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To Minister of Works Shi Pu of Xuzhou — the third徐州時溥司空 第三

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 · 227 Chinese characters · reading time 0.9 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.

1Like the bird that did not fly for three years and then became a hegemon

特辱長牋。俯傳大捷。誘賊將而暗除梟帥。剗群兇而遍戢豺聲。夫何壯哉。誠可畏也。且黃巢謂逃天得計。乃揆日偸生。書罪則竹乏南山。流惡則浪乾東海。逞暴於鋸牙鉤爪。挺災於金闕玉京。煙氛所侵。塗炭皆匝。諸道遞相逗撓。別自侜張。驅兵而未暇搴旗。喪律而先聆返旆。養姦旣久。翫寇何安。若非司空以當春滋雨露之恩。則坐迎龍節。及初夏順雷霆之怒。則立展豹韜。遂得纔發銳師。果殲窮寇。刷國家之積憤。弭州縣之餘殃。所謂三年不飛。終當一戰而霸。況可飮頭而快意。何須擢髮以論辜。有以見報聖天子之恩。固須待擧眞將軍之令。幸聯仁境。先聽好音。欣抃欽矚。翰墨何寄云云

He has honored me with a long letter and bent down to tell of a great victory. He drew out the bandit generals and quietly did away with their owl chief. He cut down the crowd of villains and hushed the howling of the jackals everywhere. How mighty a thing this is. It is truly to be held in awe. Huang Chao thought that in fleeing heaven he had found a good plan, and so he counted out his days and stole a life for himself. Were his crimes written down, there would not be bamboo enough on the Southern Mountain. Were his evil poured out, the waves would dry up the Eastern Sea. With saw teeth and hooked claws he gave his violence free rein, and he raised disaster at the golden gate towers and the jade capital. Wherever his smoke and his vapor came, mud and charcoal closed in all around. The circuits held back one after another, and each deceived on its own account. They drove their troops out and had no time to pull down a banner. They lost the rules of war, and word of returning colors came first. The wicked had been nursed a long while. How could there be peace while the bandits were toyed with? Had the Minister of Works not swelled the grace of rain and dew when spring came, and sat to receive the dragon tally, and had he not followed the wrath of the thunder at the start of summer, and stood to spread out the art of war, he could never have sent forth his keen troops so soon, destroyed the cornered bandits as he did, washed away the anger stored up in the state, and stilled the disaster left over in the provinces and counties. It is as the saying goes: he did not fly for three years, and one battle made him a hegemon in the end. Since he may drink from the skull and take his fill of satisfaction, what need is there to pull out the hairs one by one to count that man's guilt? In this one sees that to repay the grace of the sage Son of Heaven, he must indeed wait until the order of a true general is given. I am fortunate to lie next to a humane border and to hear the good news first. My joy and my clapping, my reverence and my gazing, how could brush and ink carry them? And so on.

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