To General Xi Gongfu, Protector of the Army — the second護軍郄公甫將軍 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 · 143 Chinese characters · reading time 0.6 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.
1A plea to stop the memorial the people would send up
You have sent down your favor and honored me beyond measure with words of praise. I learn quietly that the officers and the officials, the three armies and the common people, have together set out many petitions and asked that a memorial go up to the throne. They say, "Smoke and dust rise of themselves in the four suburbs, and mire and charcoal are spread over the nine wilds, yet only in the land beneath the Dipper and the Ox is there little disaster of war horses." This is truly what the lot of this land has drawn down, and Heaven's heart has sheltered it. It is the good fortune of the people. What merit or effort of mine is in it? How could I have foreseen that the General would listen too readily to the many voices, help bring this fine thing about, mean to take the trouble of writing it up for the throne, and graciously send word of it? But to lure the feelings of the many with clumsy governance, and to intrude upon the sage gaze with empty words, is not to be allowed, and is truly more than I can bear. I humbly ask that you lay the memorial aside for good and not let it call down the slander that follows office. That would be the same as receiving a gift. I do not dare to speak falsely. I humbly ask that you grant this and look into it. And so on.