Queen Seon Deok, Episode 39 and taxation

In Episode 38, Mishil's faction had cornered the staple items on the market, inflating prices in the hopes of impoverishing the small farmers. Princess Deokman released some of the military provisions, and started the rumor mill that more grains would flood the market, lowering the prices again. Mishil's faction, in hopes of cutting their losses, start selling back the grains, losing out to Princess Deokman.

Princess Deokman buys back the grains for the military provisions at half the price, having made a good profit which she invests in well made farming equipment. At this point, Deokman and Mishil have their regular repartee during which Mishil says that Deokman's unconventional strategies can't be used continuously. Deokman tells Mishil that there is something she doesn't understand: Mishil is outstandingly perceptive, a cunning thinker, and skilled in all the ways a leader should be, yet in all the time that Mishil has led Shilla, why hasn't Shilla progressed?

Although they've lost one round, Mishil and her family are determined not to lose the next one. An opportunity comes up during the harvest season when taxes are the heaviest, particularly near Angang Fortress where insects have blighted the harvest. Despite the millet harvest only being half the usual amount, Hojong (Mishil's son) taxes the same amount, triggering a riot. Princess Deokman goes to Angang to broker a compromise in which she would return the taxes along with wasteland and equipment as a low-interest loan if the people will cultivate the wasteland. The people agree.

Princess Deokman thinks that all has gone well and returns to Sorabol...where she is greeted by Sowha with the bad use that the people around Angang Fortress has fled with the farming equipment. Yu Shin rounds up the people, and Deokman returns to Angang to question the people as to why they fled when she had given them land and good equipment. The people reply that they don't know good steel from bad steel in farming equipment, that all they want is to live and that they don't care if they own the land or not. Deokman kills the village leaders.

This episode is much heavier on political strategies than most with little personal interaction except for that between Mishil and Deokman. The ending of the episode reflects the hard decisions a national leader must make. There's an interesting speech near the end by Deokman (another exchange with Mishil) in which she says that Mishil was never able to lead Shilla because she was a false mother taking care of someone else's baby, that any true leader of a nation would take care of the people, would explain to the people until they understood and would do everything for the people.

It should be mentioned that there are very few facts that are truly represented in Queen Seon Deok the drama. While there is talk that verges on democratic thoughts in this drama, I wonder if the historical Queen Seon Deok actually thought that way.