To Academician Hou Zeng of the Hanlin Academy翰林侯䎖學士
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 · 121 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.
My talent and my plans were poor from the first and my merit and toil are very thin, and yet I have wrongly received the rich favor of the throne and have climbed again and again to splendid places. Now I am appointed to an office of old, and a real fief is added. I humbly received the Academician, who attended the ruler's regard in person and bent encouraging words upon me beyond my due. He troubled the colored brush of Guo Pu, so that my glory outshines carriage and cap, and he made the small vessel of Yiwu differ all at once from a peck measure. The meeting truly fits a hundred lifetimes; how should my carving of it be for one word alone? I hope only to lean upon that battle line of brushes and to temper my art of war once more, so that with the stout heart of Zhao Chongguo I may fulfill early my wish to go on campaign, and the plain stuff of the woman of Wuyan may escape shame before the kindness that carved and painted it. Bearing this upon my head, I am fearful, and I cannot bear my earnest care. I have no way to bow and give thanks; only my leaning and holding are keen, and so on.