Socially skilling toil: New artisanship in papermaking in late Chosŏn Korea

Knowledgeable supervisors, invisible techniques

The Chosŏn dynasty pursued the ideals of a non-commercial society of self-sufficient farmers governed by benevolent kings and their scholar-officials, who proved their Confucian moral and scholarly qualifications to rule by passing civil service exams. The central court sought to achieve this goal by land reform, the governmental production system, and licensed monopoly shops. These measures aimed to promote self-sufficient farming families while suppressing and controlling artisans and merchants, the undesirables in the Confucian four-status system of scholar-officials, farmers, artisans, and merchants. Their activities were seen as simply deriving from the primary labor of farming. Implementing this ideal was a challenge, even for a country with only a few million people, the dynasty’s population at its beginning. Predictable resistance from powerful land owners did not allow for the full distribution of land and it was hard to oversee all trade when even basic necessities like rice and cotton were produced unevenly in the elongated peninsula. The constant coming and going of various producers and traders of paper tellingly illustrate these challenges. However, the ruling elite kept considerable power over the production and circulation of paper almost until the end of the seventeenth century, even with constant privatization. One factor unique to the paper trade, the fact that private production arose mainly from Buddhist temples, provides a partial explanation. As Buddhists were a group that was officially looked down on in Confucian society, their social vulnerability hindered the recognition of their artisanship.

Scholar-officials imprinted their earnest efforts to make Chosŏn a self-sufficient state of farmers in its initial administrative stipulations. They duly placed the material provision of society under their control by establishing governmental workshops in 129 different areas of craftwork. ¹⁴ They paid particular attention to papermaking, partly because of the many journeys that Korean paper had to make to China, a neighbor dozens of times bigger than Korea throughout most of its existence. The central court was determined to appease China to secure its own legitimacy and safety, sending about 1,040 tributary missions to Ming China (1368–1644) and 870 missions to Qing China (1644–1911), about four a year. When the tributary items were fully codified in the eighteenth century, paper items took up at least a third of the tributary budget. ¹⁵ Nonetheless, even with sometimes excessive demand from China for its publishing projects or royal funerals, various domestic needs, including documentation at various offices, were far more significant.

For this provision of paper, scholar-officials showed exemplary care by fully mobilizing the administrative and taxation systems. Each magistrate had to manage tak fields, keep records in a special ledger, and submit a given number of tak barks every year. ¹⁶ Collecting the lye needed to macerate tak was also one of their duties. Most prefectures had to establish paper workshops operated by a designated number of paper artisans, who then had to pay their dues to the state with their labor. There were 705 paper artisans throughout the eight provinces. The central court established the Paper Making Bureau and Workshop (hereafter, Bureau Workshop) in 1415 in the Pukhan Mountain area on the outskirts of Seoul, hiring ninety-one artisans (two carpenters, eight frame-makers, eighty-one paper artisans), ninety preparation servants, five messengers, and six tool and facility staff, working under several officials. ¹⁷ Paper production was the biggest sector in this governed production system, taking up about twenty percent of the artisanal workforce under its management. ¹⁸ The circulation of paper was also kept under control by making the trade in paper outside of one licensed paper shop in Seoul illegal. They intended to control everything about paper, from its raw materials to circulation.

In this scheme, which aimed at the stable provision of paper throughout the land, scholar-officials seem to have put paper artisans in a favorable position. Among the various kinds of artisans at central workshops, only paper artisans and damask weavers had three shifts, allowing them to use two thirds of their time, eight months, for private production (the rest had two shifts, leaving them with six months free). They could make up for the low, nominal wages given during their service time by making paper on their own during their off-duty time, or by working at their main job, farming. The paper artisans at prefectural workshops received land and some levy exemptions, and they would receive labor support for farming if they had to serve during the farming season, although this ideal measure changed early on into the wage system in 1445. ¹⁹ Even though the status of artisans was more akin to that of indentured servants rather than farmers, by using servants for laborious tasks like the preparation of materials, the skills of artisans appear to have been recognized.

However, the recognition of artisanal skills was vague. Above all, while scholar-officials seemed confident in their own knowledge and capacity to control the provision of paper, they took little interest in the specifics of papermaking. Among the alleged ninety-nine processes involved in papermaking, only the lifting of paper from the vat (浮紙 or 抄紙, indeed a key technology, although some paper artisans valued the art of mixing materials more highly) and toch’im were mentioned, but without getting into specifics. None of them was mentioned in scholar-officials’ stipulation for the Bureau Workshop. The Great Code mentions toch’im only once, not in the stipulation for the Ministry of Works but for the Ministry of Military Affairs, to double the wages of the three persons serving military duties at the Bureau of Diplomatic Documents (承文院), when there was toch’im for diplomatic documents. ²⁰

Subsequent scattered appearances of this process in official documents clarified that this extra payment was less the appreciation for toch’im as a special skill than officials’ caution about diplomatic decorum regarding China. In addition to farmers serving military duty, they allotted minor criminals serving short terms for toch’im, fully relegating the task to mere labor. Yet scholar-officials showed that they knew full well that toch’im was crucial in making the uniquely praised quality of Korean paper, mentioning it frequently when the quality of paper was an issue. This knowledgeable mention of toch’im, with some notable consistency, had the effect of making toch’im the responsibility of officials. Instead of changing the unskilled labor force, the court decided to tighten up scholarly supervision by sending officials to the workshop on the outskirts of Seoul during major paper work. Accordingly, specialization took place not in terms of artisanal skills but among supervising officials, designating a specific “paper officer (司紙)” as a long-term staff member among officials at the bureau in 1466. ²¹ Without a direct connection to paper artisans, toch’im stayed in the realm of the scholar-officials’ knowledgeable supervision.

