Yetgeul › Korea

Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden)桂苑筆耕集

Choe Chiwon · 886 (Tang, 6th year of the Zhonghe era · Silla, 12th year of King Heongang) · Korea · 366 pieces · 77,139 Chinese characters

A collection Choe Chiwon made by choosing out of the writings of his four years in the headquarters of Gao Pian, military commissioner of Huainan under the Tang, binding them into twenty volumes and presenting them to King Heongang of Silla in 886. It holds 366 pieces — memorials and reports sent up to the emperor, the proclamation denouncing Huang Chao, letters to the several military commissioners, orders and dispatches issued to those under him, Daoist and Buddhist texts for services, funeral offerings, records written for the outer wall of Chengdu and for a painting of Annam, and the reports and poems he sent up to Gao Pian. Here is the first report, which begins "I am a man of Silla," and the proclamation against Huang Chao with its line, "Not only do all the men of the world think to kill you openly; the ghosts under the earth have already discussed cutting you down in secret." The last volume holds the poems he made on the voyage home to the country he had left at twelve. It is the oldest collection by a Korean that survives, and when Hong Seokju and Seo Yugu printed it with movable type in 1834 they called it "the root and the beginning of the writing of our Eastern Country." Their two prefaces are translated with it.

Three prefaces and 366 pieces in twenty volumes, 436 paragraphs and 77,139 graphs, have all been translated. Wikisource marks this source text as 「many missing graphs」, so the thirteen places of missing graphs are left as □, and the thirty characters of underlining and collation marks an editor added ({{參}}, {{另}}, {{!}}) are not part of the source text and were cleared away. The ten pieces of volume 1 are posted as separate pages and were fetched separately, and their quotation marks were brought into line with the 「」 of the other volumes. The second and third letters sent to the same person, and the thirty poems of the Gideok series, are each counted as one piece, and the author's own notes attached to the titles were kept as notes on the first paragraph. The graph counts of the original against the source text, and of the source text against the translation, are all the same.

Book 20 — Poems
Book 20 — Funerary Texts
Book 20 — Enclosures
Book 20 — Reports to the Throne
Book 19 — Miscellaneous Letters
Book 19 — Reports and Enclosures
Book 18 — Letters and Reports
Book 17 — Reports to the Throne
Book 16 — Petitions
Book 16 — Records
Book 16 — Letters
Book 16 — Funerary Texts
Book 15 — Prayer Texts
Book 14 — Notices
Book 13 — Notices
Book 12 — Dispatches
Book 11 — Letters
Book 11 — Proclamations
Book 10 — Enclosures
Book 9 — Enclosures
Book 8 — Enclosures
Book 7 — Enclosures
Book 6 — Tang Reports
Book 5 — Memorials to the Throne
Book 4 — Memorials to the Throne
Book 3 — Reports
Book 2 — Memorials
Book 1 — Memorials
Preface