Letter sending a gift at the Duanwu festival — one woven saddle cloth端午節送物狀 織成鞍㡤一條
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 · 136 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.
The above. I humbly consider that the late shade is about to settle and that the good festival has come of a sudden. We meet the benevolent season of heaven and earth, and we look on the happy land between the Yangtze and the Huai. I humbly consider that the Grand Commandant answers to the fortune of five hundred years and takes eight thousand years for a single spring. He looks up and aids the warm wind, and he raises high the dreaded sun. He has no leisure for the labor of crossing the Lu, yet he completes of himself the plan that sets Han right. I stand unworthily among the lowest officers, and I should set out a small courtesy. In the saddle cloth named above the mandarin duck loom has offered its skill, and beast-figured brocade has made its splendor. It will rest the shadow of a wind-chasing horse, or lend its light to what shines on the ground. I humbly wish that the saddle may help the joy of a hundred blessings long at peace, and that the cloth may show the sincerity with which the four quarters follow and submit. In trespassing on your high dignity, my humble heart cannot bear the fullness of its praying, its dread, and its earnest stirring. I humbly beg you to bend down and receive it. Respectfully submitted.