Len dong's twentieth century was a study in official disapproval. The French colonial press mocked it, reformist Confucians deplored it, and the socialist state after 1954 classed it with superstition to be eradicated: temples closed, ritual goods markets shrank, and mediums served their spirits behind shuttered doors, a persistence the scholarship of the tradition records in detail.
The reform era loosened the frame, and Dao Mau surged back into the open with startling speed: temple festivals recovered, the trade in votive goods and spirit costumes boomed, chau van music entered the conservatory and the stage, and mediumship, long stereotyped as the province of the marginal, drew practitioners from Vietnam's new commercial classes, for whom the spirits' favour and market fortune sit naturally together. The state, in a reversal enacted across much of Asia, began sponsoring what it had suppressed: the Practices Related to the Viet Beliefs in the Mother Goddesses of Three Realms were inscribed by UNESCO in 2016, with len dong at their centre, and official discourse now distinguishes authentic ritual from wasteful excess rather than condemning the whole. The tradition polices its own boundaries in parallel, debating staged performances, celebrity mediums and inflated ceremony costs. Through all of it the rite itself has kept its shape: the veil, the descending court, the music that names each spirit, and the shower of blessed gifts, a ceremony that has carried Vietnam's goddess religion through colonialism, war and socialism into open celebration.