I'm Janet Hoskins. I'm a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

I'm an anthropologist, but at this point I also have an affiliation with the religion

department. I've been interested in doing research on religions in Vietnam since

roughly the beginning of the 21st century. I like to mark it kind of with

that turn of the century. And in particular I've been interested in this

new religion called Kaudaiism, which I discovered in fact in California because

they had they were building temples very close to where I grew up. But then I

followed it to Vietnam. I've at this point visited Kaudai temples in a number

of other countries including France and Australia. It's an important and

relatively large new religion that very few people have heard of.

It's clear that there was spirit writing in the 19th century at a time when it

was also very popular in China. The first published morality book was 1834. This is

based on a search of the historian Liam Kelly who argues that Le Quidon, who's a

famous Vietnamese historian, there are many streets named after him in Ho Chi Minh City

and in Hanoi, he published a book which was a guide to what he calls the hidden administration.

And this seems to have been, he argues, based on spirit writing. There also have been a

series of other morality books published, lots of them near the end of the 19th century,

and it obviously became a popular genre when you first developed large-scale printing in

Romanized Vietnamese, the Quoc Mu, which is the Vietnamese language written with Roman

characters. It seems that it came in through these communities which are called the Minh

Huong. Minh is actually a reference not just to enlightenment, which of course it also

means, but also to the Minh refugees who started coming particularly into southern Vietnam

in the 1600s. And they were an important population, especially in the former Saigon. There's

still a large Chinatown in Saigon, which is called Cholon. It means big market. And the

Minh Huong are called Minh Huong because they intermarried. So the Minh are Chinese. Huong

is a Vietnamese first name. It means fragrance or perfume. And so the mixture of the Minh

refugees and the local women created a population with some Chinese ancestry. Probably for many

people it was only a quarter or less. But there was obviously an influence of Chinese

literary culture that went much further than simply the ancestry.

Khà-đái-zâm basically emerged at the same time as the Vietnamese nationalist movement.

The first seances were held in 1925, which was the year when there was a huge funeral

for a Vietnamese nationalist who died. And it was obvious that this had become a massive

movement. The religion was officially inaugurated in November 1926. And in some ways, initially,

French colonial officers claimed that it was a political movement masquerading as a religion

because it was a religion that presented itself as identifying the Vietnamese people as the

chosen people using this sort of biblical metaphor. They were chosen because they had

suffered under the yoke of colonialism more than any other people within the East Asian

civilization area. And of course, there was like the Koreans were colonized by the Japanese,

but that doesn't, they weren't Europeans. So from their point of view, the Vietnamese,

because they have uniquely suffered under the yoke of European colonialism, they would

then be rewarded for their virtue with the chance to become the people who would lead

the rest of the world in uniting world religions, and finding a pathway to salvation. It was

a very specific nationalist method message that had a political content, and was linked

to prophecies that the age of European colonization was coming to an end. That made it, of course,

suspect, but there was a strong strategic advantage to being

a religion under a colonial power such as France.

France is an extremely secularized society,

so the freedom of religion is very important.

French colonial officers had no problem

in suppressing political movements,