Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 12 — Dispatches

To Qiwu Ping, administrative assistant for the farm colonies at Chuzhou — entrusting him with the provisions of the Shunguo army楚州營田判官綦毋蘋

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 · 98 Chinese characters · reading time 0.4 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.

1Confucius too served as a keeper of stores, and Xiao He too served as a merit clerk

報綦毋評事。夫欲均調兵食。固須妙選公才。供億旣多。料量非易。評事自匡郡政。甚洽物情。剸割而案無滯詞。淬磨而筆有餘刃。今委兼判順國軍粮料擧牒同封寄往。孔聖猶爲委吏。蕭何亦作功曹。唯託幹能。無辭猥屑。欲令小人懷惠。佇看君子勞心。悉之。

A notice to Case Reviewer Qiwu. If one would balance out troops and their food, he must indeed make a fine choice of a man of public talent. What has to be supplied is already much, and the reckoning of it is not easy. Since you set the prefecture's government straight, you have suited the feeling of the place very well. You cut through a matter, and no case is left with a word stuck in it. You whet your blade, and your brush has an edge to spare. Now I entrust to you the reckoning of provisions for the Shunguo army as well, and I send the warrant of appointment sealed in the same packet. Confucius the sage was still a keeper of stores, and Xiao He too was a merit clerk. I rely on your competence alone. Do not decline the work as petty and small. I would have the small people hold your kindness in mind, and I wait to see a gentleman spend the labor of his heart. Know it all.