To Lu Chuan — fifteen merits in keeping Wuning county safe盧傳
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 · 145 Chinese characters · reading time 0.6 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.
1The descendants of dukes and marquises will surely recover their beginning
A notice to Lu Chuan. Minister Pei, Director of the Palace Administration, has arrived at Hongzhou. The officers, the common people, the monks, and the Daoists of Wuning county have set out in a letter fifteen merits of yours in fighting the bandit host before and after and in keeping the county town whole. I read the facts closely, and comfort and content filled my heart. Does the Zuo zhuan not say, "The descendants of dukes and marquises will surely recover their beginning"? You have leaned on the blessings left over from your forebears and have not been slack in cultivating yourself. From the moment you met a time of danger you raised up your valiant conduct, called out a righteous force at a single shout, and struck at the fierce crowd on four sides. You two brothers raised the cry of righteousness together, and so a worn-out people came to have something to lean upon. The Surveillance Commissioner marked you, and you first took up the authority over a hundred li and soon borrowed the charge of the six articles. Where loyalty reaches, a favoring command is not far off. Strive to be careful from first to last, and plan your wealth and honor on firm ground. As for the recommendation you hope for, I shall certainly not let it slip from mind. Know it all.