Tran Hung Dao, the thirteenth-century vanquisher of Mongol invaders, is one of the most important figures in Vietnamese history. He also became one of the most powerful spirits in Vietnamese religious pantheons and in the practice of spirit possession (len dong). While a significant number of works about him have been written in Vietnamese, in English-language scholarship on Vietnam he has been much less discussed. Dr Pham Quynh Phuong has rectified this with her book, Hero and deity: Tran Hung Dao and the resurgence of popular religion in Vietnam.

This book is the result of years of research. The pages bring to life sentiments and thoughts of dozens of people whom the author encountered as she, first as a student and fellow at the Institute of Folklore in Hanoi and then as a Ph.D. student at La Trobe University, unravelled the mystery of Tran Hung Dao, the hero and the deity.

The book consists of seven chapters, which take readers from Tran Hung Dao's historicity to his deification. It tackles Tran Hung Dao's place in history, temples dedicated to him, his position in the world of other spirits, and how this position has been translated into the worldly, but sublime, milieu of mediumship. Dr Pham surveys the cult from the time of its appearance into modern times, with special emphasis on the post-renovation period.

The historical discussion in the chapter ‘Spiritualizing history’ is perhaps the weakest part of the book. Not only does the author fail to present any new information or analysis, but also she very often does not even provide references to the sources from which she borrowed her data. This superficial treatment of historical context and sources leads to some unwarranted assumptions regarding Tran Hung Dao's cult, which might also be seen to be in direct conflict with assumptions the author makes later in the book. For example, Dr Pham suggests that Tran Hung Dao ‘became a popular deity from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries’ (p. 29) with 27 temples by the end of that time (p. 31). It is questionable whether 27 temples are sufficient to consider Tran Hung Dao to be a popular deity. Furthermore, the author states that the French collected 172 stories about Tran Hung Dao. This raises a question about how to weigh 172 stories in the twentieth century against 27 temples by the end of the nineteenth century, especially because the author does not explain the provenance of these stories. If these stories were produced by the survey conducted by the École Française d'Extrême-Orient in the 1930s, which collected stories about deities worshipped in various temples, which I suspect to be the case, then it would mean that by the 1930s there were 172 localities that worshiped Tran Hung Dao, an enormous leap from 27 temples less than a century earlier.

Deficiencies in working with historiographical and literary sources persist in later chapters, but they are overshadowed by intriguing anthropological data collected by Dr Pham, and this is the strongest point of the book. The author uncovers not only reasons for worshiping Tran Hung Dao but also brings to light a fierce ‘competition’ among master mediums (p. 139). This discussion is successfully interwoven into the economic aspects underlying the development of Tran Hung Dao's cult and the mediumship associated with it.

Dr Pham's discussion of the current state of the Tran Hung Dao cult, incorporated in chapters titled ‘Popular religion and nation building’ and ‘Intellectuals, cultural discourse, and reflexivity,’ yields a number of important observations on the process of (re-) establishing Tran Hung Dao's cult and spirit possession (len dong) associated with it during the renovation and post-renovation period. The role of intellectuals, such as Dr Ngo Duc Thinh (pp. 179–85), who for various reasons contributed to the acceptance and eventual promotion of the cult and its practices by the state, seems to be undoubtedly very significant. There are 386 temples recognised by the state, according to the author (p. 41), far more than at any previous time, at least as indicated in the book. However, it seems not to be a one-way street with intellectuals fighting an uphill battle against the state's earlier view of the cult and its practices as superstitious. Some intellectuals, for example, Professor Vu Ngoc Khanh, have changed their views from condemning some of the religious practices associated with the cult to embracing and even advocating them, not unlike the state (p. 182). Thus, it is increasingly difficult to clearly distinguish the role of intellectuals and the state in the process of (re-) birth of this and similar cults.

In brief, this work presents a wealth of important details and observations on religious and cultural practices as adopted in contemporary Vietnam and is of importance to those interested in Vietnam and in a comparative perspective of religious practices.