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 · 134 Chinese characters · reading time 0.5 min
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 9 — 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.
On the sixteenth day of this month Collator Pei arrived. I humbly received his deep recollection of his former kindness and his putting far away the words that had gone astray. He bestowed a glorious letter upon me and honored me with fine gifts. His feeling is thick as carving and painting, and there is nothing in his words that is not praise beyond my worth; the matter is bound up with cutting and polishing, and it is plainly the kindness of one who loves and forgets. I have received much from him already, and forever it is keen in me to hold his understanding in my mouth. I do not know how his honored body has been since the intercalary autumn came in. I humbly imagine the cicadas crying in the evening light and the cranes calling in the clear sky, the long stream below his tower that watches the fame of his rule and does not rest, the far peaks within his window that draw out his thought for poetry without end. I humbly ask that in the leisure left him from serving his parents at table, and in the pause when he withdraws from office, he guard and cherish himself with care and await the summons of favor. Long ago I wished to hold on to Ji Kang, and of late I have received the goodness of Zheng Xuan. I pray deeply and gaze toward him, and the feeling of one beneath him is more than I can bear. And so on.