Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 17 — Reports to the Throne
Poem recording his virtue — the stele for the recovered city七言紀德詩 收城碑
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.
1It will not rot, standing level with the bronze pillar
功業已標征北賦。威名初建鎭南碑。終知不朽齊銅柱。況是儒宗綴色絲。
His merit and his work were marked long since in the rhapsody on the northern campaign. His awesome name has now first raised the stele that holds down the south. In the end it will not rot, standing level with the bronze pillar, and how much more, since a master of the scholars has woven words of rare beauty.
Interlinear notes 2
碑今度支裵僕射撰詞
The text of the stele was composed by Vice Director Pei of the Revenue Ministry.
"Colored silk" comes from the riddle on the Cao E stele—yellow silk is colored silk, which writes the graph for "surpassing"—and so means writing of the highest excellence. — translator