Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 14 — Notices

Dispatch making Xu Mei sole warden of the liquor monopoly office徐莓充榷酒務專知

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 · 68 Chinese characters · reading time 0.3 min

Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 14 — 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.

1Seek the profit of Dukang to keep the army supplied

牒奉處分。前件官。發跡戎行。硏心吏道。忠勤所至。幹濟可觀。今則擧漢代之權宜。搜杜康之利潤。贍吾軍用。藉爾公才。旣非若處先登。無與衆人皆醉。事須差句當天長縣榷酒務。

This dispatch carries out the decision handed down. The officer named above set out on his path in the ranks of the army, and has ground his mind on the way of the clerk. Wherever his loyalty and diligence reach, his skill in getting things done is worth seeing. Now the expedient measure of the Han age is taken up, and the profit of Dukang is sought, to keep our army supplied. For that we lean on your public talent. This is not a case of being first up the wall, so do not get drunk along with the crowd. This matter must be sent as a charge of the liquor monopoly office of Tianchang county.

Interlinear notes 1

若 is taken as "you." It can also be read as "like," giving "it is not like being first up the wall." — translator