Dispatch making Liu Xiaorang acting magistrate of Qingliu county in Chuzhou柳孝讓攝滁州淸流縣令
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 · 134 Chinese characters · reading time 0.5 min
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 13 — Notices 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.
1Better than the flowers of Heyang and the willows of Pengze
This dispatch carries out the decision handed down. When the present age praises the great officers of a town, it often takes the flowers of Heyang and the willows of Pengze for the mark of a fine gentleman. But to speak long on the highest principle, I do not hold with this. Only a man who looks on the people as if they were wounded, who keeps himself clean and so takes office, who can hold the temper of ice and bitter bark and far outshine that name of flowers and willows — such ability is truly rare, and it answers my intent. The officer named above is a descendant of Zhan Qin, with the governing skill of Yan Yan. Once he was magistrate of Jiyin and brought peace to the towns under it. Long he leaned on the frontier by the river and quietly kept a poor dwelling. Through several years, though his food was very lean, on the straight way he never once changed his principle. Now he shall be tried in every task, and a vacant post is lent to him. Let him raise no noisy blame of the magpies, and let him strive to master the art of driving chickens. This matter must be a dispatch making him acting magistrate of Qingliu county in Chuzhou.