Text for the sacrifice to the officers and men who fell in battle at Chuzhou祭楚州陣亡將士文
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 · 112 Chinese characters · reading time 0.4 min
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 16 — Funerary Texts 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.
You followed the army on the foot-long roll and repaid the country with an inch of heart. In lambskin coat and warrior's trim you were already named for your strength, and with the horsehide for your grand design you gave your bodies early. Then the brood out of Xuzhou came to invade the territory of Chuzhou. The bold spirit that would strike at the throat was not yet stretched out when the bitter cry of defeat rose all at once. At first you were seen shouldering the spear and taking your ranks, and then instead you fell to the arrows and made your rows. Yet your merit can be named, and though you died you do not rot. Among you were gentlemen like Lang Shen; there was no small man like Yang Zhen. In days past you held righteousness heavy and life light and did not seek to live at any cost. Today your name lives and your body is lost; why store up any lingering grief? If your souls have knowledge, let each of you partake of this thin libation.