In this initial system of scholar-officials, paper artisans serving central or local offices were powerless; everything about their job, even tools and raw materials, was under scholar-officials’ control. Theoretically, these artisans could do fine by making paper throughout the year, given that there was always sufficient demand. But the source of problems for these artisans was the very fact that there was such a secure demand for paper, because this demand came from those who had power, or at least a connection to power: the central court, magistrates, yangban and royal families, licensed shop merchants, and so forth. Magistrates felt quite justified in increasing the levy time on artisans and farmers, while kings made extra requests for seemingly noble and legitimate needs like the publication of Confucian primers and classics, and tributes to China. ²² The practice of sharing the paper produced in prefectural workshops with other literati in the provinces, and friends and relatives of magistrates beyond the provinces, also taxed these artisans. Some magistrates also made them produce more paper to secure revenue. Even court servants made these artisans produce paper from waste court documents, as the strong tak fiber endured the recycling process very well. Stricter regulations on waste paper became necessary as some of these court servants, excited by the opportunities for profit, went on to steal even the precious Daily Records and other important documents. ²³ The prices these artisans were able to demand for their service depended on the conscience of their powerful customers; some expected a free service by providing raw materials, although most paid several kilos of rice in return for bundles of paper. ²⁴ Although excessive or personal greed could lead to indictment, these were generally legitimate practices recorded in administrative ledgers. ²⁵

Most registered artisans seemed not to desire to work under these conditions. The Bureau Workshop could not maintain a workforce of eighty-one paper artisans, and prefectures also had problems hiring paper artisans. ²⁶ However, there was a more desperate group of paper artisans who were willing to fill the niche: Buddhist monk-artisans. The Confucian dynasty, attempting to circumscribe the power of the Buddhist establishment, confiscated the economic resources of the monasteries, such as land, assets, and slaves, and thereby pushed monks to leave the monasteries or to find other means of survival. ²⁷ Having extensive experience in the production of Buddhist sutras, papermaking was a good choice, made more appealing by temples’ mountainous locations near streams, firewood, and tak trees. ²⁸ Also, such private production was necessary from the beginning, as the initial provision from the center had not foreseen all of the varying local circumstances, such as that the tak tree was not yet available in the northern half of the peninsula. To fulfill their duties, magistrates from most regions north of Seoul, the capital near the center of the country, had to buy paper as well as processed tak from shops in Seoul, which readily relied on these disenfranchised groups from southern temples. ²⁹

By the late seventeenth century these private productions almost substituted for the government production system, although without the corresponding ascendance of monk-artisans. Above all, the government system became infeasible on its own, with diminished revenues and destruction caused by four wars with Japan and China in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In remaking the revenue system and in part appeasing estranged subjects, overtaxed and rebellious after losing their loved ones and properties during the wars, the government tried tax reform with the Uniform Land Base Tax (大同法), which initially repealed most of the item-based levies like paper and tak. ³⁰

Monk-artisans appeared to possess every technical element necessary to exploit the new situation: handed-down techniques, organizational discipline, and ready access to tools and materials. The fact that they were not immediately able to make themselves beneficiaries of this new situation thus reflects the rigidity of the social makeup surrounding them. Like the registered artisans that they had replaced, they were at the mercy of their powerful customers. Central administrative offices, local magistrates, regional military bases established during the wars, royal families, and licensed merchants aggressively exploited them, although individual customers mostly purchased paper at market prices by then. Regional military bases and prefectural offices without much revenue from the court felt justified in utilizing this socially vulnerable workforce in operating their offices. The weak central court, unable to provide alternative revenue schemes, was ineffective in checking the exploitation of monks’ skills. Paper corvée shifted to monks. This became a most widely condemned social problem by concerned scholar-officials, but without any solution provided. ³¹ Repositioning the socially disenfranchised artisans in the new social system was not a priority for scholar-officials. These artisans, surrounded by powerful authorities, could not yet assert their technical prowess.

Temple artisans had roughly three responses to the situation. Making the clearest statement about the undesirability of this kind of arrangement, some left their workshops, the temples. Others remained. These remaining artisans tried to re-shape their bonds by favoring certain ones over others; the early preference was royal families, who seemed to have the power and will to protect them from other predators like local magistrates and military bases. ³² The third response was quiet endurance, eking out a living with whatever they earned from their toil, and increasing other kinds of work like herb collecting and woodwork for survival. Yet it became obvious that fewer and fewer temples chose to continue in the paper trade. By the end of the seventeenth century, paper became a rare item; civil service exam paper once costed 4 liang a sheet, about 144 kg of rice. “It is no mystery that the price of paper is so high since those monk-paper artisans have encountered hard times year after year and those who would [still] produce paper are similarly few,” one official commented. ³³ In accordance with this gradual diminution of socially weak groups of artisans, even passing mentions of toch’im became rare. The ancient innovation seemed ready for its demise.

New connections, new locations, and new toilers

Toch’im, however, came back strongly in Chosŏn papermaking by the mid-eighteenth century, when papermaking turned the crisis of the late seventeenth century into a successful industry in growing international trade. But papermaking was not the only industry to grow. Social and cultural upheavals were visible in other fields, too, accompanying the general increase in agricultural yields and population growth (about fifteen to twenty million by the nineteenth century), and the influx of silver to East Asia, which facilitated trade between the strong regimes of Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, and Chosŏn Korea. In this society, which was being dynamically reshaped, paper artisans began to transform their once disadvantageous social condition, their origin in Buddhist temples, into a strength. Above all, these monk-artisans, who were all familiar with relocating and pilgrimages, showed a special skill at relocating themselves, both geographically and socially, making many new partners, especially outside the old system.

