fertility of soils in the area compared to those in the southern part of Korea, poor weather conditions at the time, which led to partial crop failure, and high-interest rates on loans extracted despite the poor harvest. Particularly high de facto tax rates for more well-off landowners. These took the form of grain funds and monetary loans, which had to be paid back at high-interest rates. Cross-border trade policies and taxes on imported goods from China negatively impacted Pyeongan merchants. Signs and prophetic works, particularly the Jeonggamnok, foretold that the Joseon (Yi) dynasty would fall and be replaced by a new, more just dynasty. Rivalries among the yangban were triggered by government policies to encourage or force movements of yangban from the south to Pyongan Province to better integrate it into the Joseon political fabric. However, this policy stoked tensions between the established yangban organizations and the newly arrived yangban. Discrimination against high-level civil service examination passers from Pyongan Province at the Joseon court. Sun Joo Kim favored this last cause (Discrimination against those from Pyongan Province) as the primary cause. She noted key evidence for this conclusion was the manifesto posted by the rebels in the early stage of the rebellion, which begins: Another scholar of the rebellion, Anders Karlsson, disagreed with this assessment and offered counterarguments. He noted that in his view, the manifesto, written in classical Chinese, would have been incomprehensible to the predominately uneducated army or even most of its leaders. He suggested that perhaps its primary purpose was to legitimize the rebellion and seek the support of those members of the educated elite that had not already joined the rebels. His work emphasized the importance of the ideologies espoused in the prophetic works. However, in the end, he concludes that the relative importance of the various potential causes remains an unanswered question. Basic arguments for the revolution These factors drove Hong Gyeong-Rae to travel extensively to find auspicious sites for his clientele. They helped him understand their discontents and spread a revolutionary ideology. He relied on two basic arguments to gain supporters for the revolution: 1. The Confucian precept that the hardships in the lives of the people and the natural disasters that had recently occurred were a sign/result of the withdrawal of the Mandate of Heaven from the ruling dynasty. Government corruption and events such as famine, winter lightning, and earthquakes were linked to