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 · 112 Chinese characters · reading time 0.4 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.
1Wishing good care of himself to one who leads his troops in person
I learn that he leads his troops in person and has gone far off to the war, that he treads over mountains and rivers and braves the frost and the dew. I do not know how his honored health has been these last days. The daylight hurries on, the year withers, and the power of the cold makes all things stern. His orders run through the ranks below him, and they forget every wound of chapped and frostbitten skin. His repute stands high within the realm, and he is about to save men from the trouble of their sores and their scars. Surely the hundred spirits will offer him blessing and the seven picked guards will bring his work to success. He will carry the high name of Marshal Xi far abroad and take up close at hand the mighty strategy of Guo of Fenyang. Then he will melt away the baleful vapors and bring the whole people back to life. Everyone who has a heart in him stretches his neck and looks toward him. I beg him to take good care of himself always and to answer soon the prayers offered for him. This is what my distant sincerity hopes for, and so on.