The authoritative old partners seriously tried to maintain their power over the paper trade. The central court, the ever important and powerful consumer of paper, introduced two measures to tighten up its loosening control of paper provision. In 1706, at the height of paper scarcity, the central court attempted to increase the direct production of paper by strengthening the bureau workshop. To solve the problem of artisan recruitment, it assigned each prefecture to send five artisans to the bureau, with the aim of ninety-nine paper artisans for the workshop. ³⁴ In an approximate calculation, it was a workforce that could produce about half a million sheets of paper a month. ³⁵ Given that the corvée system was otherwise changing into a voluntary hire system, this stipulation for paper artisans, to be enforced by its link to magistrates’ job evaluations, was a strange relic of the ambitious old system, revealing the unique importance of paper to the court. ³⁶ The next measure was designating authorized dealers for central paper procurement since some paper levies, such as those for tributes to China and documenting at some offices, were reinstituted for the three southern provinces best suited for paper production. The authorized dealers were mediators between local governments and the central court in submitting those levies. ³⁷ To safely secure paper through new mediators, the central court set official prices quite high, almost three times higher than market prices. It was an expensive yet promising and convenient approach to deal with unpredictability in the market, while justifying various duties imposed on authorized dealers. ³⁸

However, neither of these measures worked. In 1753, the authorized dealers purchasing paper from southern provinces made a complaint: “We purchase paper from monks with cash not for personal consumption but solely for tributes, the importance of which is matchless. However, the vicious monks turn us down, delaying deliveries every time. It even happens that we do not obtain a strip of paper after losing thousands in cash.” ³⁹

Not satisfied with a handsome margin, these dealers had always tried to pay less to the powerless producers and had been accustomed to paying in rice or cloth at favorable exchange rates. Yet even cash did not work. Not acquiescing as usual, monk-artisans came to respond differently. The complaining dealers added that the attitude of the monks became more and more arrogant because local magistrates would not do anything, even though they duly reported monks’ “unjust” slights of their important levy demands. Obviously, these monks learned that there was nothing “unjust” in refusing to sell if they did not like the terms, and the inaction of local magistrates confirmed this. The central court acted upon repeated appeals, issuing some admonitions, but monk-artisans could safely ignore them. The situation at the Bureau Workshop was no better. It could not keep enlisted paper artisans. The artisans who remained suggested the reasons for those departures, which were not new: powerful officials and royal families imposed extra or illegal production of paper on them without much pay, and even whipped them when they refused such demands. All fled except for seven or eight artisans, leaving unused workshop facilities in serious deterioration. ⁴⁰ Magistrates either could not or did not work hard enough to send artisans, apparently not fearing that evaluation criterion, which was just one of many, and the supposed farmer-cum-artisans recruited for the government workshop also did not see their bonds to any of these authorities as absolute. Once binding social relations were losing their importance, and the old politics of the authorized dealers using their connections to authorities did not work.

At the same time, as in the seventeenth century, only now more frequently, officials began to report empty temples, seemingly indicating the concurrent demise of private production. For example, the magistrate of Namwŏn, a famous paper-producing town in the Chŏlla province, made an alarmed report that most of its temples were emptied between 1735 and 1737. Yet those temples were obviously restored soon after, since this famous paper-producing town reported another exodus of monks again in 1793. In the first case, the Namwŏn magistrate searched hard to resolve this mass exodus, but to no avail. Unlike the earlier periods, they were not back in their old homes in nearby towns, where the magistrate could find them through the administrative network. ⁴¹ The reporter of the second case, a secret government inspector dispatched there, was no more successful in solving the riddle. He became more puzzled after looking into the matter: “they had no reason to be dissatisfied, given the recent price increase.” ⁴²

If these words were all true, this exodus of monk-artisans, apparently an organized one, was an entirely new phenomenon. The disappearing monks were ignoring all of the accommodations, or at least the gestures of accommodation, that these powerful old partners had made, and instead made decisive moves to sever old links. What makes their desertion of these authoritative parties more distinctive from the earlier one is that this time paper artisans forged new connections, not outside but inside the papermaking network that they were remaking. They reemerged on the paper scene, but in different locations and with different alliances. While these disappearing monks did not leave any writings in the archives as to the reasons or aims of their mass departures from their old connections, their new alliances and locations reveal their preferences and their astute politics in securing them.

