Only the sixteenth-century father and son, Giap Hai and his son Giap Lem, achieved the tiến sĩ title, with the father earning Trang nguyen or First Doctoral Laureate.
Giap Hai was adopted child of a rich family in Dinh Ke Village, Phuong Nhan District (now Dinh Tri Hamlet, Lang Giang District, Bac Giang Province) and a local prodigy. He passed the tiến sĩ examination in 1538 at the age of thirty-two; the palace selected him as First Doctoral Laureate.
After winning his degree, Giap Hai discovered that his adoptive parents had been dishonest. Suspecting he was not their real son, Giap Hai consulted an eighty-year-old villager named Phan about his origins. The old man told Giap Hai the following story: Thirty years before, his adoptive parents' boat was anchoring at Bat Trang Village when they saw him playing outside the home of a widow. The couple forced him on board and sailed away.
Giap Hai thanked the old man and went to Bat Trang to look for his real mother. He found her, but to make sure, he studied her face and then in private studied his own face in a mirror. Their faces were similar. Then he went back to see her.
"How many children do you have?" he asked. "How old are they?"
"I am sixty-eight years old," she answered. "My husband died when he was young. I was pregnant then and gave birth to a son. One day while I was out, merchants took my son away, and I don't know where he is now." "Do you remember any special marks on his body?" Giap Hai asked. "He had a round, coin-size, red mark on his back and two moles on either of his shoulders. A fortune-teller predicted he would be a great man." Giap Hai took off his shirt and showed the woman his birthmarks. Mother and son embraced and wept profusely. He then took his mother to his home and looked after her in her old age.
Giap Hai's son, Giap Le, followed in his father's footsteps, studying hard. He became locally known as a great scholar. In 1568, Giap Le passed the national-level examination and was granted the tiến sĩ title. He was later assigned to the post of teacher in a royal school.
Both father and son were respected as talented and honest mandarins.