Jason Devitt

There are too many cars in Phnom Penh. As soon as we left the bus station, our tuk-tuk got caught in a traffic jam.

This is an economic observation, not just a grumpy complaint.

Motorbikes rule the streets of Saigon and Hanoi. We were told that ten years ago we’d have seen only bicycles. If the economy keeps growing, ten years from now most people will have cars. Beijing is further along; Bangkok has completed the transition. But today in Vietnam a Chinese motorbike starts at $400 - about six to nine months’ salary in the cities - and so right now a moto is the vehicle of choice.

Cambodia is much poorer than its neighbor. Average incomes are half those in Vietnam. Infant mortality is almost three times higher. Most people don’t finish high school. Most people don’t have bank accounts. (There were no ATMs in the country a year ago, and some people asked us how they worked.) Gas is often sold out of bottles by the curbside, even in the capital. The road from Ko Kong to Sihanoukville and on to Kampot is mostly dirt and even the road to Phnom Penh and on to Siem Reap was not completely paved. So how come so many people can afford cars?

I thought at first it might be the ugly face of capitalism: great inequality of income, urban wealth in a country where most people are subsistence farmers and there are still occasional famines. In other words, a lower average income than in Vietnam but a greater variance.

But in that case where is the middle class? The goods in the markets are very basic and there are no large stores. On Sisowath Quay, a pleasant riverside strip of bars, hotels, and restaurants, very few of the Cambodians that we saw were owners or even customers. If they weren’t employees they were beggars or touts. Outside the capital we saw no sign of any economic activity beyond agriculture, fishing, tourism, a little construction, and a lot of begging.

I am serious when I call begging an economic activity. Children are farmed. Modern Fagins rent or buy kids from their parents and organize them into teams with distinct territories. Women rent newborn babies to beg with, drugging them to keep them quiet.

You won’t notice any of this if you take your cue from "Why Is Everyone Going To Cambodia?" Spend four days at Sokha Beach in Sihanoukville - a four-star resort that will earn its fifth when they open their spa - and three days at The One Hotel in Siem Reap, which promises a cameraman and stylist to accompany you as you tour Angkor, and you’ll leave Cambodia thinking that it’s a rapidly growing market economy with charming, happy natives and a fab-u-lous heritage.

As the writer mentions in paragraph 156 or so, the reality  - and the answer to my original question - is that Cambodia is a totalitarian kleptocracy; a land ruled by thieves, where a weary population is trapped in poverty by a corrupt government that imprisons its opponents and rewards its supporters … with cars.

Teachers make $20 per month. Hotel staff make twice that. People who work for the government can afford brand new American and Japanese cars.

What moved me beyond moral outrage to educated self-interest is that they are stealing most of it from us. About half of the budget of the Cambodian government comes from foreign donors, mainly the US and the EU. You and I are paying for half the cars in Phnom Penh.

Now I believe in foreign aid and I’d like to see America’s paltry budget (in percentage terms) go up a lot. But foreign aid has turned Cambodia’s government upside down. In America the government get most of their revenue from us - the governed - through taxes (and fines and fees for services). In return they provides services that the majority of people want them to provide. Assuming that they want to stay in power and that we don’t want to pay higher taxes, the only way to keep improving services is to broaden the tax base: adopt policies that drive long-term economic growth so that there are more taxpayers and all of them are richer. Fail and we give someone else the job.

In Cambodia the government also get most of their money from us; they skim enough to buy off the smart people who can be bought, threaten the smart people who can’t be bought, and still have enough money to return more than a dollar in services for every dollar paid in taxes which, if you are not very smart, seems like a good deal.

We can’t give someone else the job, because there are no grounds for international intervention. We can reduce foreign aid in protest at the amount of corruption, but they can pass most of that reduction along to the general population without feeling much pain. And we can tell them that we think that this is a really, really bad way to run a country, and watch them ignore us.

Personally I would like to starve the beast, a Republican phrase that seems strangely appropriate. Let’s bypass the Cambodian government as much as possible and give more money directly to NGOs that represent local communities. Are there corrupt NGOs? Some, probably, and many more that are inefficient or wasteful. But we can cut off funds to an NGO completely and give the dollars to another one; there is only one government.

The real problem is how to decide which NGOs to fund and how to monitor their performance without wasting a lot of money on administration. I’ll return to this topic, but given my background it won’t surprise you that I think we should use the web.

This forlorn little country contains one of the ugliest places on earth and one of the most beautiful.