The first, most clearly documented new connection is their alliance with a new kind of merchant, collectively called Songsang. Named after their region of origin, Songdo, a capital of the previous Koryŏ dynasty just north of Seoul, these merchants were the region’s elites, according to a famous eighteenth-century scholar, Yi Ik (李瀷, 1681–1763). The elites from here and the wider Northwest region developed commerce and crafts because the new dynasty had hindered their political careers, suspecting that they were still loyal to Koryŏ. ⁴³ Songsang, in competition and cooperation with merchant groups emerging in other regions like Mansang from Ŭiju on the border with China, became particularly serious players in trade with China and Japan, building up a state-wide network and tight-knit organizations. ⁴⁴ As paper was an important item in trade with both China and Japan, Songsang had long cultivated relations with paper artisans. ⁴⁵ These connections became notable in the mid-eighteenth century, when the complaining authorized dealers began to associate the insolence of monk-artisans with Songsang; monk-artisans ignored their demands because of Songsang, whose attaché stayed in those temples at all times, buying out high-quality paper. ⁴⁶

Given the continued complaints of authorized dealers about the special relationship between paper artisans and Songsang, it must have been a robust one. The central court’s indecisiveness failed to undo the link. While the court indeed issued several warnings against Songsang’s “underground trade” of paper, it seemed unsure of what to do with Songsang’s growing trade with China and Japan. This unofficial trade was a threat to the translation officers’ official trade during tributary visits, mainly consisting of trading a designated amount of ginseng per person for various Chinese goods or silver, but it could increase government revenue. In 1712 the central court acquiesced to the situation and legalized border trade, allowing private traders to sell their wares in so-called after-markets (後市), held after the completion of tributary visits. As China and Japan did not have direct trade relations at the time, Songsang’s trade mediating Chinese products like silk, South Asian products like water buffalo horns (for bows), Korean products like ginseng, and Japanese silver and copper (coinage) was enormously lucrative for traders and important for the central court. However, as the opposition of translation officers became strong, after-markets became illegal again in 1725. Yet in 1755, while chastising local magistrates for not cracking down on Songsang’s paper buy-out in southern temples, the central court again legalized the after-markets, charging a fixed lump sum for a trading license, only to forbid it again in 1787, alarmed by the enormity of the trade, which was detrimental to official trade. ⁴⁷ This ban did not work, as the central court fully predicted. ⁴⁸ The unchanged plea from the authorized dealers the following year regarding Songsang’s paper monopoly in the southern temples was just one indication. ⁴⁹

This international demand that connected paper artisans with Songsang seems to have inspired monk-artisans to move great distances. While monk-artisans were disappearing from temples in the south, monks began mysteriously appearing in northern border areas that had not previously seen monks or been involved in papermaking. ⁵⁰ In 1728, a state official, after visiting border areas, reported at court:

Before, there were no monks in Yukchin (six military garrisons at borders with China) and if there were, it was only those who passed by carrying their own provisions. Starting a few years ago, every village now has so-called Hwat’aeksŭng (monks with wives). More of them live near riverside towns such as Hŏeryŏng, Chaesŏng, Kyŏngwŏn, Kyŏnghŭng; temples are lined up looking over each other, with the number of monks reaching several hundred. They take wives, have children, and farm, not unlike lay people, except for their shaved heads and monks’ robes. Alas, while these people with monks’ appearances were figuring out ways to avoid military duties, magistrates do not prohibit this but simply profit from the hemp paper accepted as a levy (納徵) and extort some straw sandals. ⁵¹

Monks en masse thus flocked to border villages, marrying and having children, living off farming and papermaking. Border magistrates would accept their monk-status while taking some paper and other craft items. The official said that these monks already “understand the barbarian (胡) language and, owing to their shaved heads, pass as barbarians if in barbarian clothes, and cross the border unchecked.” ⁵² He worried that they would be a security threat by siding with the other side in case of war, but most others saw these bilingual monks, who at times lived with “barbarian” wives, as a different kind of threat. U Hayŏng (禹夏永, 1741–1812), a serious scholar who decided to survey every corner of the peninsula to learn about people’s livelihoods and state affairs after failing to pass the last stage of the civil service exam, saw these monks basically as smugglers. They crossed borders freely and smuggled prohibited things. He was not even sure whether they were Koreans disguised as Chinese or Chinese disguised as Koreans. ⁵³ Yi Kyukyŏng (李圭景, 1788–1856), another serious scholar who also devoted his life to study, pointed out paper-related items as their choice items; they not only smuggled Chosŏn paper to China but Chinese paper to Chosŏn, while exporting processed tak barks to China for Chinese artisans to make fake Chosŏn paper. ⁵⁴

Paper-producing towns emerged not only in border regions. In addition to rather well-known Ansŏng, a commercial hub near Seoul and home of popular xerographic publication, ⁵⁵ nine small towns in the Hwanghae province, north of Seoul, entered the paper scene for the first time in the early nineteenth century in an administrative document recording submissions of item levies by authorized dealers. These towns, not discussed by any scholar-officials or historians as paper-producing towns before, became the main sites where authorized dealers purchased paper for the central court, including levies allotted to three southern provinces. Authorized dealers finally stopped making ineffective complaints about Songsang’s interruption of their purchases in southern temples; they made 198 out of 343 paper transactions in these obscure northern towns. Since there were thirty-nine dealers trading with the nine towns, no one town was controlled by a single dealer. In addition to these nine Hwanghae towns, the list also included other seemingly new papermaking towns in Kangwŏn and Ch’ungch’ong provinces, although purchases from these towns were not as significant as those in Hwanghae. ⁵⁶

