Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [361]
As a young man Huynh Phu So was cured of a mysterious illness by the monks of Tra Son Pagoda near his home town of Chau Doc. He continued to live at the pagoda, studying under the monk Xom, but returned to his home village after Xom died. During a storm in 1939, So entered a trance from which he emerged to develop his own Buddhist way. The sect quickly gained followers and, like Cao Dai, was soon caught up in nationalist politics. To the French, So was a mad but dangerous subversive; they committed him to a psychiatric hospital (where he promptly converted his doctor to Hoa Hao), and then placed him under house arrest. During World War II Hoa Hao followers were armed by the Japanese and later continued to fight against the French while also opposing the Communists. At the end of the war Hoa Hao members formed an anti-Marxist political party, prompting the Viet Minh to assassinate So in 1947.
However, the movement continued to grow, its private army equalling the Cao Dai’s in size, until Diem came to power and effectively crushed the sect’s political and military arm. The sect then splintered, with some members turning to the National Liberation Front, while most sided with the Americans. As a result, when the Communists took over in 1975 many Hoa Hao leaders were arrested and its priesthood was disbanded. Nevertheless some claim that there are now over 1.5 million Hoa Hao practising in the Mekong Delta. The government recognized the principal Hoa Hao sect in 1999, although its more radical offshoots, which are accused of anti-government activities, remain outlawed.
Vietnam’s ethnic minorities
The population of Vietnam currently numbers some 86 million people, of whom around 85 percent are ethnic Vietnamese (known as Viet or Kinh), while approximately 800,000 are Chinese in origin (Hoa) – see "Hoa and Viet Kieu". The remaining eleven million people comprise 52 ethnic minority groups divided into dozens of subgroups, some with a mere hundred or so members, giving Vietnam the richest and most complex ethnic make-up in the whole of Southeast Asia. The vast majority of Vietnam’s minorities live in the hilly regions of the north and central highlands – all areas that saw heavy fighting in recent wars – and several groups straddle today’s international boundaries.
Little is known about the origins of many of these people, some of whom already inhabited the area before the ancestors of the Viet arrived from southern China around four to five thousand years ago. At some point the Viet emerged as a distinct group from among the various indigenous peoples living around the Red River Delta and then gradually absorbed smaller communities until they became the dominant culture. Other groups continued to interact with the Viet people, but either chose to maintain their independence in the highlands or were forced up into the hills, off the ever-more-crowded coastal plains.
Vietnamese legend accounts for this fundamental split between lowlanders and highlanders as follows: the Dragon King of the south married Au Co, a beautiful northern princess, and at first they lived in the mountains where she gave birth to a hundred strong, handsome boys. After a while, however, the Dragon King missed his watery, lowland home and decamped with half his sons, leaving fifty behind in the mountains – the ancestors of the ethnic minorities.
Vietnam’s ethnic groups are normally differentiated according to three main linguistic families – Austronesian, Austro-Asian and Sino-Tibetan – which are further subdivided into smaller groups, such as the Viet–Muong and Tay–Thai language groups. Austronesians, related to Indonesians and Pacific Islanders, were probably the earliest inhabitants of the area but are now restricted