As you approach Angkor Wat from the west there is no frame of reference. Just as the moon appears larger when it is near the horizon, the three main towers loom so large that they must be close by - immediately behind the outer wall. In fact, as you set out to cross the moat they are still more than a kilometer away. Trust me, no photograph can convey this. Few structures in the world are at once so large and so graceful.

But Angkor Wat is just one building in a ruined city that was the same area as New York is today and that was home to a million people at a time when there were no more than 50,000 living in London. There are over 100 temples within one day’s drive, built over a period of 600 years.

Our favorite, and the favorite of many, is Ta Prohm - the temple that’s been consigned to the jungle. There is a sense of a battle being fought between the buildings and the trees on a timescale very different to our own - faster than, say, a wrestling match between sea urchins, slower than India’s assault on the rest of Asia. Most of the trees here are silk cotton. Their bark is smooth and pale like bone, so that the temple looks like it is being torn apart by giant skeletal hands, moving at a thousand years per mile.

If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then the stones have allies in the forest. The banyan is a tree that grows on other trees, competing with them for light and moisture and ultimately killing them. Above this much-photographed door, a banyan slowly strangles a silk cotton as it in turn tries to tear down the wall of the central sanctuary.

Compared to Mayan or Egyptian pyramids, the variety of designs here is extraordinary. The Bayon: it looks like a pile of bricks. It isn’t. Look closer and each side of each of the 54 towers resolves into the enigmatic smile of Jayavarman VII.  

Banteay Srei. All the carvings here are beautiful, but what I loved about this jewel-box of a temple is the fractal design. Click on the image above to see what I mean - I have annotated the picture on Flickr.

The Terrace of the Leper King. Ministers of Tourism in half the countries of the world would kill to have an attraction with a name as good as that, to hell with what it looks like. Here many people walk right past it on their way from the Terrace of Elephants to the North Gate of Angkor Thom and on to Preah Khan. And then there’s the River of a Thousand Lingas…

The national anthem of Democratic Kampuchea, 1976-1979:

The red, red blood splatters the cities and plains of the Cambodian fatherland,
The sublime blood of the workers and peasants,
The blood of revolutionary combatants of both sexes,
The bloods spills out into great indignation and a resolute urge to fight,
17 April, that day under the revolutionary flag,
The blood certainly liberates us from slavery.

I was ten years old when the Khmer Rouge fell. I grew up hearing a lot about the Killing Fields. Here are the things that I did not expect:

The brightly painted classrooms. The prison that the Khmer Rouge called S-21 used to be a school. The last fourteen inmates of S-21 were beaten and shot to death in these sunlit rooms, still chained to their iron beds.

The palm tree. It is a source of oil, sugar, wood, and roofing material for the Cambodians, a symbol of the country. The leaf stems are surprisingly stiff and sharp-edged. The Khmer Rouge used them to cut the throats of prisoners, to save money on bullets.

The record-keeping.

The smell of the skulls.

Choeung Ek: N11°29.037′ E104°54.126′

For hundreds of years the Khmers believed that the soil and the trees and the stones around them were imbued with the spirits of their ancestors. They called this Nak Ta. The spirits or ghosts who lived in or near inhabited places were friendly; those that live in the deep forest were not. Cambodia’s landmines are like a vivid, ugly manifestation of Nak Ta. The inhabited areas are clear and safe; the remote rural areas still claim one victim every day.

I don’t believe in ghosts. But I know that sometimes our memories of the dead can overwhelm us. In that sense Cambodia is filled with ghosts. Even the laid-back beach resort of Sihanoukville.

In 1964 the newest and best hotel in town was the Independence, a classic piece of 60s modernism on a cliff overlooking the ocean, with orange furniture, a circular dining-room, and a kidney-shaped swimming pool. But in Year Zero the Khmer Rouge took over the hotel as a base. They drained the pool, covered it with a wooden grille, and used it as a prison.

Now that Sihanoukville is becoming a major tourist destination once again, a Thai consortium is renovating the Independence Hotel, preserving many of the original architectural features, including the pool. I wish them luck. But the people we met in Sihanoukville say that they would never stay there. I am not sure that I would either.

More poetically, the ghost of French colonialism dwells on Bokor Hill. This was a retreat for the French overlords, 3,300 feet above the surrounding plain, near the southernmost tip of Cambodia. At this height the temperature was tolerable for the lily-white Europeans. The road to the top was built by indentured labor over eighty years ago, has not been maintained since the 1950s, and was torn apart by tanks when the Khmer Rouge took over the station and the Vietnamese came to get them. We rode up in the back of a pick-up truck. It’s only 25 miles, but the road is so scarred that it takes three hours.

