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946 book XI CHAPTER : SETTING UP CAMPS AND ORGANIZING RELIEF ACTIVITIES The First Thing to Do Is to Establish a Place for Relief and Appoint Supervising Officials, Set Up a Cauldron, and Secure Items like Salt and Soybean Sauce, Brown Seaweed, and Dried Shrimps. Since the success of all affairs under Heaven depends on finding the right persons , it is impossible to accomplish the goal unless one finds the persons who are capable of carrying it out. The personnel who are needed for relief activities are one director, two supervisory officials, and two clerks in charge of grain [saengni], and particularly the saengni clerks should be outstanding in integrity and discretion , as well as ability. When he selects the director in charge of famine relief [ch’ongam or kimin toyusa], the magistrate should be more careful. As I often observe, the director takes bribes and practices tricks. Thus he distributes grain even to those who have a sufficient reserve of grain while leaving out widowers and widows who have no one to depend on. Conspiring with the clerks and practicing all kinds of tricks, he just stands by and watches those poor people suffer. The power of selecting starving households should never be entrusted to a man like that. A man of integrity and discretion should be carefully chosen to manage the relief aid for each subdistrict. Since it is inevitable that the number of starving people fluctuates up and down, as does the number of the living and the dead, households that are extremely poor should be allowed to receive more aid by adding one or two extra members to each of them. As for cauldrons for cooking, they are either borrowed from Buddhist temples or the armory, purchased from civilians, or requisitioned from artisans’ villages, but they should be very large, and there should be no fewer than five of them. Then the relief camp is separately set up in the yard of the granary, and the five cauldrons are used to make porridge. If each cauldron can cook porridge for 50 households, the porridge produced in five cauldrons can feed 250 households a day. Since each individual in the standing line is supposed to take food on behalf of each household, which is made of four members in average, including himself, the total number of recipients is actually one thousand people a day. If warm porridge is taken out from the cauldron and distributed to starving people, would it not be nice? However, those who make porridge nowadays use only one or two cauldrons and put it into a large jar after preparing it all night long. By the time it is distributed to the people who are cold and hungry, the porridge is already cold and diluted. How uncharitable they are! During a famine year the price of salt always tends to soar because starving people take wild greens for their staple food. The wild greens cannot be swallowed unless they are properly salted. Therefore, the price of salt can easily rise Famine Relief 947 to twice the normal price. When a long spell of rainy weather ends in the autumn, the magistrate should call the salt harvesters and pay them in advance to get them to produce salt right away and also keep good-quality soybean sauce in storage after personally tasting it. Brown seaweed should be purchased in early autumn and preserved when it is fresh and fine in quality. Since a handful of dried shrimps costs only 1 p’un, dried shrimps for 1 mace can be used for the porridge in five cauldrons. Even if porridge is made a hundred times, the cost of dried shrimps will be no more than 10 taels. However, since the satisfaction of the people and the sound of their praise spreading afar will be worth 1,000 taels, why should the magistrate begrudge a little money and avoid buying such goods? The Next Step Is to Winnow Grain to Determine the Quantity of Husked Grain and to Count the Number of Starving Households to Decide the Actual Number of Those Who Are to Be Provided with Relief. No matter how much grain there is, what can be eaten by men is husked grain, not the skin of grain or empty ears or chaff. Since the grain supplied by the provincial government and the Naval Command [T’ongyŏng] is full of empty ears and chaff, the quantity of the rice for relief is nothing but an...

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