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 · 132 Chinese characters · reading time 0.5 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.
1Consoling one who was driven out by his own soldiers
I consider quietly that the bandits are not yet wiped out and that the soldiers are often arrogant. Whoever is called a prefect finds governing truly hard. Even if those above are in accord and those below in harmony, what is right in the morning is wrong by evening. Still more so when fortune comes by chance and disaster cannot be measured. If only a man has no shame even in the darkest corner of his own room, how could that burden the grace of the state? Now you were keen in serving the public good and were not careless in soothing your men. Though there was alarm and disorder, in the end you escaped injury. There is reason to see that you governed without private interest and that you had room to spare when benevolence fell to you. I have heard that you have already left the Si River and are only now reaching the hills of the Huai. Holding your letter and reading it, I find that you humbly take the past fault upon yourself. How could I ever set aside or forget my admiration? Then the prefect who hung up the fish has carried on the integrity of the ancients, and the old man of the frontier who lost his horse may ease the heart of one who understands. And so on.