Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/284

 fields. These grades are determined by several factors, the natural fertility of the soil, the ability to irrigate, the roughness or smoothness of the topography, and the lay of the land ; for if it slopes toward the north it is considered much less valuable than if it slopes toward the south.

New fields are constantly being made, which for a few years are not shown on the prefect's records and do not pay taxes to the government. For this reason the authorities periodically order a remeasurement of arable land, or rather a readjustment of the prefectural records, so as to include the new fields. There is no definite interval of time between these readjustments. Sometimes half a century passes without one, and then again they may follow each other by an interval of only a few years. Korean history shows that with the beginning of each new reign, or the inauguration of a new government policy, or under stress of some national calamity which has emptied the treasury, a readjustment of land values is likely to be ordered. A royal commission goes about and examines the new fields and estimates their value, noting carefully all the conditions above enumerated. They do not actually measure the land, but they find out how long it will take to plough it with a single bullock, and how much seed grain it requires to plant. By these means they estimate how many kyul there are in the field. Now a kyul is one hundred man-loads of unthreshed rice, and each man-load is composed of ten sheaves. Ten per cent is the legal rate, and so a field of thirty kyul would yield the government three kyul. This again must be reduced to threshed rice in the bag, as that is the form in which, until very recently, the tax has been paid. It was a very clumsy arrangement.

The status of a field being once definitely settled, it is put down on the books as being liable to a definite amount of taxation each year, and this tax is due whether the year is a good or a bad one, whether the field is tilled or left fallow. It is only by a special dispensation of the central government that the tax on a single field can be remitted, whatever be the disabilities