Ch 4 - Koryo and the Khitan

A Reformed Government

Koryo reduced the number of slaves, established new tax policies and adopted a government civil service examination system modeled after that used in China. Many of the programs dealt with taxation, land management, education, and communication.

King Chongjong ruled Koryo for only four years. He died In 949 at the age of twenty-seven. Chongjong's successor, Kwangjong, proclaimed a new strength for the royal throne and the independence of Koryo by adopting the royal title of "emperor," the first monarch in Korean history to do so. The stability of the Koryo throne rested on more than just a title, however. It depended upon the strength of the kingdom as a whole, and that depended on a strong economic base, maintaining control over aristocratic in-fighting among the royal families, and diffusing threats to the royal court from the civil bureaucracy. Emperor Kwangjong attacked these problems by going after the root cause of most of them; the status of Koryo's slave population.

Throughout Korea's history, slaves produced wealth for their owners. The more slaves a landowner had tied to his estate, the greater his economic and military strength. During the chaos of the Later Three Kingdoms period, many of the country's castle lords, military commanders, and provincial gentry forced thousands of prisoners and refugees into slavery. To stem this growth in power, in 956 Emperor Kwangjong moved to reduce the number of slaves in Koryo by enacting the Slave Review Act. He ordered an investigation of the records to find those people who had once been freeborn commoners and restore their free status. Through a royal edict, Kwangjong expanded the central government's financial base by transferring thousands of people from the nontaxable status of slave to the taxable status of commoner. The Slave Review Act also had the significant side effect of blocking the growing power of the aristocracy by undermining the military and economic strength of Koryo's wealthy land barons.

With the country's financial affairs much improved, Kwangjong turned to the problem of how to deal with the government's aristocratic bureaucracy. Shang Ji, a close adviser to Kwangjong and a former member of the Chinese embassy to Koryo from the state of Later Zhou, provided him with a solution. Shang devised a plan to create a new bureaucratic structure that would further serve and strengthen royal authority. He proposed the emperor should fundamentally change the bureaucracy by adopting a government civil service examination system modeled after that used in China. Shang Ji designed his new system to bring a new generation of civilian talent into the bureaucracy, men of learning to replace the old military officials who had participated in the founding of Koryo. It had the added benefit of providing a way to absorb and regulate the entrance of the provincial elite into the central government. Kwangjong agreed with the plan and established the civil service examination system in 958. Since Shang Ji was unrelated to either the royal or noble clans in Koryo, Kwangjong appointed him to head the new system.

Under Shang Ji's new system, candidates for civil service had to pass one of three qualifying examinations held in both the capital and the provinces:  composition, with emphasis on literary ability;  exposition of selected topics from the Chinese classics;  or an occupational examination in such fields as mathematics, astronomy, and law. Candidates earned the greatest prestige by being awarded the coveted red diploma for successfully passing the examination in composition. These candidates received appointments to the highest bureaucratic positions. Except for the five highest ranking officials in government, men who could obtain a direct appointment to office, the civil service examinations became the only entry into the principal ranks of the Koryo bureaucracy. Kwangjong further heightened the government's hierarchic structure in 960, by instituting gradations in court robes, thereby distinguishing officials of different rank levels by the purple, red, scarlet, or green color of their attire.

Emperor Kwangjong's early reforms dealt a serious blow to high officials among the local gentry. The nature of the civil service examination system tended to favor families of civil officials in the central government. Thus, the bureaucracy strengthened itself at the expense of the provincial elite and the military. Kwangjong disregarded the tradition of appointing officials based solely on their distinguished lineage. Instead, he appointed scholars primarily from among those who had passed the state examination and Chinese officials who had no power base in Koryo. This enabled the monarchy and the central bureaucracy to assert royal authority over at least the provincial land barons, the aristocratic landlords, and King Taejo's old retainers at Kaesong.