The main building is a glorious folly, all terraces and stairwells and ballrooms and corridors to nowhere. Covered in a mysterious blood-red moss, shrouded in mist, it lacks only an enormous coal-black hound. Elsewhere in the ruins of the retreat, scattered over a few dozen acres, are a casino, a viewing platform, and a Catholic church.

There is talk of renovating Bokor Hill too. I hope that it remains a monument to the foolishness of dead white European colonists, who had to climb a mountain to escape the heat.

The Burmese Python, the snake that kills more US pet owners than any other. Fortunately this one had just been fed.

The Bangkok Snake Farm: N13°43.938′ E100°31.962′

(1) A woman steps inside her simple wooden home and lifts the chicken to check the eggs. Then she goes over to lift her newborn baby. The baby’s lips move! He says no! A disembodied hand appears holding a bar of soap. The woman smiles. In the future, she’ll remember to wash first.

A public safety ad sponsored by UNICEF. This is still a very poor country. Diarrhea is the leading cause of death in children.

(2) A boy lies in the back of a pick-up truck, cradled in his mother’s arms. (Even in Bangkok, the most advanced city in the region, there are few emergency medical services. Most people get to hospital in pick-up trucks, tuk-tuks, or on the back of a motorcycle.) He’s clearly very sick, but he’s holding a mobile phone. Cut to the anxious face of his father, driving through the night, and speaking reassuring words. Cut back to the son - close-up on his arm. Snakebite! The boy is fading fast. His father calls out. The boy says nothing. The father cries out again. The boy opens his eyes and replies. Cut to announcer.

It’s an ad for Cambodia’s biggest wireless operator, Mobitel, emphasizing the reliability and coverage of their network, and implying that if you don’t have a Mobitel phone, you may not be able to keep your children alive. Can you hear me now? 

(3) A fair-haired European man in a linen suit drives a red convertible down a twisting mountain road. The camera cuts back and forth between him and his beautiful girlfriend, smiling in her power-red lipstick and suit, complete with shoulder pads. The wind is in their hair, they’re laughing maniacally, they’re in love, they must be - yes they are - they’re smoking Mercor cigarettes!

Big tobacco is alive and well and peddling death sticks to the Khmers. 60% of them smoke. Cambodia is the only country in South-East Asia that doesn’t regulate tobacco advertising. That’s a matter for the Cambodian government and people, but I find it offensive that the marketing message is ‘rich white people smoke.’ Perhaps we can sue them for libel. Or just run ads filled with Western celebrities saying ‘I don’t smoke.’

"What, me worry?"

Cambodia is theoretically a multi-party democracy, but the Cambodian People’s Party and the army control the country and the Prime Minister has picked up the Singaporean habit of suing the opposition if they oppose too vigorously. Myanmar is an international pariah for locking up Aung San Suu Kyi, and there is no opposition at all in Vietnam or Laos. Sad, but hardly news.

The most developed nation in the region, the supposed beacon of democracy, is Thailand. I haven’t written much about Thailand precisely because it is so developed: the southern islands are well-established luxury vacation spots and Bangkok is one of the world’s great cities. You’ve already been here or you know someone else who has. True, the current Prime Minister doesn’t like criticism and press freedom has suffered a lot in recent years. But Thailand seems to be a politically stable democracy with a vociferous opposition and a fast-growing market economy, where the big question is no longer how shall we feed the people but when and how shall we deregulate the telecommunications industry.

And yet. You can’t spend a week here without noticing the peculiar status of the royal family and especially the king of Thailand. His face is on every banknote; there are 30-foot high portraits at major road junctions; in Lumphini Park, a series of billboards (sponsored by Canon) celebrate his life. Before the start of every movie, the audience stands for the national anthem and on screen the camera swoops through a CGI living-room, filled with photos of major events in the life of the king.

Of course, this year the king celebrates his 60th year on the throne and the atmosphere is, I vaguely recall, similar to the silver jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II in 1977, before the Windsors went to hell. Unlike Liz, Phil, and Charlie, the king of Thailand is still widely revered.

But then you learn that it is still a crime to criticize the royal family. If it were a crime to criticize the President, most visitors to the US would think that Americans revered George Bush.

