U Seong-sik (1)
The seasons turned once again.
This year, Hwiyeom turned fourteen.
Yet the arrival of a new year had changed nothing about him.
After driving the craftsmen day and night until the fertilizer factory stood complete, he set about selecting the laborers who would work there. Because the synthesis method for the fertilizer demanded absolute secrecy and security, he carefully chose only those whose ties to the Dang Family ran deep. Men still paying off debts from Yeowangchae who now served in the Minjeongwon, scholarship students at the Hwieon General School, or the parents of such people—anyone who would never dream of betraying the family.
Honestly, even if the information leaked, no one else could copy it anyway.
With fertilizer, knowledge alone was useless; there was simply no practical way for outsiders to manufacture it. It was a monopoly situation not unlike the coal mines. The principal ingredients of the chemical fertilizer the Dang Family would produce were guano, serpentine rock, lime, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, and the like. Guano was already under exclusive Dang control. Serpentine and lime were one thing, but sulfuric and nitric acids were substances almost impossible to obtain anywhere in the Central Plains outside of a house like the Dang Family.
In any case, the factory hands began producing fertilizer exactly as Hwiyeom had envisioned. All the steel coming out of the family’s Cheol-u-jeon was now forged in puddling furnaces, and the crucible furnaces were gradually being retired one by one. Hwiyeom kept several of those retiring crucibles and converted them into fertilizer kilns. Guano and serpentine rock were melted at high heat, quenched in cold water, and the resulting lumps of phosphate fertilizer were smashed with hammers, sieved into fine powder, and packed neatly into sacks. Moisture would harden the powder into stone, but unlike gunpowder it could simply be broken up again and used, so ordinary straw bags were perfectly fine for storage.
Superphosphate of lime, which required sulfuric acid in its production, was made only in small quantities; the acid made large-scale runs too burdensome.
We’ll package this as a premium fertilizer and sell it at a steep markup.
In truth, superphosphate of lime was not dramatically more effective than ordinary phosphate fertilizer. But scarcity plus high unit cost equaled the perfect formula for gouging the price.
“Does this fertilizer truly work as well as you claim?”
Dang Un-sang had come to inspect the finished factory and watched the entire process that turned out the completed product. He asked with genuine curiosity. Hwiyeom smiled.
“Yes. First I’ll distribute it among the fields held by the main bloodline and have them use it for farming. By this summer alone the difference between our paddies and everyone else’s will be glaringly obvious. Word will spread among the farmers—why is it that only those fields are producing so well?”
“That makes sense.”
“After that, we simply let our delivery informants and the Minjeongwon amplify the rumor, then open sales. That’s all.”
“But the farmers are too poor to buy it…”
“Do we need to sell to the farmers? We sell to the landlords and the powerful local clans. That will be enough.”
“Hmm.”
“I know what you’re worried about, Father. You’re afraid that once the yields of the great landlords’ fields and those of the independent farmers diverge, it will only hasten the ruin of the freeholders.”
“Exactly.”
It was the same logic as a giant marketplace endlessly running discount promotions until every little neighborhood shop was driven out of business. Hwiyeom grinned.
“Father, really—do I look to you like some greedy merchant who has lost his mind over money and would simply ignore the farmers’ suffering?”
“Well…”
Saying “Of course not!” was impossible; Hwiyeom had already shattered far too many merchants. Dang Un-sang rolled his eyes awkwardly and forced a smile. Hwiyeom looked faintly aggrieved.
“Father, I may have caused quite a few upheavals in the Sichuan commercial world, but every bit of the damage was concentrated solely on the branch families. Everyone else was offered a path forward by joining hands with the main bloodline, were they not?”
“Only those who took the main bloodline’s hand, mind you.”
“Yes. And everyone else? Why should I care about them?”
“…”
It was true. Hwiyeom had indeed opened a path of survival for his competitors—but that path existed only for those who grasped the Dang Family’s hand. He had never attacked them with a crude us-versus-them binary. He simply held out no hand and competed “fairly.” They either withered on their own or came crawling, begging for help. That was the nature of innovation: it burned everything around it to cast light upon the future. Those who could not accept change simply fell behind.
Hwiyeom smiled.
“With this, I intend to become someone who can wield the same influence as a great landowner of Sichuan, even if I never actually become one.”
“It doesn’t sound as though you mean to pressure the farmers and seize their land… Do you plan to bury them in debt, then?”
“Hardly. Though of course I will buy back every scrap of the old Dang lands that had to be sold off during our financial troubles.”
“That… I am grateful for.”
Dang Un-sang’s voice roughened; he could not claim he bore no responsibility for those sales.
“In this age the life of an independent farmer is an extremely precarious high-wire act. I intend to give them peace of mind—to become both their spiritual and material backing—and thereby win their support.”
“How?”
“A farmers’ cooperative.”
Hwiyeom’s smile widened.
“I’m going to create a farmers’ co-op.”
Farmers fell into two broad categories. The first were independent farmers who tilled fields they themselves owned and paid taxes to the authorities. The second were tenant farmers who cultivated a landlord’s land, surrendered most of the harvest, and barely scraped by. Naturally the former lived better than the latter, and the latter vastly outnumbered the former. That imbalance was precisely why Hwiyeom called the farmers’ lives precarious.