It is hard to ascertain how these new papermaking sites came about. However, it is not unreasonable to assume that some of the monk-artisans who had disappeared settled in these new sites, drawing authorized dealers, their old acquaintances, to these obscure towns, since the spread of the paper trade had mainly relied on such relocations of journeymen artisans elsewhere. ⁵⁷ Songsang, based in the nearby town, could not disapprove of such mobility if they had not directly organized or aided these monk-artisans’ transformations as journeymen. Changes in the paper trade accompanied changes in Chosŏn Buddhism, which slowly regained its social respectability and consolidated its economic foundation using restored land and property ownership. Monks organized various kye (契, associations) such as “Temple Protecting” kye or “Same-Age” kye, helping each other and contributing their yields back to their home temple, revealing them as mobile but connected units on their state-wide organizational bases. ⁵⁸ Some southern temples apparently chose papermaking as a means of decisive self-strengthening. Moving away from their “pseudo-shutdowns,” many temples built new facilities such as rooms with wooden tubs for lifting paper, big stone mortars and beating stones, and new organizational structures, such as “paper mulberry,” “sales,” and “warehouse” sections, revealing a division of labor. One temple in a southern province had a building with 120 paper molding rooms. ⁵⁹ Its approximate daily production of 60,000 sheets exceeded the yearly paper submission to any government agency, indicating an immensity of demand from outside those old authorities that would seriously weaken the entrenched power. ⁶⁰

Indeed, a robust network created by diverse marketplaces undergirded these kinds of ambitiously built workshops. Scholar-officials, as customers, were serious contributors to these new marketplaces. “How scholar-officials like paper is almost ridiculous,” one scholar-official noted, disapproving of his peers’ seeming enjoyment of this development; they consumed high-quality paper for everything from kids’ scribbling to blowing their noses; paper became insoles to “make the feet of his beloved servant comfortable.” ⁶¹ It was not simply that they consumed paper in large quantities and in myriad ways. Every kind of paper added its refinement to satisfy their taste. Precious letter paper, sought after in the market, was extremely expensive; a modest court clerk was not able to buy one sheet of subtly colored paper with his monthly income. All the fancy names of paper circulated, whether owing to customers’ erudition or to paper traders’ ingenuity in marketing. ⁶² Some of them were Chinese or Japanese by name, but as it was not clear whether monks in border villages were Korean or Chinese, it was not clear who made what paper, with which materials, from where, and based on what technical traditions.

If this high-end market for paper looks somewhat volatile, innovations in papermaking were happening and spreading vigorously on a very broad foundation. The great increase in civil service exam candidates and the corresponding increase in Confucian academies and town schools at the time meant an exponential increase in paper demand. ⁶³ Also, more and more scholar-officials began to publish anthologies and collections for their ancestors and for themselves in a competitive market for literary talent, and more people assuming the title of officer-candidate printed genealogies. ⁶⁴ Demands for less respectable reading material like novels and miscellaneous poetry also meant a rise in paper consumption. The strong tak paper’s versatile everyday uses by the growing population, such as covers for walls, doors, and floors, also increased demand. As one nineteenth-century observer noted, “in both public and private [use], the demand for paper is the largest.” ⁶⁵ This immense increase in paper consumption took place in notable calm without causing major or sustained problems in paper scarcity or inflation, except for occasional complaints about high paper prices. ⁶⁶ Louder were the condemnations of the wasteful use of paper.

Also noteworthy is that this increase in paper consumption did not lead to an exhaustion of tak trees. Although mixing with other materials became quite common, especially for thin printing paper, the tak tree was the main ingredient for most paper produced in Korea. ⁶⁷ However, instead of a dearth or exhaustion of tak trees, this tree, believed to grow only in the southern half of the peninsula, was planted everywhere except for the northernmost provinces, and circulated, as mentioned, even to China. The southern region, best for its cultivation, increased its production. The Honam region, the home of Namwŏn and other famous paper-producing towns, listed twenty-seven tak-producing towns in 1842, a significant increase from seventeen in 1771. ⁶⁸ Hwanghae province, the home of the nine new paper-producing towns, also registered eight other towns as newly tak-producing towns. ⁶⁹ Tak barks became an abundant and widely accessible resource around this time in the peninsula.

Some attributed the increase in tak fields to the enlightened King Chŏngjo and assumed that his death was responsible for the alleged decline of both tak tree cultivation and papermaking in the nineteenth century. ⁷⁰ His officials certainly recorded an impressive expansion of tak fields after the king’s edict beseeching its cultivation. However, this unprecedented record of tak and bamboo fields demonstrates that most tak trees grew on private lands. ⁷¹ In Ch’ungch’ŏng province, there were 1,741 private tak fields compared to 277 public ones, and in Chŏlla, 2,636 private to thirty-one public fields. ⁷² If this was a response by farmers to the king’s edict circulated by his magistrates, the efficiency of his rule would be matchless. However, farmers were highly selective about which edicts to follow. Tobacco, another popular cash crop at the time, showed a similar pattern of increase despite the efforts of the king and other officials to suppress it. ⁷³ There must have been other factors outweighing the king’s well-documented concern. As many scholar-officials noted, gone was the time of farmers growing mostly rice for self-sufficiency, and the tak tree was an appealing cash crop. ⁷⁴

This increase of tak production is evidence of a broad social transformation and the diverse forces shaping it; paper artisans who severed their links to authoritative old partners utilized these new material and social forces in making their constant moves. Indeed, this changed way of producing and circulating tak barks, the main ingredient in papermaking, was crucial in freeing paper artisans from the geographical or ecological constraints previously induced by the tak tree. Monk-artisans did not have to live in their mountainous temples in the southern regions. ⁷⁵ With once- or twice-processed tak barks available even in northern border towns, paper artisans moved widely, reflecting and creating new connections with these farmers and various kinds of merchants circulating them.

Thus emerged a very heterogeneous network of paper production and circulation. Although the central court and its scholar-bureaucrats tried to maintain control over the trade, the social dynamics that developed in the private realm seriously undermined their efforts. The central court and its scholar-officials gradually yielded control, accommodating the tax and levy systems, and lifestyles and attitudes, to this evolving network. It was not a network reshaped from the center, or by any grand idea, simple desire, or imperative material necessity.

