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 · 82 Chinese characters · reading time 0.3 min
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 18 — Letters and Reports 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.
As to the above: though my will is to seek within myself, my skill does not reach that of other men. I have received the benevolence of His Excellency the Grand Commandant. His benevolence put flesh on my shattered bones, and took an addled egg under its wing until it hatched. It is hard to dress this out in a scrap of speech or a single word. I can only set out roughly how his virtue moves me and how I hold his favor in my heart. Now I have long stored up a bloody sincerity, and I dare to lean upon brush and paper. I take the cauldron gladly first, and look up and sully your banners and standards. I have respectfully drawn up a long letter to lay the matter out. My humble heart cannot bear the fullness of its trembling and burning. I bow and beg that you will especially be lenient with my offense and its punishment, and stoop to consider and look into it. Respectfully submitted.