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 · 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.
1A purpose to be diligent in tribute in a troubled season
I privately consider that the ways of the world change easily and the affairs of the time are hard to speak of. Men float along and find their own ease in the water, and the whole realm is one surging flood. Though Dong Zhuo's great belly is already alight and the crowd cries out for joy, yet if Huan Yi has a loyal soul he answers in secret with wailing. Whenever I look into the rule of armies, I stir a stout plan for nothing. Now the great carriage has not turned back and the outer domains have many troubles. Those who take profit plan only to enrich their houses; of those who hold soldiers, who understands how to cleanse the palace? This circuit is short of supply, and yet it is diligent in tribute alone. It wishes for an early return of the imperial carriage, and it is hard to lean for nothing upon the levy carts. The reason for what is divided and held, and the directing of it, lie here. I surely hope he will look with a clear mirror and see deeply into this humble sincerity. For the rest I shall send a man at once, and hope to set it out in a later letter, and so on.