Last week Summer and I visited the National Museum in Bangkok, and walked through their permanent exhibiton on Thai history. According to our guidebook this is one of the best museums in South-East Asia, and judging by the design - inviting layout, readable text, well-chosen objects, pretty dioramas - this may be true. But the entire museum seems designed to confirm the role of the monarchy as the foundation of the Thai state and the source of all political legitimacy, as opposed to, say, the consent of the governed.

National museums are like autobiographies; you don’t expect a lot of overt self-criticism. But here in Bangkok we learn that from the early city-states through the rise of Siam and modern Thailand, the Thais have been blessed with one great king after another. They wrote some of the finest books and works of music in Thai history, and were brilliant military strategists, technological visionaries, and battle-hardened heroes. Most of them were ‘offered’, ‘invited’, or ‘asked to assume’ the throne. It’s never clear when this means a legal process of succession, a power-play by civilians in the shadows, or just plain-old-seizing-the-throne.

It’s 1688. A Greek adventurer named Constantine Phaulkon has maneuvered himself into the position of chief advisor to the king, an unprecedented (and never to be repeated) achievement for a foreigner. Phaulkon iss supposed to be conniving with the French to take over Siam. A Siamese general revolts, kills the Greek, expels the French, and usurps the throne, imprisoning the rightful king until death.

That much I picked up from other sources. In the National Museum of Thailand you learn that foreigners gained a mite too much influence in the court around 1688, but the new king put an end to it. And there’s a little chart showing the end of one dynasty and the beginning of the next.

What most interested me was the museum’s account of the current Chakri dynasty, which has ruled Thailand for the last two hundred years, since just after the American Revolution.

Not surprisingly, Rama I was ‘invited to assume the throne.’ (By whom? What did King Taksin have to say about it?) Rama II and Rama III consolidated power, and found the time to compose some of Thailand’s greatest works of literature and music. In what may be a rare example of subversive curation, a sign tells us that the kings generously invited many talented people to ‘co-author’ works with them.

Next up is Rama IV, whose efforts to modernize the country included hiring Anna Leonowens to teach English in the court. Her photograph appears twice. But there is no reference to her undoubtedly exaggerated book, the novel, the musical, or the three films based on it, all three of which are banned in Thailand because they do not flatter the king. (So why mention her at all? More subversive curation?)

Ramas IV, V, and VI personally get all the credit for modernizing Thailand and saving it from colonization by negotiating with the British and the French to give up about one third of the country in all to British Burma and French Indochina. Again, it’s as if the kings acted alone. And there’s no acknowledgement that it suited both Britain and France to maintain Thailand as an independent buffer state between them.

Rama VII abdicated following a coup to establish a constitutional monarchy. Really? Fascinating. Tell us more. Who was involved in the coup? We get one name. How was it planned? Any pictures? Oh, by the way, haven’t there been twenty other attempted coups in Thailand in the last seventy years, half of them successful? Care to tell us anything about those? No, guess not. Straight on to Rama VIII, who ‘was chosen to assume the throne’ - the passive voice again. Chosen by whom, in the aftermath of a democratic coup? All we learn is that after a brief reign poor Rama VIII ‘died suddenly.’

Yes indeed he did. He was shot dead. Imagine a summary of JFK’s Presidency that ended with the line ‘he died suddenly while visiting Dallas.’ This for me is the most surreal moment.

The last section of the exhibition is devoted to the life of the present king, and his accomplishments in painting, writing, jazz music, sailing, sculpture, photography, and a greeting card designed on a computer with clip-art.

Clearly a lot of people profit from focusing the attention of the Thai people on the royal family. If you are interested in learning about the rise of democracy in Thailand, the civilian governments, the army coups, Thailand’s role in the conflicts in Vietnam and Cambodia, the violence in the south of the country today, the 1997 economic crisis, the importance of tourism, the name of the Prime Minister - any Prime Minister - hell, an account of the life of a single civilian in the last six hundred years who was not on his way to becoming king - I advise you not to go to the National Museum of Thailand.

The first hint that D. might be different from all the other taxi drivers in Bangkok comes when we tell him our names:
"Jason."
"Ah, like the guy in the movies who kills kids," he says, putting his hand in front of his face first to suggest an ice-hockey mask, then to cover his Thai smile. "Where are you from?"
"America," says Summer.
"I love America! I lived there. Seven years. North Carolina."

This is really surprising. We have met few Thais who have ever left their own country, let alone been to America.

D. is tall for a Thai and lanky, with the look of a man who has partied hard. He says he used to be much bigger, and I wonder if an American diet in his early twenties added a few inches to his height as well as his waist.