Common ways of seeing this process of commercialization, however, have more often involved discussions on the grand schemes of states or capitalists or visionary thinkers, global and technologically sophisticated mass production systems including imperialism and plantation agriculture, or the new ideas of property and commodity that inspired people’s desire to possess and consume. This state, built on Confucian ideals of self-sufficiency, had not made up its mind about this path and did not produce any serious capitalists or a new kind of statesman, but it was also on this path, in large part because of the maneuvers of these new laborers. The changes in power relations were fundamental. Previously, paper artisans had been unable to refuse any demand from powerful authorities. While these ruling parties still kept their powerful political positions, they could not exercise their power over the trade as before, marginalized as they were by the broad and heterogeneous network of paper production and circulation, shaped by paper artisans and their numerous new connections. Surely, paper artisans had not foreseen or planned these changes. Nonetheless, their skills in spotting promising new partners outside of old powers were innovative. Artisans in possibly more sophisticated craft fields like gold- and ceramic-work, who had not broken away from their powerful customers as of yet, failed to mimic this vibrant ascendance of the paper trade. By no longer seeking powerful protectors and instead working for and with the broader population, they made the flexibility of their cultivable raw materials and the versatility of their products fully function for them. It was the astute politics of paper artisans that enabled them to ignore the demands of powerful parties. These producers now exercised power, not over the authorities, but beyond their control. Paper artisans, shaping and moving through this evolving network populated by heterogeneous and diverse entities outside of power, were no longer a simple cog in the machine.

New paper artisans embracing toch’im

Paper artisans seemed to recognize their new status. Notably, the artisans working for the central court, who seemed to be bound by old relations, transformed those relations within this selfsame system, too. Records of rituals published for court publication projects such as the Annals and the Royal Genealogy and various administrative documents delineate paper artisans’ lengthy negotiations with scholar-officials in their quest for recognition. ⁷⁶ Embracing toch’im, corvéed toil for those on military duty or prisoners, as their own was one of their strategies that left traces in the archives. ⁷⁷ Even though technical details regarding the skilling of toch’im are absent, the changes in the workforce, workplace, and working conditions surrounding toch’im help illuminate broader changes in technical practice, built on that heterogeneous network of various new allies.

Artisans’ new attitudes about their artisanship and the ruling elite seem to have been crucial in changing scholar-officials’ limited understanding of toch’im as simple toil and their attitudes concerning these artisans. Among the series of documents on court publishing projects, one compiled by an especially dutiful scholar-official best delineates these interactive attitude changes. Hong Kyehŭi (洪啓禧, 1703–71), who distinguished himself by passing the civil service exam with the highest mark in 1737 and led important policy measures later as a successful bureaucrat, was the one who wrote the document. ⁷⁸ In charge of an urgent documentation project at the court between 1746 and 1747, the restoration of about 130 years’ worth of precious Daily Records lost in a fire in the Royal Secretariat building in 1744, he produced a careful record of these changes.

Regarding the restoration project, there were many other important matters that received Hong’s attention, including collecting the base records from various bureaus, ministries, and some scholar-official families, and securing capable writers and scribes to check and compile them. However, he could not and did not neglect the provision of important items like paper, brushes, and ink either. One of the first requests that he made to the king concerned paper. After the establishment of the Restoration Bureau on May 16, 1746, and setting the guidelines regarding its operations and budgets on May 21, he and two other officials at the bureau requested the king’s hearing to confirm a few more things. After confirming the scope of the restoration and other matters, Hong asked: “At the court meeting the other day, your highness ordered us to use common paper. However, common paper will definitely tear before long as it changes hands. How about using Thick White Paper (厚白紙) with toch’im?” ⁷⁹ The king appreciated his concern and approved the request.

However, even with the king’s direct approval of his thoughtful provision, carrying out toch’im for such a considerable amount of paper, over fifty thousand sheets during an operation of approximately nineteen months, was no small task, although it is unlikely that Hong realized this. He, like other scholar-officials, assumed it to be simple toil. He merely requested eight “strong soldiers” from the Ministry of Military Affairs and one artisan from the Bureau Workshop, whom he requested, it seems, only for a preliminary check of the toch’im site that he planned to install at the court. The following month, he requested an increase in the workforce, ten soldiers this time. However, following a petition by the paper artisan Yi Chingŏn (李震健, exact dates unknown), Hong learned that his estimation of the process was quite wrong. ⁸⁰ Hong helped these artisans convey their main request to the Ministry of Finance. Their request was simple: since they did not belong to any office to receive a salary, they needed a real wage during their toch’im, not the nominal lunch money given to soldiers. They requested 3.5 ch’ŏk (about 1 meter) of common cloth per day, not a small wage for an artisan, in addition to rice for three meals. Relaying this concern of those who thus presented themselves as free paper artisans, Hong asked the Ministry of Finance to make the payment. The estimation of their workday that the Restoration Bureau formally set was “wages for eight paper artisans for three workdays,” that is, twenty-four man-days, for 2,000 sheets beaten. ⁸¹

This meant that one artisan would beat about eighty-three sheets of paper a day. That would have been a leisurely speed, since beating was hardly done sheet by sheet. Generally, eighty-three sheets would make one or two bundles to beat together, either on a wooden roller with a wooden mallet or on a flat square stone with a wooden mallet. ⁸² This request could have meant an incredible amount of beating (4,800 times for an eight-hour day if beaten just ten times a minute), which could tear the paper apart, or other complex processes involved in toch’im, or just an audacious estimation of the worth of their time by paper artisans. Hong’s request did not reveal which was the case. He simply added:

Our bureau received the authorization at the court meeting to use Thick White Paper with toch’im for the volumes. Although we do not have the exact estimation as to how much paper has to be beaten to the end, this toch’im is different from other cases as it is not temporary work. Also, as it is unjust to use poor and wretched artisanal hands (匠手) without paying wages for the public work, it is not strange that they felt they were wronged. ⁸³

The importance of the restoration project and the king’s authority were evoked, and his urge to keep these hands for the entire project by addressing their grievances was shared.

