Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 10 — Enclosures

To Minister of Works Zhou Bao of Zhexi, with congratulations on the winter solstice浙西周寶司空

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 · 68 Chinese characters · reading time 0.3 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.

1Congratulations on the winter solstice

伏以禮慶履長。傳標視朔。夷夏契混同之運。乾坤叶交泰之期。伏惟司空相公浙水流恩。吳山變俗。旣睹趙衰之日。永洽物情。願親傅說之星。早環帝座。末由拜賀。但切禱祈云云。

I humbly consider that the rites celebrate the lengthening day and the record marks the watching of the new moon. The Yi and the Xia meet in a fortune that joins them as one, and heaven and earth accord with the season of peace and exchange. I humbly consider that the Minister of Works lets his kindness flow through the waters of Zhe and changes the customs of the hills of Wu. Having already seen the sun of Zhao Cui, he satisfies the feeling of all things forever. May he draw near the star of Fu Yue and soon circle the emperor's seat. I have no way to bow and offer congratulations, and only pray the more earnestly. And so on.