To Jiang Yong, Director of the Bureau of Merit Assessment考功蔣泳郎中
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 · 146 Chinese characters · reading time 0.6 min
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 10 — 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.
You troubled a messenger of your own, and suddenly I was honored with your glorious letter. You bestowed on me praise fit for carriage and cap beyond my worth, and I shall keep it forever as a treasure in my kerchief box. I am truly ashamed before it. How should I dare to take benevolence as my own? As Director and Academician you withdrew for a time from hard days and chanced to wear yourself out in a sojourner's tracks. Now your office is pure and your bureau weighs merit, and your post stands high in the Hall of Assembled Immortals. In the Hall of the Unicorn's Tread you long attended the guests who drive the phoenix team, and on the steps of the dragon's head you unfold in person the talent that breathes forth phoenixes. Do you merely raise up the fine detail of the four virtues? Surely you also stand ready for the questions of the ninefold palace. You spread out brocade and embroidery, and you unfold and make clear the silken cords of the imperial word. So the writings of Yu, Xia, Shang, and Zhou walk again in this sage age. And the places of Xiao, Cao, Wei, and Bing — to whom else should they belong? How could you keep to the loneliness of the three paths, or fret over the steepness of a thousand mountains? You have allowed that you will come and call. I hope only to greet you with reverence. I humbly ask that in your private kindness you look into this.