In 1983 his mother, fearing that her fun-loving son was going to end up in a Bangkok jail, persuaded a relative in North Carolina to bring D. over for a visit. This man had an American wife (Betty, nice and pretty, he looked after her house, she looked after his visa, then divorced him and married her longtime American boyfriend while he paid it forward and married a nice Chinese girl who needed a greencard), and tried to fix D. up too.

D.’s most memorable date was with a two-hundred pound shut-in who had a fetish for illegal immigrants: she already had a daughter by a Mexican apple-picker. Her snores kept D. awake all night, sweating and drinking Budweiser. After that he gave up on the marriage route.

For seven years D. washed dishes, cooked, or packed bags in a convenience store. Most nights his best friend Tony, an amputee with a specially adapted pick-up truck, would collect him from work so that they could go "Par-tay!"

And then one day he missed his mother so much that he went home to Bangkok. On the way out, lacking the right papers, he was banned from travelling to America for life; and for D. it is was as if he’d been locked out of paradise.

A few days after meeting D., Summer and I decide to travel overland to Cambodia. Flying is wonderful when you’re in a hurry and the destination is more important than the journey, but for us neither of these things is true.

It’s about 600km by road from Bangkok to the Cambodian border. For $20 we could ride there in a comfortable air-conditioned minibus, in the company of other foreigners. But for $75 D. offers to drive us, and that sounds like a lot more fun. And so we hail a cab to Cambodia.

D. doesn’t disappoint. He shares Thai gossip and stories about his life and driving a taxi in Bangkok.

Often he listens to his foreign passengers’ conversations, not letting on that he can speak English. One night a tourist spent the whole ride laughing about how all Thai women are for sale. D. was furious at the insult, partly because it contained a grain of truth. Not only is the sex industry vast, but many Thai girls like to date white tourists casually, for gifts, clothes, and trips to expensive bars and restaurants. D. says that things are worse in Cambodia, where he rode his motorbike for a vacation six years ago. A woman offered to sell him her daughter - permanently - for 5,000 baht ($125).

The Thai landscape does disappoint, however. Bangkok sprawls along beside us for twenty kilomters, all apartment blocks and malls and gas stations. Beyond the city as we head south-east the land is featureless and the highway is brand new, marked by bright clean bilingual road-signs in international standard shades of blue and green. The only indication that we are in Thailand, apart from the Thai script, is that every few miles we see a new Buddhist temple under construction, all built to the same plan and paid for by local subscription.

At a roadside cafe we stop for lunch. $1.75 buys us two bowls of noodle soup, piled high with shrimp and pork and vegetables and cooked in front of us, plus two bottles of drinking water. Summer asks D. what music he likes. He spits out his tuna sandwich and starts singing Van Halen’s Jump. He also loves Dolly Parton and Aerosmith, and speaks fondly of the Richard Marx concert he saw in the States.

Our guidebooks - two of them - say that the border closes at 5 pm. The first sign that we may fall behind schedule is that D. keeps pulling into gas stations, asking the same question, and driving off without refuelling. Apparently his cab like many in Bangkok runs on liquified natural gas - 10 baht per liter, versus 27 for regular gas. But outside Bangkok LNG is hard to find, and after 300 km, D.’s tank is almost empty. A couple of the places that we are sent to are closed on Sundays. Finally D. gets directions to an open garage in the little town of Chanthaburi and fills up.

Unfortunately D. neglected to get directions out of the little town of Chanthaburi and soon we’re lost. It’s a sleepy place - narrow streets, stores closed, dogs sprawled asleep in the afternoon heat, few people out. We find a delivery man (on a motorbike with a trailer) and he and D. and a woman who passes by spend fifteen minutes discussing how to get back to the main road. I can’t understand Thai, but I suspect it’s all "Ah, this is a bad place to start" and "You can’t get there from here." The delivery man kindly offers to give us a motorcycle escort out of town; we chug along behind him for half a mile, make one right turn, and the highway entrance is directly in front of us. "Good luck," he says in English, as if sceptical about our ability to make it from here.

With 100 kilometers to go and ninety minutes left to get to the border, we hit a police checkpoint just outside Trat. Problem: it’s the 8th of January and D.’s insurance disc is eight days out of date. That’s a $20 fine, but they won’t accept payment at the checkpoint; instead we have to drive to a district office and pay it there. Now.

In the bathroom of the drab municipal building, I kill time studying the supply chain that a column of ants has set up between a hole in one wall and the vomit-encrusted sink at the opposite end of the room.

