To Army Commissioner Tian Lingzi, sending vessels田令孜軍容送器物
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 · 85 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.
Of the above, I quietly consider that the foul vapors have not yet melted away and the roads are still blocked. Long have I failed to send a messenger of my own, and I convey only a little of my small sincerity. I always worry that distance keeps me from bringing things to him, and I dare not treat a great quantity as the precious thing. For the vessels above, the material was not hard to come by, and the vessels are easily filled. Though they are put to shame by the name of fine gold and pure iron, I wish them a place in the rank of his wine jars and goblets. So I send them as a gift, to show from afar that I lean upon him. I humbly ask that he not hang his mind on the four who know, but let his kindness flow in a single word of assent and receive them. And so on.