In the Vietnamese cities of the 1910s and 1920s, seances were a middle-class pastime, and the class that practised them most was the one Ngo Van Chieu belonged to: French-educated Vietnamese clerks and administrators in the colonial service, literate in Chinese and in French, at home in neither tradition entirely. Two currents met in these gatherings. One was the Chinese practice of fuji, spirit writing performed with a suspended stylus that traces characters in sand or ash, long used by Daoist and syncretic societies. The other was French spiritism, the seance culture of Kardec and his successors, which arrived with the language and the schools.
Out of these sessions came messages signed by a spirit that eventually identified itself under the name Cao Dai, the high tower or supreme palace. Several circles were receiving such messages independently by the mid-1920s, and in 1926 a group of them signed a declaration to the colonial government announcing a new religion and held a founding ceremony at Tay Ninh.
What resulted was consciously universal in design. Cao Dai holds that God has revealed himself in successive eras through the founders of the existing religions and now addresses humanity directly; its pantheon includes figures from Chinese, Buddhist, Christian and Vietnamese tradition, and its organisation borrowed a hierarchy of dignities from Catholic and Vietnamese court models alike.