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.
1Alone among the hundred fruits, the first to ripen
As to the above: Yu Gongchu, commissioner of the Central Army, respectfully conveyed your instruction, and I received the cherries named above. I bow and consider: under the three months of spring one first looks over the many flowers, and among the hundred fruits these alone boast of coming first. They gather the dew of the immortals and are fit to feed the phoenix. They take in the wind of your virtue and let the oriole hold them in its beak. So you had them picked from the high branches and shared out their lovely fruit. How could one of the lowest rank have looked for so deep a kindness? Holding them up, their color outdoes the duckweed fruit of Chu. Swallowing them, their taste makes light of the tangerines of Suzhou. Why should they be kept on a dish of red crystal? They are best set before a wine cup of white jade. Ten thousand beads ranged evenly are not a feast for the eyes alone. It is as though I had swallowed a single pill of medicine, and at once I feel my body grow light. My humble heart only grows the more grateful for your kindness. I respectfully present this memorial to give thanks. Respectfully submitted.