A Vietnamese literary riddle from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Hoàng Sĩ Khải's Tứ Thời Khúc

Abstract

This article considers the literary curiosity from the Mạc–Lê dynastic wars in the sixteenth century of a poem written by a Mạc-dynasty partisan being interpreted by later generations as having been written to praise the Lê dynasty. It uses textual and contextual analysis to argue that the poem was written to praise the Mạc dynasty but was later revised by scholars of the Lê dynasty.