A statement presenting vessels of gold and silver進金銀器物狀
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) · 2 passages · 119 Chinese characters · reading time 0.5 min
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 5 — Memorials to the Throne 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.
For the above: your servant humbly considers that the smoke and dust are about to settle, yet the roads still give cause for worry. I am always ashamed of the honor of holding the axe, and I have often left empty the rite of presenting treasure. What I can set forth as distant tribute is only a light load. The gold vessels and silver vessels named above were changed in substance by the sifting of sand and parted in shape by the casting of gravel. Though I am ashamed that they are easily filled, they rest for now on the merit of receiving while empty. I truly dare to exhaust my heart for crossing the waves and climbing the peaks, and to help on the good omen of the unicorn's hoof and the horse's hoof. In offering gold of three kinds I only set forth in vain what the land makes fitting. I look toward the ninefold palace, yet I have not fulfilled my wish to attend at court. How could my feeling for your grace ever reach its end? My longing for my sagely ruler is diligent, and nothing more. I now send the Staff Officer Wang Qian to present these with this statement. Respectfully presented.