The Ministry of Finance refused to engage with any of Hong’s arguments, and simply said that there was no precedent for making payment for toch’im. Notwithstanding repeated appeals from the Restoration Bureau saying that it was not right to rely on precedent in this unique circumstance, the Ministry of Finance was adamant. Only in December did it finally make the payment, but only partially, by shifting some of its burden to the Ministry of Military Affairs. ⁸⁴ Hong responded to this grudging acquiescence by raising the estimated wage of artisans, from twenty-four man-days for 2,000 sheets to twenty-eight man-days (four artisans, seven workdays) for 2,000 sheets, which seemed to have occurred mainly because he ended up retaining only four of the artisans. ⁸⁵

In addition to the high wages, there were other changes in the Restoration Bureau’s toch’im process to reflect on. First, Hong stopped sending requests for soldiers as of September 1746. Instead, he sent the payment requests for his four artisans almost every month to other ministries. ⁸⁶ Clearly renounced was the idea that toch’im could be done by just any temporary laborer. Another important change is that Hong gave up his right or duty to supervise the process. At first, he set up a tent at the court as a toch’im site, apparently meaning to keep close watch on the work. ⁸⁷ However, he came to allow these permanent hands to work on their own. These paper artisans and their headman seem to have had a good relationship with Hong, visiting him with the processed paper and asking for his support for various things such as the repair of their wooden mallets. ⁸⁸

More remarkable was the attitude of the artisans. They showed no sign of hurriedness, unthinkable for laborers who might have had to live hand to mouth. Nor did they back down from this ruling elite. They stood back while Hong worried about the delay, quarreled about rules and precedents, and made apologies for this unchanging demand to different ministries. And paper artisans seemed to have maintained this attitude in their frequent encounters with scholar-officials who had the same initial assumption about toch’im as simple toil. A series of similar records documenting court publication projects from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth century clearly reveals the lengthy negotiations that artisans engaged in with scholar-officials, testifying both to the strong resistance by scholar-officials and the insistence of these artisans. The quiet confidence of these artisans regarding the diversely secured worth of their skill ended up winning out. In all three aspects of the transformation – the specialization of the skill, their own supervision, and higher pay – artisans fully secured by the nineteenth century what they had temporarily obtained from Hong.

The disappearance of scholar-officials’ supervision over toch’im was most clearly documented, as they duly recorded their business trips to the Bureau Workshop for toch’im to justify their absence from court. The last such trip was in 1795. Some scholar-officials in charge of publication projects apparently did not mind this chance to get away from court, spending time instead in a scenic mountainside. The mid-eighteenth century, when Hong yielded his control to paper artisans, was still a high time for such leisurely business trips for toch’im. Scholar-officials in charge requested more and more items from various offices for “a temporary pavilion for officials-in-charge (郞廳依幕所),” such as mats, back-rests, sun- and wind-screens, porcelain spittoons, and so on, as well as tea-sets and even tea-maids. ⁸⁹ By the end of the century, however, such specific requests for pavilions became fewer and fewer, and finally there was no more mention of it after 1795. ⁹⁰ Accompanying this gradual and fluctuating yielding of their supervisory role, scholar-officials came to rely on paper artisans, by requesting the presence of paper artisans during toch’im. From the mid-eighteenth century, calls for paper artisans, often more specifically a “headman (邊首)” or “commanding artisan (領率匠人),” began to appear. Those were new designations for artisanal groups, revealing both the organized nature of artisans and scholar-officials’ growing respect for them. ⁹¹

However, requests for “toch’im soldiers” persisted with only occasional exceptions, while revealing curiously varying staffing of toch’im workforces. For example, scholar-officials at times requested only paper artisans without requesting any “toch’im soldiers.” The earliest such cases were in 1751 and 1752. Yet both before and after these years, the requests for toch’im soldiers continued, only with great variations in numbers and in different combinations with paper artisans (See Table 1).

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Table 1.

Numbers of paper artisans and toch’im soldiers by year. ⁹²

Year	1748	1751	1752	1758	1764	1776	1795	1812
Paper artisans	6	6	6	6	3	2	5	2
Toch’im soldiers	3	0	0	8	10	15	5	15

The fluctuating numbers and changing combinations rather seem to be proof that there was no serious distinction between the two groups; if there had been a clear distinction, it would have been almost impossible for anyone in charge to combine the division of labor between the two groups in such different ratios. A new regulation addressing monks’ repeated petitions to stop the corvée of “toch’im soldiers” from temples, introduced in 1756, clarifies why there did not need to be a distinction between the two groups; toch’im soldiers had been recruited from monk-artisans. Importantly, the court’s new decision was not to stop the recruitment of toch’im soldiers from temples but to set aside a budget to make it not corvée but paid labor. ⁹³ Both toch’im soldiers and paper artisans had the same roots in temple workshops and came to be paid for their toch’im work. ⁹⁴ Neither was forced; each simply sold their toch’im skills upon request. They could be mixed in every way, as it was only a matter of which department had to pay for how many artisans. The old title “toch’im soldiers” now meant a dramatically different thing: free and skilled artisans.

