To Minister of Works Shi Pu of Xuzhou — the second徐州時溥司空 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 · 157 Chinese characters · reading time 0.6 min
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 8 — 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.
1Congratulations on the victory that destroyed Huang Chao
The Minister of Works is a sharp weapon leaning on the sky, and his loyalty runs through the sun. When he hands down the rules of war, nothing he undertakes leaves a plan untried. When he trains his troops, every move brings success. Of late the cornered bandits fled in alarm, and his keen troops pressed the attack. He weighed the way of pursuing a fugitive as the unicorn annals tell it, and he spread out the moment for deciding victory as the art of war has it. He cut down the crowd of villains in quiet and took the head of the chief of the brigands in secret. Beside the county of Fan Dan a thunderous power rose and sent up the sound of a killing frost. By the mountain of the Ji clan the punishment of heaven showed the joy of a work announced complete. A great merit long held back has fallen at last to a mighty talent. It is as the saying goes: there must first be an extraordinary man, and then there are extraordinary deeds. The Marquis of Jiang and Guan Ying were also the fine men of one age, and Guan Yu and Zhang Fei did not owe their merit to generations of forebears. His name is carved on the golden cauldron and the jade bell, and his figure adorns the Cloud Terrace and the Lingyan Pavilion, the halls where portraits of merit hang. If one speaks of beauty brought to its full for all time, who would dare to claim a place before him? I am fortunate to border upon a neighbor of virtue and to follow the road of right with all my heart. My joy and my congratulation grow with every occasion, and they are truly unlike those of ordinary men, and so on.