Letter of thanks for the winter solstice allowance謝冬至節料狀
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 · 101 Chinese characters · reading time 0.4 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: I received your benevolent kindness, and you specially granted the holiday allowance named above. I bow and consider: I have undeservedly lodged under the roof of your virtue, and I feel no shame in a foreign land. Across ten thousand li of blue waves I do regret that news from the east is cut off. Yet in the three months of winter, when the sun is dear, I was glad at least to greet the day of the solstice. How could I have reckoned that your honored kindness would send down a generous gift besides? The jade-like grain came from ears that grew paired, and the frosty flour from stalks that forked in two. I need not trouble myself with talk of chewing great mouthfuls. What I hold in mind instead is the care of being caught by the "sage" — the clear wine. I do not know how to repay such kindness or requite such virtue. I know only how to eat my fill and chant in my cups. My humble heart cannot bear the fullness of its awe and dread. Respectfully submitted.