We went looking for vegan food in Taipei but found a cult leader — here’s what happened next.
A podcast producer’s struggle to tell a story that becomes more elusive the farther down the rabbit hole she goes.
The life of a podcast producer can be fascinating, frustrating, exciting, and excruciating. Producing a global show like Passport requires an entire team of professional audio excavators who scour the planet looking for stories that help unlock a window into a place and then tracking down the right people to help us tell it. But every now and again, that order flips on its head — and instead of a producer hunting the story, the story starts hunting them. And that was exactly the case with this week’s episode of Passport, set in Taiwan.
“Suddenly, in the middle of the night, I woke up to a barrage of messages saying she didn’t want any part of it. That she was afraid of participating. And I thought, should I be worried too? To be honest, I was spooked.”
It was 3am Barcelona time (where our team is based) when Passport producer Harriet Davies received a series of messages from a Taiwanese food journalist she’d been trying to connect with for weeks for a story about Taipei’s vegan scene. She’d been turned on to the topic by a friend of hers who had wandered into a popular vegan restaurant there called The Loving Hut. Her friend thought Harriet should check it out. She couldn’t fully describe it to her, but said there was something a bit odd about this place. It had a complete minimalist, all-white interior and, most interestingly, it had a giant TV playing something called Supreme Master TV, non-stop. A little research revealed that The Loving Hut was a giant and growing vegan restaurant chain — the largest in the world, in fact — and that had been founded in Taiwan by a woman named Ching Hai who goes by the title Supreme Master. By some accounts, Ching Hai had amassed a following of over 2 million people worldwide and was officially known as a “cybersect” — a religious movement that primarily functions and connects online. Our entire teams’ interests were piqued and so Harriet went digging. And almost immediately, she’d run smack into this ominous sounding warning from a potential source who wanted nothing to do with our story.
Now, that’s the kind of message we actually did expect to find when producing our last food episode, about the Costa Nostra’s extortion of Sicily’s food and restaurant scene. When you’re literally talking to farmers and restaurateurs about politicians, lawyers, and activists who’ve been killed by Mafia car bombs, it goes with the territory. But it’s not necessarily the response you expect when producing a show about meatless, cruelty free cuisine in a country where almost 87% of people identify as Buddhist or Toaist. But there it was. Something had scared this food journalist off — and left Harriet wondering if she herself might be wise to steer clear.
Now when most people get a cryptic or anxiety-inducing message from someone warning them to back off of a topic or story, they probably listen. But when you’re a podcast producer, it means it’s time to toss out the story you thought you were doing, because the real story just found you. And so Harriet forged on.
She wanted to understand who Supreme Master was and what it was that had scared her first source off. The journalist had included several links to news stories in her messages to Harriet. They were in Mandarin. But a quick Google Translate later, and an image started to form — and it was a bit disconcerting. There were articles about fraud, tax evasion, a mysterious fire, and the death of a follower — all linked to Supreme Master. The articles Harriet began to pour over were filled with claims that Supreme Master was a cult leader and that The Loving Hut was the epicenter — and the sacred cash cow — of her outfit. People joke that Veganism is a cult, but suddenly that link was starting to feel quite real.
But reading Google translated articles often coming out of nearby countries — like China — with state-sponsored media was no stand-in for the truth. Harriet needed to find someone on the ‘inside’ to talk to to get the real story behind Supreme Master.
And that’s when things got even more cryptic.
Harriet’s first stop was to simply walk through the front door — literally and metaphorically. Sometimes there’s no need to be surreptitious about it out of the gate. If nothing else, our team wagered, The Loving Hut is a business who might find some value in talking to a podcast producer about their mission and their food. If they have nothing to hide, it shouldn’t be hard to talk to someone. But you can guess how that turned out. Dozens of emails, phone calls, and messages later — no one had returned Harriet’s queries. She’d reached out to Loving Hut franchise owners, managers, and folks on the corporate side of things — and been greeted with deafening silence.
She was still determined to get Supreme Master’s side of the story — but with the front door temporarily out of order, it was time for Harriet to start digging out back. While the internet may be robbing us of our attention spans, eyesight, and democracies — it’s also the best tool for organizing humankind has ever seen. There is a community for everything. And so, after a few trips down some rabbit holes, Harriet had located several online forums and Facebook groups of people raising alarm bells about Supreme Master and The Loving Hut. And as Harriet dove into these forums, the plot thickened.
They were full of people claiming to be ex-followers of Supreme Master or family members of current followers. They spoke of people being convinced to give over all their earthly possessions — even houses — to Supreme Master, of being driven to divorce and bankruptcy, and of a series of suspicious events that had occurred around Supreme Master but had never been fully investigated.
There was a fire in 1996 that had burned down her main dojo in Taiwan after she’d been charged with fraud and tax evasion. As she reportedly fled the country — or did she just decide to move shop? — the dojo had burned to the ground. Had one of her followers burned it down in protest? Had she put someone up to burning it down? Had important papers or evidence been burned down with it? Theories swirled and people on the forum wanted answers.
