禱雨救民 Pray for Rain Save Us
逐句解 Line by line
In the countryside they cheat the authorities, robbing and eating people to hold on to their own lives.
顧命 is to look to one's own life, to think only of surviving. The contrast with the previous line is the whole structure of the sentence: inside the walls people still fear the law and pawn their coats, and outside them the law has stopped applying.
For this reason we issue this notice, looking up in hope to the worthy and wise of all ten directions, to pray for rain and save the people.
仰望 is to look up in hope, and it is the word a petition uses when it addresses someone above the writer. 十方, the ten directions, is Buddhist: the eight compass points plus up and down, meaning everywhere there is.
Such kindness shall be richly repaid. We undertake to offer a thousand in gold by way of thanks, and this is no empty word.
千金, a thousand in gold, is the standard round figure for an enormous reward — nobody is counting actual coins. Remember the offer: Pilgrim is going to refuse it in very pointed terms, and the refusal is the hinge the whole chapter turns on.
This notice is hereby given.
A fixed formula that closes an official proclamation, roughly equivalent to the English legal let it be known. There is no way to translate it that sounds like anything a person would say, because it was never meant to.
The notice ends the way it began, in pure officialese — but the last thing it does before closing is make an offer, and that offer is a trap the prefect has laid for himself without knowing it.
A thousand in gold is what a government thinks a miracle costs. The chapter's entire argument is that this is precisely the wrong currency, and Pilgrim will say so within a few pages. The proclamation is sincere, generous, well-intentioned and aimed at completely the wrong target.
One small piece of typography is worth noticing: the blank space left before the word of respect. It is a physical courtesy, a bow made of white space, preserved in the text for six hundred years. The man who dictated this notice was scrupulous about form. Hold that thought — his trouble began with a lapse of exactly that kind.