Kwangjong's drastic policy changes did not come without opposition. High military and civilian officials and their heirs, men who had earlier been awarded merit status for their services to Taejo in founding Koryo, felt the greatest discontent. The halls of the royal palace resounded with accusations and recriminations as old grudges ignited and new ones were incurred. Threats were made against Emperor Kwangjong's life. A purge atmosphere blanketed the capital. Kwangjong enforced his position by mercilessly liquidating any who would not submit to the authority of the throne.

Emperor Kwangjong died in 975, passing the Koryo crown to the fifteen-year-old Kyongjong. Building on the reforms begun under Kwangjong, the young monarch developed an idea to solidify the economic foundation of the central government bureaucracy. Koryo's actual financial foundation rested on taxes. The government collected a land tax of 25 percent on all lands except monastery property and the lands assigned to military families. Each household paid a tax based on the number of taxable adults in the household. The tax system also included provisions to conscript people for manual labor on public works projects, to collect levies for a specific government requirement, and to collect annual regional tribute in the form of specialty products from each area of the state. After only one year on the throne, Kyongjong enacted the Stipend Land Law, a measure centered on the concept that land would be granted to individuals and returned to the state after their death. Kyongjong hoped to create a permanent and theoretically inexhaustible economic resource by placing ownership and management of all lands in the hands of the central government.

At its heart, Koryo's land management system bore many similarities to the system used by Tang China. The state allotted tracts of "public land" to government officials and military families for support and maintenance. Government offices, schools, postal-relay stations, river ferry stations, and hostels also received tracts of public land. The state allocated "private land," intended to serve the private interests of individual aristocrats, in much the same manner as public land. Private lands could be inherited by relatives or freely disposed of as the landholder saw fit. Once the aristocracy discovered it could keep private land in the family by passing it to their heirs, property in Korea began to change hands almost exclusively by inheritance. The provincial elite converted highly coveted "stipend lands" and "merit lands" into private land and collected rents and taxes of up to 50 percent directly from the peasants. Koryo's aristocracy further increased private landholdings by reclaiming wasteland, by receiving special grants from the king, or by forcibly seizing the land of others. Built on a foundation of private landholding, the fortunes of the aristocracy grew steadily fatter.

King Kyongjong's brief reign ended with his death at the age of twenty-two. At the time, his eldest son and hereditary heir was barely two years old. The royal court temporarily bypassed the infant in favor of a teenager from a branch of the royal family who took the Koryo crown in 981 as King Songjong. By the time Songjong reached the throne, influential Chinese appointees in the central government had brought a number of Confucian scholars into leading political roles in Kaesong. These men, absorbed with ambitions for personal advancement in the Kaesong bureaucracy, had no power base in the Koryo countryside. Choe Sung-no, a major Confucian figure in the Koryo government, opposed the growth of absolute power at the level of the king and abhorred the concept of an absolute monarch who ignored the opinions of the bureaucracy. He strongly favored the centralization of power and maneuvered to create an elite society in which political power centered on the aristocracy. King Songjong relied heavily on the views and beliefs of men like Choe and adopted many of their ideas.

By 983, Songjong felt strong enough to begin reforming Koryo's local government structure. At the time, Koryo was comprised of ten administrative provinces under the jurisdiction of civil officials and two northern frontier districts governed by military commanders. Songjong designated twelve provincial towns as regional administrative centers and dispatched officials from Kaesong to serve as local governors. Because the central government feared the growth of regional power centers, local governors served a fixed term in office. Although no central government official received an appointment to head his home district, he could be sent into his home district as an inspector-general to check the power of district magistrates. Each regional administrator had the freedom to organize his district, appoint local administrators and petty functionaries, and delegate tasks involving direct contact with the population at large.

Each administrative province operated as a central government in miniature. The resemblance was more than superficial. The district magistrate ruled, in effect, as king of his own little state. Beneath each magistrate, six lower-level functionaries called ajuns, worked as ministers to actually carry out his directives. The Korean word ajun has existed for centuries and originally meant any government officer from the highest ministers of state to the lowest government employee. Each minister managed a comparable function of the central government,and conducted all district business through his office.

