Lieu Hanh

Lieu Hanh is the most widely venerated of Vietnam's Four Immortals and the central figure of Dao Mau, the indigenous Vietnamese tradition of Mother Goddess worship, with legends describing her as a daughter of the Jade Emperor sent to earth, where she lived among ordinary people, married, and became renowned for both her compassion toward the poor and her sharp punishment of the arrogant and corrupt, before eventually being recognised and worshipped as a goddess in her own right, sometimes in explicit tension with, and eventually accommodation by, the Confucian state orthodoxy of earlier Vietnamese dynasties. Philip Taylor's ethnographic study of pilgrimage and popular religion in Vietnam documents Lieu Hanh's cult as one of the most vigorous and visibly growing strands of contemporary Vietnamese religious life, centred on major pilgrimage sites including the Phu Day temple complex in Nam Dinh province, her most important cult centre, which draws large numbers of pilgrims particularly during her main annual festival.

Lieu Hanh stands within Dao Mau's Four Palace, Tu Phu, cosmological system as the presiding goddess overseeing a large pantheon of subordinate mother goddesses and spirits associated with the sky, water, mountains and forest, earth, and this system is given living ritual expression through len dong, a spirit possession ceremony in which a medium, generally understood as female or embodying a female role regardless of the medium's own gender, is possessed in sequence by a series of these deities, each manifestation marked by a change of costume, music, dance and behaviour specific to the spirit currently present.

UNESCO inscribed the "practices related to the Viet beliefs in the Mother Goddesses of Three Realms" on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2016, formal recognition of Dao Mau's living, actively practised status in contemporary Vietnam. Taylor's scholarship notes that Dao Mau and Lieu Hanh's cult experienced significant growth following Vietnam's post-reform economic liberalisation, becoming one of the clearest examples of a genuinely indigenous Vietnamese religious tradition expanding rather than declining under modern conditions.