Agriculture in this era, to put it bluntly, is nothing more than a one-year gamble.
Take an independent farmer named Gap. By good fortune he had inherited ancestral paddies from his parents and had lived as a freeholder. Then one year the harvest failed. The reasons could be endless: too much rain, too little rain, heat, cold, a plague of locusts, war—any of a dozen disasters beyond human will or effort. Gap could not simply starve, so he had to borrow. But did anyone lend money lightly? Whether he went to a landlord or a money-lender, the answer was always the same. A desperate farmer seeking a loan after a bad year looked, from their perspective, like nothing more than a chance to scoop up land on the cheap. They lent grain or coin at impossible interest rates. And with very high probability the farmer could not repay. That was the end of the story: one more freeholder ruined and reduced to tenancy. It was a pattern that had repeated itself, east and west, in every land since agriculture began.
Hwiyeom meant to introduce a modern institution that would serve as a safety net for those farmers.
Let’s see. I’ve been thrashing the Elder Council for a while now; time to offer a carrot and drive another wedge among them.
In truth the Elder Council was already so thoroughly broken there was little left to thrash, yet a few elders, led by Jang Gil-yeong, still lingered and waited for a chance to rise again. Hwiyeom intended to split them once more. He summoned Lee Jinmyeong and gave the order.
“Bring Elder U Seong-sik of the Elder Council to me.”
Even among the branch families of the Sichuan Dang Family there were those who farmed. U Seong-sik was the elder who spoke for that landowning agricultural faction. His stance was neutral; much like the head of the medicinal stores, he belonged to the Elder Council yet had never been particularly cooperative with Hong Ilgon’s faction. The reason was simple: the money-lending and commercial schemes that occupied Hong Ilgon’s circle had almost nothing to do with the interests of the farming landlords. To U Seong-sik, attaching himself to the Elder Council rather than to a weak and impoverished family head had simply seemed the proper conduct for a branch member. Hwiyeom’s invitation therefore carried heavy implications.
So now it’s the landlords’ turn. What on earth is he planning…?
With a measure of tension, U Seong-sik made his way to the Innovation Hall. No one in the family was unaware that the ironworks faction—once written off as a lost cause and nearly sacrificed as a disposable piece by Hong Ilgon’s men—had suddenly revived because of a deal with Hwiyeom. The atmosphere in the Elder Council these days was therefore thoroughly poisonous. Bak Chang-eon’s group, Ma Jeonggu’s group, and Jang Gil-yeong’s group each went their own way; the elders of the restaurant trade barely bothered to attend meetings anymore. And recently the medicine-shop faction led by Lee Gyu-chan had, for reasons no one could fathom, crawled under Hwiyeom’s wing to launch a newspaper venture that promised no profit at all. Naturally Hwiyeom’s influence had been behind it—just as it was behind the summons U Seong-sik now answered.
What will it be this time… poison or tonic?
There was nothing for it but to face the matter head-on. Steeling himself, U Seong-sik arrived at the Innovation Hall. Ye-eun guided him in. After the brief formalities and ceremonial small talk, Hwiyeom’s next words made the elder tilt his head.
“A farmers’… cooperative, you say?”
“That’s right.”
“What exactly is this cooperative meant to do?”
“It will support farmers in many ways so they can devote themselves to agriculture without fear. Please look over the proposal for the details.”
“…May I read it?”
“Of course.”
Hwiyeom sipped his tea. U Seong-sik swallowed dryly and opened the cover of the planning document. In a single breath he was drawn through to the final page.
“Hmm…”
After a moment of careful thought, Elder U Seong-sik spoke.
“May I offer my honest impression?”
“By all means. Speak freely.”
“This… is not a business that will greatly benefit the Dang Family.”
He flipped through the pages, ticking off points one by one.
“The scope of operations… low-interest loans to farmers through Hwieon Comprehensive Finance, sales of fertilizer and… pesticide? I don’t know what pesticide is, but setting that aside—bulk procurement of seed for cheap resale, large-scale purchase of farm produce and brokerage of its sale… In short, it is a project for the farmers. And if it actually works as written, it will certainly be a great help to those who till the soil. But is there any real commercial viability in this?”
At the elder’s question Hwiyeom’s eyes lit with genuine interest.
“Why do you say there is no commercial viability?”
“Even allowing that a planning document omits the detailed meat… Selling fertilizer and this ‘pesticide’ to farm households will hardly bring in great sums, and I doubt many will even buy them. I don’t see why we should go to the trouble of importing seed in bulk only to sell it cheaply, nor why farmers who can sell their own crops would pay us a commission to market them through our cooperative. The brokerage is the same problem: if we buy the produce and resell it, the price will inevitably rise in the process. Who will purchase goods that are far more expensive than those of competing farms?”
“Heh heh heh…”
“What is so amusing?”
“I’m simply pleased to find I judged you correctly, Elder U. You are earnestly trying to give me advice—an elder of the branch families’ council, no less.”
“…To be frank, after seeing what happened with Elder Ma I did hold certain expectations. But no matter how I look at this plan…”
“I know. I understand perfectly. At first glance it looks like nothing more than a wild fairy tale. That is exactly why no one has ever attempted it.”
Hwiyeom smiled.
“But Elder U, innovation is precisely the act of dragging those wild fairy tales down into reality. I will show you that reality now. So—will you dream with me?”