Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 20 — Enclosures

A separate letter sent up to the Grand Commandant上太尉別紙

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 · 87 Chinese characters · reading time 0.3 min

Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 20 — Enclosures 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.

1Sharing a ship with Kim Ingyu, the envoy of my home country

某啓。昨以鄕使金仁圭員外已臨去路。尙闕歸舟。懇求同行。仰候尊旨。伏蒙恩造俯允卑誠。今則共別淮城。齊登海艦。雖慙李郭之譽。免涉胡越之言。遠路無虞。不假琴高之術。巨川能濟。唯懷傅說之恩。下情無任感戀之至云云。

I submit this. The other day Vice Director Kim Ingyu, the envoy of my home country, was already at the point of setting out, but he still lacked a ship for the return. I earnestly asked to travel with him and looked up for your honored will. I humbly received your kindness, which bent down and granted my lowly sincerity. Now we take our leave together at Huaicheng and board the sea ship side by side. Though I am shamed before the repute of Li Ying and Guo Tai, I am spared the talk of Hu and Yue. There is no fear on the long road, and without borrowing the art of Qin Gao I can cross the great river. I hold only the kindness of Fu Yue. My humble heart cannot bear the fullness of its gratitude and longing. And so on.