To Minister of Works Shi of Xusi, sending gifts徐泗時司空
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) · 2 passages · 97 Chinese characters · reading time 0.4 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.
Of the above, I humbly consider that with a white silk sash and a ramie robe the history of Lu put first the place each came from, and that throwing a peach and being repaid with a plum was used in the odes of Zhou to show that two men knew each other. Speak long of the plants at the pond's edge: how should they yield to the treasure of langgan jade? The point is to guard against a lapse in the rites, and to value only the setting out of sincerity. The goods above are called what the soil affords, but they come only as a ripple reaching out, and they are truly shamed by anything splendid. Still more, they are very few and small. It is hard to take eight lines and write out in full the words that carry the heart. I lean on a single messenger and set out this slight ceremony of something held in the hand. I humbly ask that of his kindness he look them over and receive them. And so on.