Buu Son Ky Huong

According to the historian Hue-Tam Ho Tai, the phrase “Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương” (literally "Strange Fragrance from the Precious Mountain," from the Sino-Vietnamese ) was coined by writers belonging to the Buddhist sect known as the Hòa Hảo, founded in Southern Vietnam by a twenty-year-old mystic named Huỳnh Phú Sổ in 1937. Huỳnh Phú Sổ claimed to be the reincarnation of another mystic from Southern Vietnam named Doan Minh Huyen, who came to be known as the “Buddha Master of Western Peace” (Phật Thầy Tây An). Doan Minh Huyen assumed this title during the cholera epidemic in 1849, which killed over a million people, and was reputed to have supernatural abilities to cure the sick and the insane. His followers wore amulets bearing the Chinese characters for “Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương,” a phrase that became identified, retrospectively, with the form of Buddhism practiced by Doan Minh Huyen, and the millenarian movement associated the latter.