Dispatch putting Zang Huan in charge of the Yancheng directorate臧澣知鹽城監事
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 · 149 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. If an office holds no straight way, then profit finds many doors. Everyone who has served his term at the salt pans may build there the means to enrich his house. But that a man should go into work so heavy and pressing and keep his purity and restraint, so that the judgment of his heart takes on no grease and the blade of his wisdom can part the hip from the thigh — such words I have heard before, but I have rarely seen the man. The officer named above dresses his mind in elegance and calm, and ties up his duties with clarity and diligence. He has long held the monopoly quota of Youquan, and has followed only the rule of knowing when to stop and be content. His rest and replacement are not far off, and his merit can be proven. If he draws once more on being tried in every task, he will surely carry through what is heavy and hard. Let him spread his talent in the district of the near directorate, and keep his principle in the land where salt is made. There is no need to face the snow in the air and chant the poem of Xie Lang. It is only under the words for boiling the waves that one sees the rhapsody of Zhang Rong. This matter must be an appointment as inspector for the grain sales commissioner, with charge of the Yancheng directorate.