Millenarianism—the belief in the coming of an ideal society—provided nineteenth century Vietnamese peasants with a total, holistic solution to the hardships of their frontier environment. It gave religious meaning to their sufferings and promised them salvation and rebirth in a world made perfect through cataclysmic change. Transcending the conventional tendency to view millenarian movements merely as forms of protest, the author weaves together the temporal, spatial, and mythic patterns of Vietnamese millenarianism to recreate the moral and religious universe of its followers.

Hue-Tam Ho Tai traces the impact of millenarianism on Vietnamese society as its believers strove for salvation through both piety and violence. She shows how the dream of a perfect world helped the twentieth century Hoa Hao sect build a huge peasant following and how its apocalyptic vision of change eventually drove the sect into conflict with Communist revolutionaries.

In the early years of the Vietnamese Revolution—the 1920s and 1930s—radicalism was the dominant force in anticolonial politics. The subsequent displacement of radicalism by communism, however, has obscured radicalism’s role as a nonideological reaction to both colonial rule and native accommodation to that rule. Hue-Tam Ho Tai seeks to redress the influence of radicalism on this crucial point in Vietnamese history. She reveals a vibrant and explosive era of student strikes, debates on women’s emancipation, revolt against the patriarchal family, and intellectual explorations of French and Chinese politics and thought.

Making instructive use of literacy sources, archival materials, and the unpublished memoirs of her father, himself a participant in these events, Tai persuasively sets right the personalities and spirit of the Revolution—and the culture from which it emerged.