The Great Divine Temple

Most architects would balk at building a 320-foot cathedral without blueprints. The Cao Dai faithful in 1930s Vietnam had a different consultant: God himself, who transmitted every measurement through séances and spirit-writing sessions. Construction ran roughly sixteen years, accounts of the exact span vary, with volunteers building the Great Divine Temple based solely on nightly divine instructions received via planchette, no drawings, no professional architects. The result? A fantasia where dragon-wrapped bamboo pillars support an 11-foot eyeball gazing from a cosmic sphere, and Victor Hugo shares sainthood with Joan of Arc and Charlie Chaplin.

Caodaism itself was born the same way, in a string of séances held in and around Saigon between 1920 and 1926, when a group of Vietnamese civil servants began receiving messages from a god they called Cao Dai, the same being who would later dictate the shape of his own cathedral down to the dragon coils on its pillars. Four times a day, at 6, noon, 6 again, and midnight, the temple fills with chanting and colored robes: yellow for Buddhism, blue for Taoism, red for Confucianism. It is, by any reasonable architectural standard, a building that should not exist. It exists anyway, exactly as specified by a god with very particular taste.