To Chief Minister Li Du of the Salt and Iron Office — the second鹽鐵李都相公 第二
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 · 132 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.
Each time I unworthily receive his honored letter, he sends down empty praise. That Zhou Yi should be named level with Yue Guang is surely a thing to hold shame for, and that Han Fei should be handed down in one record with Lao Dan is truly beyond hoping. My thanks for his grace grow keener, and my fear and my awe grow deeper. I humbly consider that the Chief Minister is like the sword of Song that leans against the sky and the halberd of Lu that stayed the sun. He holds a heavy charge a second time, and the feeling of the many is greatly satisfied. I reckon that Hai Ruo will lean his heart toward him and make wide and rich the profit of the boiling pans, and that the mountain spirits will lend their strength and help complete the work of smelting and casting. He will set the wooden oxen and the gliding horses to work, and in the end they will carry past a thousand and beyond ten thousand. The spending of the state will look at once for plenty to spare, and the plans of the ancestral hall will bring peace and order while he sits. The sincerity of serving the king diligently rests with me alone. I humbly beg that he keep and guard himself, and so comfort my prayers at the shrine. The rest of the feeling of one below is set out already in my earlier letter, and so on.