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 · 183 Chinese characters · reading time 0.7 min
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 19 — Miscellaneous Letters 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.
1The people of Shouzhou will live forever in a land of long life
At this time a sage Son of Heaven is above and a worthy chief minister is below. Yet those who are pushed forward for long-standing virtue and fine repute are only our lordship and the Director of the Palace Secretariat at Huatai, these two and no more. At first you, Attendant, quietly cut away the old abuses and held the commissioner's tally for a time. Our lordship reported the state of your rule and asked that you be made the true governor, and the emperor said, "So be it." Later you soothed and settled the customs of the commandery and shook out and made strict the might of the troops. The grand marshal recommended you as a man of bold talent and asked that you be made second in the vanguard, and the emperor again said, "So be it." So you have played with the seal and shared its honor, and you have split the tally and carried out the work of teaching. Within a month you reported your government and brought all the worn-out people back to life. Truly it may be said that the people of Shouzhou will live forever in a land of long life. This being so, that you, Attendant, have met the understanding of a worthy chief minister and entered into the use of a sage Son of Heaven, that you are martial and also civil, rich in talent and in the arts, is already spread abroad within the four seas. How should I dare to tell and sing of it point by point? What I pray and wish for now is that the blue canopy and the red pennon may draw your road ahead up high, and that a chief minister's tent and a general's altar may open out a fine place for you apart. If you say that I am not to be believed, the spirits will hear it.