The above records, mostly for much shorter projects, are not clear about the fees that they received, although they clarify that there was precedent for paying for toch’im before 1746. Their payment was not especially high. The daily wage for artisans varied by year but it was the same for all artisans working on the same project, seemingly revealing the bureaucratic preference of uniformity. However, several administrative manuals from the nineteenth century suggest that the higher payment that Hong’s artisans had secured came to be well institutionalized by the nineteenth century, showing the growing consensus about toch’im’s worth among scholar-officials. The manual for the administrative procedures compiled at the king’s request in the early nineteenth century, Government Handbook (萬機要覽), presented to the king in 1808, chose to list ninety-six different kinds of paper, specified by size, price, weight, and color, for governmental use. The technique that the artisans claimed as their own, toch’im, was a common category that determined the price of paper. Even low-grade beaten paper was almost twice as expensive as unbeaten paper in the same category and high-grade beaten paper in the same category would be double the price. ⁹⁵ It was a technique to be secured at a high price, not something gratis to be attained by force. A collection of administrative protocols published in 1867, The Ordinances of the Six Ministries (六典條例), contains a specific salary category for toch’im artisans in the Ministry of Military Affairs budget. The salary was fifteen liang, the highest among artisans and higher than that of a regular scribe. ⁹⁶ After being dismissed for so long, toch’im secured paper artisans a high level of social autonomy and material reward. It was wise of them to embrace that manual technique of toch’im as their own.

Conclusion: new artisans by toiling hands

Would it have been wise of paper artisans to embrace toch’im earlier? The scholar-officials acknowledged the famous old technique in their ambitious governmental production system, but they appropriated it from artisans and placed it under their own supervision. Neither was the earlier privatized production system filled by newly emerging monk-artisans ideal for those monk-artisans to embrace toch’im. Isolated in socially rejected temples, monk-artisans seem to be the only element to have changed from the initial, governed system of paper production and circulation, and they were the weakest link in a system governed by scholar-officials’ ideals of a socially stratified self-sufficient society. Although monk paper artisans were quite autonomous in their temple workshops with their own tools and raw materials, this did not change their relations to powerful authorities as of yet. Notwithstanding a lack of legal obligations, they inherited old relations by quietly accepting demands from powerful authorities as long as they stayed in the trade; only the usual politics of seeking a more powerful protector within the old system was tried, without this leading to any decisive change in their status.

The remarkable and gradual skilling of toch’im took place only after the rigid old relations were greatly shaken up by the moves, both social and geographical, of these artisans. Now far beyond the old system, their relocations and new alliances gradually created a heterogeneous new network of things and people, whose ideas, inclinations, wishes, and moves were wide-ranging and interactively negotiated. Historians have suggested some unifying forces that might have directed these diverse entities toward the industrial modernization that most cultures seem to arrive at, as mentioned in the previous section. While not denying the power of any of those unifying forces and grand ideas, this conclusion, by focusing on Chosŏn paper artisans’ social skilling of toch’im, wants to underline and reflect on one of the rarely noted but clear political contributions of these artisanal hands, which reconfigured rigid and stratified power relations by new socializing techniques and norms.

Above all, the recognition that they secured from scholar-officials was a product of their constant assertions of artisanship, supported by their distinctive political acts. Their collectively-made moves constituted one political vision to consider, although I do not claim that these paper artisans had a clear political vision. By their constant moves and re-alliances, these skillfully laboring artisans gradually transformed their passive looking form of everyday resistance, desertion, into an act of creating a new social and material network, which was big enough to marginalize the old governed system, and heterogeneous and dynamic enough to confuse the old politics; upon their new alliances, they could turn the table to shake up the rigid social relations and norms of the governing class greatly for their benefit. They made the authorities recognize the worth of their skillful labor, not by relying on the initiatives of those who had the power, but by severing their links to those powers and making those powerfuls less relevant by their new alliances. By gradually ignoring the powerful and welcoming diverse small allies, who had produced what each other needed with their mindful hands, these unrecognized hands freed themselves from old bonds to keep and cultivate their skills on their own terms.

While this paper illuminating Chosŏn paper artisans’ social technique realizes that it is not yet ready to discuss the relationship between these transformative moves of artisanal hands and new science and technology, it shares its doubt that clear understanding of these unique politics of artisanal hands did not exist among emerging new knowledge practitioners in Chosŏn Korea. The scholar-officials, who had increasingly yielded control to artisans, saw that society was being reshaped not by their knowledgeable guidance but by the moves of those who were governed. Upon realizing the limitations of their knowledge, some of them anxiously followed the far-reaching moves and new alliances of paper artisans and then began to change their knowledge practice, like their European counterparts, even going so far as to adopt the empirical and hands-on approach of artisans and diligently looking into the specifics of mundane techniques. They thus tried to transform themselves as a new knowledge-class. However, the element of that artisanal move that most empowered paper artisans did not characterize the ascendance of the new knowledge-class in Chosŏn Korea. For they mostly missed the casually exercised politics of artisanal hands that ignored the powerful and welcomed diverse small allies, which finally allowed these unrecognized paper artisans to free themselves from old bonds, to keep and cultivate their own artisanship, and to turn the tables. Was and is it okay for anyone dreaming of a new kind of meaningful knowledge to remain obtuse to these various implications of social techniques by continuing to rely on old powers?