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 · 128 Chinese characters · reading time 0.5 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.
I do not know how his honored health and his comings and goings have been since summer began. I picture the power of Zhao Dun, harsh as the summer sun, looking down in might upon the northern frontier, and the transforming manners of Yuan Hong helping the southern breeze from afar. Surely the nine commanderies hold his grace in their hearts and the hundred spirits offer him blessing. He holds a tally of white jade and stands in state as a great wall of ten thousand li. He has built a terrace of gold and opened wide the road of the worthy from the four quarters. How should this stop at answering the dream of the hanging thread? Of itself it goes beyond the glory of wearing brocade. I beg him to be exact and careful in his sleeping and his rising, to meet another patent of favor, to uphold a flourishing fortune forever, and to satisfy the feeling of the many. Now I send Zhuge Guoqing, borrowing a postal circuit to pay my respects. I am ashamed that I have not made up gifts good enough, and I fear besides that I may have let a fine man slip away. My distant sincerity has no limit. I set it out for each in a separate letter, and so on.