1671–1716. Third son of Đinh Nho Công, Hoàng giáp of the 1700 examination, governor of Cao Bằng, vice-ambassador to Qing China — died on the road. A poet under the name Mặc Trai. An entire academic conference was devoted to him; its thirty-one papers are the main source of these pages.
Ⅰ
The examination and the offices
He took the Hoàng giáp degree — second rank, first name — at the Canh Thìn examination of 1700, the twenty-first year of the Chính Hòa era, at thirty. One paper recalls that Lord Trịnh Căn had then tightened the examinations, and that several of his eighteen fellow graduates became illustrious.
On his offices the conference argues. Nguyễn Hữu Tâm establishes that his first post was Hàn lâm viện Hiệu lý — corrector of books at the academy, principal seventh rank — and disputes that he was ever Tham chính of Sơn Tây, as Ngô Đức Thọ held. In the seventh month of the year Giáp Thân, that is August 1704, he was sent as Đốc trấn of Cao Bằng: a frontier charge the court established in only three provinces, and usually entrusted to senior military officers.
He was later Thượng Bảo Tự khanh, and posthumously promoted vice-minister of Rites (Tả Thị lang bộ Lễ).
Ⅱ
The embassy, and a death the sources do not settle
In the year Ất Mùi (1715) he set out as Phó sứ — vice-ambassador — of the tributary mission to Qing China. Phan Thị Viên, his second wife, accompanied him as far as Lã Côi.
He died in the course of the journey, on the 27th or 28th of the twelfth lunar month of the year Ất Mùi. That year is 1715, but this twelfth month falls in January 1716: hence the sources give now one year, now the other — neither being wrong.
The place remains disputed. The Đại Nam nhất thống chí says only “died on the road”, without saying outward or homeward. One conference paper — by Đinh Nho Quỳ — is given over entirely to these open questions, and reports that the reburials of 1976 and 1985 revealed an inner coffin within a watertight outer sarcophagus, with no grave goods at all: a treatment the author judges “honourable but hasty”, and which he files as evidence rather than as a conclusion.
His body was brought home and buried; both the Lê and the Qing courts pronounced a funeral oration.
Ⅲ
The poet, and the cult
His embassy poems, gathered by his son-in-law the doctor Nguyễn Trọng Thường under the title Mặc Ông sứ tập, take up a whole section of the conference: seven papers study them, from the “Cao Bằng thập thủ” composed at the frontier post to the rhapsody “On Lake Động Đình”. Three may be read on the page devoted to him in the poetry collection.
He is venerated at đền Gôi Vị beside his father and his wife. The site further gives him the divine title Đắc Đạt Đại Vương.
The temple keeps three stone stelae bound to his life; Đinh Nho Quỳ observes that the middle one, carved on four faces, was cut in two campaigns — whence the supposition that events after his death were added later.