Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 17 — Reports to the Throne
Poem recording his virtue — Panxi七言紀德詩 磻溪
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 17 — Reports to the Throne 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 traces of his writing carved in stone are wondrous
刻石書蹤妙入神。一廻窺覽一廻新。況能早遂王師業。桃李終成萬代春。
The traces of his writing carved in stone are so fine that they enter the divine. Each time one looks at them, they are new again. How much more, since he early fulfilled the work of the royal army: his peaches and plums will at last make a spring of ten thousand ages.
Interlinear notes 1
伏覩相公磻溪詩云。及到王師身已老。不知辛苦爲何人。又經虢縣詩云。手栽桃李十餘春。今日經過重建勳。
I bow and read his lordship's poem on Panxi, which says, "When the royal army came at last, the body was already old; I do not know for whom all the hardship was borne." And his poem on passing Guo county says, "The peaches and plums I planted with my own hand have seen ten springs and more; today I pass by, and merit is set up once again."