The king caused the erection of great store-houses in the various parts of the country for the storage of rice to be used in time of famine. The students in the Confucian school were encouraged by gifts of clothes and food, and several were sent to China to prosecute their studies. In 987 the soldiers’ implements of war were beaten into agricultural implements, especially in the country districts. A second trial was made of liberating slaves but without satisfactory results. It made those that were not freed so arrogant that the attempt was given up. A further invasion was made into the territory of priest-craft by the discontinuance of certain important festivals, but the fact that the law against the killing of any animal in the first, fifth or ninth moons was still in active force shows that Buddhism was still a powerful factor in the national life. Kyöng-ju, the ancient capital of Sil-la, was made the eastern capital of the kingdom, a merely honorary distinction.
The annals state that this reign beheld the inauguration of the humane custom of remitting the revenues, in part or in whole, in times of famine, also the custom of the king sending medicine to courtiers who might be ill.
The growing power of Kitan in the north was a cause of uneasiness for we find that in 989 the whole north-east border was thoroughly garrisoned. The time was approaching when this half-savage tribe would add another proof that conquest is usually from the cooler to the warmer climate.
During the commotion incident upon the founding of the dynasty and the extinction of the kingdom of Sil-la, the bureau of history had been largely neglected. Now it was reorganized and the annals of the kingdom were put in proper shape.
The king was apparently trying to steer a middle course between Buddhism and Confucianism, for the pen of the annalist records that no animals were to be killed on the king’s birthday, and in the next stroke that wives were to be rewarded for unusual virtue, and again that the king went out of the city to meet an envoy bringing the great Buddhistic work, Tă-jang-gyŭng, from China, and still again that the first ancestral temple was erected. Well would it have been could this equilibrium have been maintained.