Word: dais
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...oddest religion in the East, and the one with the most catholic pantheon, is known as Cao Dai. Founded in Saigon in the 19205, it numbers among its archangels Victor Hugo, Joan of Arc, Sun Yat-sen and Clemenceau, and boasts some 2,000,000 adherents, a private army and a pope. But Cao Dai's voluble, bright-eyed little Pope Pham Cong Tac was never able to resist meddling in secular matters. Tossing his 15,000-man army now on one side, now on the other in the delicate balance of Vietnamese politics, he succeeded only in incurring...
...interrupted his daily mandolin strumming and xylophone banging to pray for the dead. Meanwhile, rivalry between the pope and his disaffected general to win the favor of the faithful went on apace. Last week General Phuong tipped the scales by collecting certified letters from 19 vestal virgins of Cao Dai complaining that the pope had raped them. He then called a congress of the Cao Dai hierarchy to consider the complaints. Three days before the congress met, Pope Tac decided to get out of town. Loading his two daughters and a bearded cardinal into a sky-blue Ford, he headed...
...general slaughter in central Annam following Emperor Bao Dai's surrender to the Communists back in 1945, Diem's brother Ngo Dinh Khoi and his eldest son were dragged out of their home and whisked away in a green Citroen to be shot near the village of Co Bi in the high, jagged mountains of the Chaine Annamatique. "I remember my brother Khoi," says Diem, who fled into hiding at the time. "He was the brightest son of our family of twelve, a tall, handsome man. The welfare of the people was his life's work...
Next came the brothels, but with somewhat less success. As police entered the Dai La Thien and the Pare aux Buffles (Stockyard), a lower-class emporium with a mere 200 population, scores of girls scrambled to safety over back walls. In some other places, indignant Foreign Legion and Vietnamese troops stood off the cops with rifles, and opposition from the military generally was so strong that Diem later exempted field brothels from...
...licensed prostitutes simply vanished-back to their families, to nearby Cambodia, or to emergency havens provided by rich customers (who paid the madams up to 10,000 piasters for the privilege). But the back of the racket nevertheless was broken. Last week Diem's police began stripping the Dai La Thien of its mirrors and nude murals, to convert it into a school for ex-prostitutes, teaching them such trades as sewing and nursing. To discourage girls from reverting to their old trade, police announced that customers caught patronizing them would be jailed until their wives applied for their...