Young Page of Cửa Suốt
Cậu Bé Cửa Suốt · Holy Pages
Compiled by Andy Tran
Young Page of Cửa Suốt is a figure in the youthful male attendant rank known as the Thánh Cậu within Đạo Mẫu (Dao Mau), the Vietnamese worship of Mother Goddesses. This profile explains the figure's ritual position while distinguishing living tradition from documented history.
Quick answer
Young Page of Cửa Suốt is a youthful attendant of the Cửa Suốt sea gate in Quảng Ninh. The reference source places him in the Trần dynasty cult of Đức Ông Đệ Tam Cửa Suốt (Trần Quốc Tảng), not in the Four Palaces Holy Pages; he is listed here beside the other Pages so readers can tell them apart. Vietnamese names and honorifics are retained because literal English substitutions can conceal rank, ritual relationships and local usage.
Names, rank and palace
The Vietnamese devotional name is shown alongside the English reference name in the page heading. Popular usage calls him a Cậu Bé, like the youthful male attendants known as the Thánh Cậu, but his cult belongs to the Trần dynasty tradition. Palace affiliation, ritual colour and honorifics can vary between temples; this page does not assign a more specific colour where the reviewed sources do not agree.
Tradition, variants and evidence
The Young Page of Cửa Suốt is associated with the coastal gateway of Quảng Ninh. His cult shows how a local guardian spirit of the Trần tradition can sit close to, without belonging to, the Four Palaces Page rank.
Đạo Mẫu is a living and locally varied tradition. Feast dates, genealogies, principal temples and even palace affiliations may differ between communities. Where a claim rests on oral tradition or liturgical poetry, it should be read as devotional knowledge rather than modern archival proof.
Place in ritual practice
In hầu đồng (hau dong), a deity is recognised through invocatory chầu văn music, colours, costume, gestures and the sequence of the spirit possession ceremony. Not every named deity is incarnated in every ceremony, and actual sequences depend on the ritual occasion and the medium's lineage.
Feast days, temples and pilgrimage
No single feast date or principal temple is asserted here without a directly checkable source for this individual figure. Lunar dates and local observances can differ by temple and year; visitors should confirm current arrangements with the temple custodian before travelling.
Related reading
Ritual song text
Cậu Bé Cửa Suốt belongs to the Trần dynasty cult rather than the Four Palaces Holy Pages; his liturgy is Trần-cult text outside the scope of this series. The Vietnamese version of this page explains this.
Sources and further reading
- UNESCO: Practices related to the Việt beliefs in the Mother Goddesses of Three Realms.
- Ngô Đức Thịnh, Đạo Mẫu Việt Nam, Religious Publishing House.
- Karen Fjelstad and Nguyễn Thị Hiền (eds.), Possessed by the Spirits: Mediumship in Contemporary Vietnamese Communities, 2006.
This page is an editorial synthesis. It does not claim that UNESCO separately verifies the biography of every deity.