That same year — 1996 — there was a large donation made to Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign of $640k (that’s $1,052,000 in today’s dollars). How had she amassed that much money and more importantly, why had she donated it to Bill Clinton? Bill Clinton might be an avowed vegan now, but this was a full 14 years before he went plant-based following coronary artery bypass surgery in 2010. 1996 Bill Clinton was still “Bubba” — chomping hamburgers, fried chicken, and BBQ on the campaign trail. So what was the deal? A TIME magazine article about the incident from 1997 referred to Supreme Master as the “Martha (as in, Stewart) of Buddhism”. Considering Martha’s future tangles with the law, perhaps they were more right than they knew.
Then there was the Florida incident.
One of the few stories reported on in English, it was a truly bizarre one. In March of 2004, rangers at Florida’s Biscayne Bay National Park had gotten a tip about something weird happening inside a narrow strip of mangrove forest. The mangroves in question were right on the coast about 15 miles south of Miami. When rangers arrived, they were greeted with a truly perplexing sight. Three motorized caravans were parked just beyond the park’s limits. They were surrounded by a giant deck connecting them and an entire aviary. From there, a path had been hacked through the mangrove forest.
When the rangers followed it, they found a wooden pathway built — it led all the way out to the ocean and a wooden boardwalk continued for another 350 feet into the water. At the end of it — was a giant glass building built upon an entirely man-made — and 100% unauthorized — island. This area was protected coastline — and there definitely wasn’t supposed to be a walkway and man-made island there. The caravan was linked to a worldwide religious sect known as the Suma Ching Hai International Association — aka, Ching Hai, Supreme Master, and founder of The Loving Hut. When law enforcement tried to track down who was responsible for the bizarre camp-cum-island, they found that a woman named Celestia De Lamour had purchased the adjacent plot of land. But after a bit more digging, they soon discovered that Celestia De Lamour was actually Ching Hai, Supreme Master.
And perhaps most disturbingly, the people on the forum talked about a follower of hers that had died at an event at one of her dojos in 2019. According to the forum — the people at the ceremony had called Supreme Master before calling an ambulance. But a search for stories about this death turned up nothing.
However, despite clearly unlocking the motherlode of Supreme Master critics, this back door would prove just as frustrating as the front door had. Person after person Harriet reached out to refused to comment or simply vanished after she reached out. Many of the accounts were linked to dummy social media accounts and untraceable email addresses. Were these critics real? Were they anti-Supreme Master bots? Or were they truly people so scared that they’d chosen well-hidden identities before they’d dared criticize her? What was going on?
If we couldn’t find people to actually talk to us about Supreme Master, could we really tell this story?
Harriet continued to dig — she found experts on religious cults who had met Supreme Master and food journalists who weren’t afraid to talk about the vegan movement in Taiwan — but still no one from inside the movement — positive or negative. In fact, she couldn’t even locate Supreme Master herself. There were reports of her showing up at random events around the world — but Harriet couldn’t seem to pin down where Supreme Master actually lived or spent most of her time.
Then Hollywood called.
Well, technically it was a Los Angeles-based producer for Supreme Master TV — the TV channel Harriet’s friend had seen all that time ago in The Loving Hut she’d walked into. Supreme Master TV is a mixture of TedTalks meets veganism meets… Supreme Master, of course.
While everyone on the restaurant side of The Loving Hut had ghosted Harriet, someone had passed her info along to the Supreme TV side of things. Finally, Harriet had someone on the inside. It was a moment of triumph after weeks of searching. But of course, he had nothing but great things to say about The Loving Hut and Supreme Master. He spoke of the beauty in the community, the powerful mission of Supreme Master’s message, the virtue of the vegan diet they are promoting across the world. From where he was standing, there was nothing shady about it. It was all love, great food, and good people.
Harriet knew she was only getting one side of the story. But no matter what she tried, nobody would come forward to actually speak to the accusations against Supreme Master. She had been tipped off on what seemed like a simple story and had uncovered a much larger one. She’d spent weeks hunting it and gotten further than most in her search. She’d found a professor who’d witnessed Supreme Master’s hold on people first-hand and spent years studying religious movements and cults. She’d found a Supreme Master TV producer who’d given her a window — if a rosey one — into the world. And she’d found a community of people looking for answers and scared — but unwilling to talk.
Harriet was never able to break through whatever wall or fears are at play in the world of Supreme Master’s critics. But maybe this episode will bring a few of them out of the woodwork in the end.
Is the Supreme Master an incredible mystic poet trying to inspire the world to follow a more sustainable and less cruel way of living? Or is she a capitalist mastermind harnessing people’s desire to do good for her own ends? Or perhaps both?
Listen to this episode of Passport and you be the judge.
For more remarkable stories from around the world check out The Ticket on Medium.
