In the early 13th century, the Mongol Yuan government implemented a new 'silver tax' system, in the Northern region of the Yellow River. Through such system, it collected a vast amount of silver throughout Northern China. Yet in the latter half of the...
In the early 13th century, the Mongol Yuan government implemented a new 'silver tax' system, in the Northern region of the Yellow River. Through such system, it collected a vast amount of silver throughout Northern China. Yet in the latter half of the 13th century, such tax system began to deteriorate due to drainage of silver reserves in the area, and facing drastic drop in the silver income level, the Yuan government suddenly decided to reorganize the Eungbang units located throughout the region (under the authority of high-ranking fiscal offices), and had them serve as extractors of various items in Northern China, and also quite probably ‘tap into’ local silver reserves more directly. Interestingly enough, the Eungbang units in Goryeo that were newly installed just around the same time, also served as harvesters of local goods in Goryeo, including Goryeo's own silver resources. We can see the possibility that the Yuan authorities, facing dire needs to increase their silver revenue, might have become very interested in Goryeo's silver reserve, and resorted to extract Goryeo's silver through the Eungbang units which had been installed everywhere inside Goryeo since the mid-1270s.
Yet what was even more interesting, was Goryeo King Chungryeol-wang's stance in all this. He definitely was critical of the Eungbang units' malpractices and extortions that were continuing inside his own realm, yet he was also trying to benefit from the operations of those Eungbang units, by aiding them through his own cronies deployed throughout the country. He even tried to invite a Muslim figure to oversee the operations of the Eungbang units in Goryeo and not to mention all the commercial goods and materials that were piled up there. His intentions are unclear, yet considering the fact that the Yuan government's policy regarding the Eungbang units in Northern China showed a very close tie with the government's foreign trade policy as well, we may presume that Chungryeol-wang's intentions concerning the Eungbang units had something to do with his own intentions regarding the Goryeo dynasty's foreign trades with Yuan or other entities involved in the maritime silkroad trades. It seems that, instead of letting all the materials piled up inside the Eungbang units slip away outside Goryeo territory, he wanted to ‘invest' them himself in foreign trades, and because he needed all the information, techniques and networks to launch an effective and profitable investment, he called for a foreign figure to handle the actual procedure. In the end, his attempt was thwarted by his own wife, yet we can have a glimpse at what kind of preparations would have been made by the Goryeo figures in their foreign trade attempts, by examining all these Eungbang units that were installed inside Goryeo.