Dispatch appointing Li Zhaowang inspector of Fengguo李昭望充奉國巡官
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 · 151 Chinese characters · reading time 0.6 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.
This dispatch carries out the decision handed down. Long ago Confucius warned Boyu about learning and said, "His ancestors may not be worth praising, and his clan name may not be worth speaking of. Yet that a name flows down to later descendants — is this not what learning brings about?" If that is so, then ancestors and clan name are not only what an age honors. They are also what the sage held weighty. The officer named above is of the first rank among the gentry, and he tied on his seal cord at the central court. He was about to inherit the fragrance of the library when suddenly his tracks blew loose like tumbleweed. He fled far from the tiger's mouth, yet the courser's hoof was hobbled all the same. Now a single word declares him worthy, and three generations can be counted. The blazing clan of his mother's side shakes out a weighty name while sitting still. Drifting to a dwelling on the Huai frontier, he comes to seek a petty post. So here is an answer given like an echo, to try his talent. He knows already that each office has its own keeper. All that remains is to cultivate that virtue of his. This matter must be an appointment as inspector of Fengguo in the agricultural colony of Chuzhou.