Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 17 — Reports to the Throne

Poem recording his virtue — the Bearer of the Gilded Mace七言紀德詩 執金吾

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 · 28 Chinese characters · reading time 0.1 min

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.

1His heart, bent on setting the ruler right, is never idle for a moment

一陣風雷定八蠻。來趨雲陛悅天顔。王孫仕宦多榮貴。心爲匡君不暫閒。

With one burst of wind and thunder he settled the eight Man tribes. He hurried to the cloud-high steps and gladdened the emperor's face. The offices of the royal grandson have brought him much honor and rank, yet his heart, bent on setting the ruler right, is never idle for a moment.