The old ajun class, a kind of hereditary advisor to the local district magistrate, represented perhaps the most important group of men in the administration of the Koryo government. While the king could change his cabinet at will, choosing from among thousands of potential replacements, the district magistrate faced a far more restricted choice, limited to anywhere from ten to one hundred ajuns in his district .

All revenue for the district passed through the ajun's hands. Not surprisingly, some of it found its way into the ajun's pockets. The magistrate wanted all he could get from the people and kept a close watch on his ministers. Simultaneously, the ajun tried to get as much as he could, not only for the magistrate, but for himself. After all, the ajun, like the district magistrate, had their personal reputation and that of their family to support. One of the ajun's most brilliant attainments was his ability to make excuses. If the people charged him with extortion, he blamed the magistrate's orders. If the magistrate charged him with short accounts, he bowed low and swore that the people were squeezed dry and could give no more. The ajun's tremendous influence glued the body politic together for centuries. Despite the oppressive and discouraging living conditions of the people, the ajun anchored the ship of state firmly to its moorings during the periodic tides that surged across the country and threatened to dash it on the rocks.

The "Imperial Capital" of Kaesong became the focal point of the nation in the heartland of a new aristocracy, the city where all those who shaped Koryo's destiny congregated. The royal palace sat on the Full Moon Terrace at the foot of Mount Songak, a site that geomantic believers regarded as highly propitious. The streets around the palace grounds were filled with great government office buildings, temples and monasteries, forming a city of neighborhoods, blocks and wards. Standing in stark contrast to the thatched roof homes of Kaesong's ordinary citizens, clustered together like small beehives, the palaces, government buildings and temples portrayed an aura of proud splendor.

Recognizing the country's three major population centers, the Koryo government designated three alternate capitals beyond Kaesong:  Pyongyang (the western capital), Kumsong (the eastern capital), and Seoul (the southern capital). A network of roads connected the capital with its outlying districts and twenty-two routes, or circuits, linked over 500 post offices in a postal-relay system. River ferry stations operated at major river crossings to transport relay riders and government officials. A number of state-operated horse ranches raised and maintained the horses needed to support both the military and the postal-relay systems. For purposes of internal and national security, the government established five regional military centers in the provinces of Andong, Annam, Anso, and Anbyon. While their primary function was to maintain order, these military centers also performed a wide variety of local services, including manning a nationwide network of fire beacons used to signal the approach of invaders.

King Taejo's "hostage system" remained in effect to control the ambitions of aristocrats who might challenge the central government. The sons of local influential families were still required to live in Kaesong and work for the government. Koryo's reliance on governance by aristocrats from many different clans increased the number of civil officials on the political stage with ties to gentry families around Kaesong. These changes effectively downgraded the position of the provincial aristocracy, as the higher positions they once held became largely honorary in nature.

Many aristocratic lineages bypassed the traditional route to power by using marriage as a strategy to expand the power of their clan within Koryo's bureaucracy. The more influential the family into which a clan married, the greater the honor to the clan, and the more quickly they could enhance their standing and rise to greater political prominence. The greatest aspiration was to marry into Koryo's most aristocratic family, the royal clan. This brought not only the greatest distinction, but represented the ultimate shortcut to grasping political power. Koryo society attached such great importance to lineage that they listed aristocratic families on separate census registers from those of the commoner population.

For the vast majority of ambitious Koreans, government service represented the ultimate source of wealth and power in Koryo. The lone path to achievement and reward in Koryo society began with the state civil service examinations. Since passing the examinations meant appointment to government service, they were seen as the key to unlocking the doors to the halls of power. Wishing to absorb as much of the local gentry as possible into the capital aristocracy, King Songjong spared no effort to educate Koryo's youth. Academies and libraries were built in Kaesong and Pyongyang, and regional schools were developed in the major administrative towns. Koryo completely oriented its highly specialized education system toward preparation for the government civil service examinations.

In 992, Songjong founded the National Academy for the study of Chinese literature and the classics . All the textbooks used to teach civil service candidates were, and had been since the Silla period, written in a foreign language;  Chinese. In response to demands from the regional elite, the government assigned instructors to each of the major provincial centers to teach the Chinese classics and medicine.