13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

LE, Chi Que

New Developments in the Legend and Worship Rituals of the ‘Store Queen’: a cultural phenomenon engendered by the shift from a subsistence-based to a market-based economy

According to folk legend, the ‘Store Queen’ was an eleventh-century Ly king’s concubine who earned great merit by preserving the king’s rice stores and expanding the cultivated land in an area of Bac Ninh province comprising 72 villages. When she died, people from these villages set up temples to worship her. One temple, located in Co Me village, Vu Ninh commune, Bac Ninh province, where there is a royal tomb, is considered to exert a particularly strong supernatural influence. From feudal times through to the 1980s, ‘Store Queen’ was worshipped as an agricultural saint.

After 1980, Vietnam entered a phase of substantial political and economic change. With the shift from an agricultural-subsistence economy to a market-based economy and the development of businesses and services, the folk legend of the ‘Store Queen’ was propagated nation-wide. As the ‘Store Queen’ is considered a symbol of health, over the lunar Tet holiday period, several million people from all parts of the country, most of them businessmen, come to ‘Store Queen’ temples to pray for prosperity and borrow capital for their business. At the end of the lunar year they return for payment.

The spread and change in significance of the folk legend and the boom in worship rituals such as praying for benefit, borrowing, repaying capital, or reciprocating favours in ‘Store Queen’ temples over the last 20 years reflects the shift in Vietnamese society from an agricultural subsistence economy to a commodity and market-based one.