D. storms out with the look of righteous indignation that traffic offenses inspire the world over. He says "1 hour, 100 kilometers. That means 100 kilometers per hour," and drives off in silence.

In the last 60 kilometers the scenery changes dramatically. To our left the Cardamom mountains rear up, a continuous wall of rock 700 feet high, covered in virgin forest, that has long separated Thailand from Cambodia. To our right the sea: the Gulf of Thailand. On my map the purple line that marks the Cambodian border is wider than this strip of land. The Thais cling to it like the inhabitants of Skull Island cling to the rocks outside their stockade, an image that comes to mind because our ultimate destination tonight is the village of Ko Kong.

Like the stockade, the Cardamom wall today seems designed to keep something in. Every couple of miles there’s a police roadblock, where D.’s cab will be checked on the way back for smuggled Cambodians.

He promised 100 km/h, but I am not sure what speeds D. does reach in this last stage of our journey, because his speedometer doesn’t work. He loses control only once - coming out of a hairpin bend on the narrow coastal road he over-corrects, and the car fishtails and stops on the wrong side of the road. Fortunately there’s no other traffic.

It seems pointless. It’s 5:30, and we’ll surely have to drive back 50 km to the nearest town to spend the night. We pull into the border crossing, and jump out.

Happy New Year. The border is now open until 8 pm.

I pay D. and tip him enough to go some way towards paying his fine. Children tug at our arms, begging for money and candy. On the other side of the border fence we see the motorcycle taxi touts gathering; they’ll surround us soon, fighting for our $2 fare to Ko Kong. And then I will try and fail to persuade the particularly well-dressed Cambodian officials to accept the true cost of our visas, without their 40% personal markup.

But for now we’re here. Thanks D.

The Vietnamese eat everything that can be eaten, sell everything that can be sold, and worship everything that can be worshipped.

About one tenth are Catholic. Most of the rest call themselves Buddhists, but practise a combination of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism (which they have embraced and extended to include roughly 13,000 gods), and ancestor worship. As if mindful of Pascal’s wager, they frequently consult fortune tellers, avoid unlucky numbers, and may even show up in church on Christmas day. 

In Hanoi we saw many people kneeling on the sidewalk late at night, burning ghost money for their ancestors to spend in heaven. At the Jade Emperor pagoda in Saigon, a barefoot girl lit a joss stick and said a prayer, believing that the smoke would connect her to the spirit world. At the temple of literature in Hanoi, we saw an old woman praying to Confucius, bowing her head and dipping her hands repeatedly to show respect. On the floor of a candy factory in the Mekong delta, a real cigarette smouldered in the porcelain fist of the happy, chubby, genie of the earth. In a mobile phone store in Saigon, the most important decision a customer had to make was not which carrier or model of phone to choose, but which phone number. A tour guide told us that her best friend got married at 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning - in front of 500 guests - because a fortune teller told her that it was the most auspicious time. And in the poorest place we visited, the godforsaken Chicken Village, a few dozen buildings hugging the edge of Chicken River, the Catholics proudly flew the yellow and white banner of the Vatican. The poorest ones are always Catholic.

Such a variety of piety proved fertile soil for Vietnam’s one true home-grown religion. Cao Dai is a monotheistic faith, which holds that Laotze, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Mohammed and others were all messengers of the One True God, Lord of the 3,027 worlds, but that they were misunderstood and that Cao Dai is the one true path. The founders were spiritualists to whom the Lord spoke in a series of seances. It appears that God, frustrated by mankind’s failure to understand Buddha and Jesus, decided to send a clear and unambiguous message via a ouija board. If you haven’t heard about it, blame Victor Hugo, who is the saint responsible for foreign missions.  

I don’t think there has ever been a state-sponsored religion in Vietnam - unless you count communist atheism, which never stood a chance - and I suspect that this has encouraged the diversity of beliefs, just as the separation of church and state has indirectly encouraged the growth of religion in America. Established churches, like state-run monopolies, are lazy and uncompetitive, and decline over time. Look at the poor state of the Anglican church in England, where vicars have resorted to conducting services in pubs and the next head of the church is a divorced adulterer, and compare that to America, where churches compete aggressively for worshippers with more songs, fewer sermons, dramatic exorcisms, and folksy politics: 80% of the U.S. population goes to church regularly.

… from the Khao San Road in Bangkok. Yes it was a little blurry.

Moblogged at N13°45.714′ E’100°29.649′