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) · 2 passages · 113 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.
1Scarlet gauze, purple twill, yellow twill, and the rest
As to the above: I received your benevolent kindness, and you specially granted the bolts of cloth named above. Sunset clouds spread out their phoenix threads, and snow is piled up in mermaid-woven gauze. Undeservedly you shared out what was left of the crimson curtain and let me change the trimming of my coarse robe. I have not learned the artful talk of Wang Ni, yet all at once I have undeservedly taken the rare honor of Lu Zhi. I am ashamed only that the form of a mole cricket or an ant does not match the poem on the mayfly. I wish only to press on with the discipline of eating bark and drinking ice, and so repay the kindness that puts me in red and trails purple behind me. My humble heart cannot bear the fullness of its gratitude, its fear, and its tears. I respectfully present this memorial to give thanks. Respectfully submitted.