The Exiled Princess Who Became Vietnam's Central Goddess

Lieu Hanh is the most widely venerated of Vietnam's Four Immortals and the central figure of Dao Mau, the indigenous Vietnamese tradition of Mother Goddess worship, with legends describing her as a daughter of the Jade Emperor sent to earth, where she lived among ordinary people, married, and became renowned for both her compassion toward the poor and her sharp punishment of the arrogant and corrupt, before eventually being recognised and worshipped as a goddess in her own right, sometimes in explicit tension with, and eventually accommodation by, the Confucian state orthodoxy of earlier Vietnamese dynasties. Philip Taylor's ethnographic study of pilgrimage and popular religion in Vietnam documents Lieu Hanh's cult as one of the most vigorous and visibly growing strands of contemporary Vietnamese religious life, centred on major pilgrimage sites including the Phu Day temple complex in Nam Dinh province, her most important cult centre, which draws large numbers of pilgrims particularly during her main annual festival.