Dao Kim

Dao Kim is a Vietnamese Roman Catholic priest and sacred-music composer whose work belongs to the modern Vietnamese Catholic hymn tradition. Reliable online sources do not establish his birth year, death year, civil name, education, or detailed ministerial appointments, so those details should not be supplied without stronger documentation. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of Vietnam's historical survey of Vietnamese sacred music names Dao Kim among composers connected with the repertory formed around Saigon's seminary and later notes his collection Kinh Ngọc among post-1975 contributions to Vietnamese church song.

Vietnamese Catholic music repositories preserve a substantial group of songs under his name for offertory, prayer, communion, dedication, mission, Advent, Marian devotion, and other worship uses. The Sacred Music Commission of the Archdiocese of Hanoi catalogs Ca khúc trầm hương under Dao Kim and gives it an ecclesiastical approval record; contemporary Catholic resources continue to identify the piece with Fr. Dao Kim. OCP's Thánh Ca Dân Chúa also places Dao Kim among the Vietnamese composers represented in a major Vietnamese-language Catholic hymnal.

In English-language hymnody Dao Kim is best documented through The United Methodist Hymnal (1989), which credits him as both author and composer of My Prayer Rises to Heaven and names the tune VIETNAM. The English text closely corresponds in imagery and sequence to the Vietnamese Ca khúc trầm hương, but the hymnal does not identify a separate translator. Because the surviving documentation is much stronger for his musical works than for his personal biography, a cautious profile should emphasize these verified contributions rather than inventing biographical detail.