Saigon Cao Dai Temple

This guide to the Saigon Cao Dai Temple opens with a surprise: inside, the French novelist Victor Hugo is honored as one of three prophets, alongside Buddha, Confucius and Jesus. You'll hear how a circle of Vietnamese clerks working for the French colonial government began holding seance-style sittings in 1925, inspired by Hugo's own experiments with spirit communication, and announced a message from the Supreme Being the following year that founded the Cao Dai faith. The guide traces the sanctuary itself to 1949, when the movement bought a French villa on this street, and to the decades of war and neglect before its reconstruction began in 1999.