To Chief Minister Wang Hui of the Tax Office租庸王徽相公
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) · 1 passages · 133 Chinese characters · reading time 0.5 min
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 7 — Enclosures 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.
1On his receiving the charge of guarding the palace
I bow and look upon the imperial writ. He has received a favored command in honor, and I bow low in thanks and gladness. I humbly consider that when the ruler of ten thousand chariots travels abroad, the hardest thing is to stay behind and take charge of affairs, and that what the hundred officers lean upon belongs truly to the one who holds the net cords. Still more, at the time when the carriage turns back, the rite of cleansing the palace is held the weightier, so that to receive this favored trust rests truly with the worthy and the able. The Minister of Works, in stillness, holds within him a talent of rare reach, and in motion he wields a blade with edge to spare. In the work of repaying his ruler and settling the people he was early the first among the high offices, and his name for binding the wicked and mowing down abuses already matches the talk of the crowd. Now the cuckoo names the office and the hawk and the falcon raise their power. Within, the dust of the royal carriage is cleared; without, the land of the passes and the capital region is made stern. The sage ruler's new command entrusts the middle way to him for long, and the old statutes of the Colonel of the Guard wait to see the great rite. I have unworthily received his care and his encouragement, and my joy and my applause are truly deep, and so on.