Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 13 — Notices

Dispatch making Zheng Shou, former registrar of Yingshang county, acting vice magistrate of Shengtang前潁上縣主薄鄭綬攝盛唐縣丞

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 · 106 Chinese characters · reading time 0.4 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.

1The vice magistrate: greedy chiefs dread him, crafty clerks take their rule from him

牒奉處分。凡城一邑。皆列六曹。雖云具體而微。豈可從心所欲。況縣丞之佐理也。貪長憚其糾摘。猾吏稟其規程。苟能自強。何患不立。前件官。康成求己。季智奉公。曾申潁上之勤勞。遂見渭陽之論擧。桓譚貳政。且宜肅彼奸豪。殷浩吟詩。無用傷其貧賤。事須差攝壽州盛唐縣丞。

This dispatch carries out the decision handed down. Every walled town of a district sets out the six sections. Though one may say the form is complete but small, can a man simply follow what his heart desires? Still more, the vice magistrate assists the governing. A greedy chief dreads his censure, and a crafty clerk takes his standard from him. If a man can strive of himself, why should he fear that he will not stand? The officer named above seeks within himself as Kangcheng did, and serves the public as Jizhi did. Once he set out his diligent labor at Yingshang, and so the recommendation of his mother's kin was seen. As Huan Tan took second place in the government, he should first bring the wicked and the overbearing to order. As Yin Hao chanted his poems, there is no need to grieve over poverty and low station. This matter must be a dispatch making him acting vice magistrate of Shengtang county in Shouzhou.