To Qin Yan of Hezhou — to one who sent five hundred sheep和州秦彦
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 · 83 Chinese characters · reading time 0.3 min
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 12 — Dispatches 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.
A notice to Minister Qin Yan. Your envoy arrived and I received your letter, and with it you sent five hundred sheep. Your diligent sincerity is unfolded in this, and the number is truly large. It is what is meant by "Your sheep come, and I cherish the rite in it." Still more, though you have had the glory of raising the sparrowhawk banner, you have been able to follow the example of the hung-up fish. Far off you carry a name for honesty and care, and deeply you take up a government that soothes and settles. And now you unfold your earnest sincerity besides, so that my praise is doubled. Since there is no fear of a ram butting the fence, put your strength into the merit of bearing the whip. I send this back with your envoy and cannot set it all out.
Interlinear notes 1
"The hung-up fish" refers to Yang Xu of the Later Han, who hung up a fish he had been given and took no more, refusing bribes. — translator