A memorial thanking him for an increase in the stipend謝加料錢狀
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 · 129 Chinese characters · reading time 0.5 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: today a certain officer conveyed your order. Twenty strings of stipend money are to be added each month. My official salary already soaks me richly, and my allowance for books is more than ample. The ram's horns are not thin, and a mole's belly is easily filled. My one worry is that such good fortune is too full, and that so deep a favor is hard to repay. How could I have reckoned that, when my brush tip lacks the words of the white phoenix and I have nothing to offer day by day, the bottom of my purse should gain the art of the green duck and grow fuller month by month? I hold only the heart of one standing at the edge of a ravine, and fear that my strength for carrying a mountain will fail. I wish only to spare something from the food set out in my poor lane, and share it to relieve my parents in their distant home, so that they may be moved together by your generous favor, and it may be handed down long in a far country. Should it ever turn into idle spending, I shall surely bring a hidden punishment on myself. My humble heart cannot bear the fullness of its gratitude for your kindness, its dread, and its weeping.