To Chief Minister Xiao Gou of the Historiography Office史館蕭遘相公
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 · 161 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.
1Thanks for the release of the salt pans and for a rise in office
Day after day I have no toil to show, and yet heaven sends down the light of favor. Though rain and dew are always even and do not refuse to moisten things, hill and mountain grow heavy by degrees, and I cannot set my person at ease. Still more, the Chief Minister has seen that I stand alone in the sage court and walk the straight way with diligence. From afar he bent down his shelter and kept me from sinking away. He opened the great furnace and honored me with the thick gift of casting and molding; then he wielded a colored brush and troubled it with fair words that carve and paint, saying, "In motion he has success, and before him is no strong enemy. He soothes and quiets the land of Huai and stills the smoke and the dust. One after another he sets forth the rite of offering the produce of his land, and from afar he sheds the earnestness of one who gazes at the clouds." So at last I rose in honor to the painted hall, and the salt pans were loosed for me in particular, and the kindness of a fief in the ranks was added again, and still the place of commanding troops was lent me. Looking up at the splendid brush and looking down to weigh my common stuff, I have not been able to end the calamity of many ramparts; with what do I steal the fame of a Great Wall of the realm? I look only to spur myself and to repay a little the kindness that bore and reared me. Before I can bow and give thanks, my heart holds his benevolence the more keenly, and so on.