20 FEBRUARY 2014: MY SON

Mỹ Sơn
Our first organised trip out from the resort was an hour and a half's drive away, 40 kms. south-west of Hoi An, to  a cluster of abandoned and partially ruined Hindu temples constructed between the 4th and the 14th century AD by the kings of Champa, and discovered by French archaeologists in the late 19th century.

 The Champa people originated in India and settled in the Central highlands of what is today Vietnam. From the 4th to the 14th century AD, the valley at Mỹ Sơn was a site of religious ceremony for kings of the ruling dynasties of Champa (whose capital Simhapura is the present-day Tra Kieu) as well as a burial place for Cham royalty and national heroes. Successive dynasties added more temples to the site until in its prime there were seventy buildings. The temples are dedicated to the worship of the god Shiva, known under various local names, the most important of which is "Bhadresvara. The area was considered the domain of gods and god-kings, and living on-site would have been an attendant population of priests, dancers and servants.

Mỹ Sơn is perhaps the longest- inhabited archaeological site in Indochina, but, after the Vietcong based themselves here in the 1960s, a large majority of its architecture was pounded to oblivion by US carpet bombing by B52s during a single week of the Vietnam War. Since 1999 My Son has been recognised by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

The whole site was originally in a bowl of lushly wooded hills, towered over by Cat's Tooth Mountain. So dense had been the vegetation, the individual Americans were unaware of what exactly lay beneath their bombs.

The site is now divided into area Groups.

We started with Group C where the central temple is still standing and fairly well preserved, though we will have to wait until we visit the Champ museum in Da Nang to see the statue of Shiva it was built to house.

The statues of standing gods around the walls are still there, though, ......

 .......as is the carved lintel that runs across the entrance.

Group B is regarded as having been the spiritual epicentre of My Son, yet only the base of the central sanctuary remains. Stone epitaphs nearby reveal it was erected in the 11th century on the site of an earlier wooden temple.

Nearby is a well-preserved repository room where votive offerings and other ritual paraphernalia would have been stored in its chimney-shaped interior.

Outside on the west wall is a bas-relief of two elephants with their trunks entwined around a coconut tree.

At Group D two long, windowed meditation halls (mandapa), where the priests would meditate prior to worshipping, 

 have been converted into galleries. 

The War never being far from memory, there are also 2 more recent exhibits on display:

The ground between these 2 galleries was named the Court of Stelae by early archaeologists, a reference to the many stone tablets etched with sandskrit script.

The remains of Group G are poorly preserved:

At the corners of the sanctuary you can still pick out horned gargoyles sporting fangs.

Our last stop  on site was Group F, where efforts to reconstruct the sanctuaries had proved too difficult and had had to be abandoned.

Meet Mr. Bwe (pronounced Boo), our really nice and very helpful Saga Guide....

...an English graduate who is now licenced, by the government, to work as a Travel Guide. He told  us lots of interesting things about the temples, but more interesting were the asides he made about Vietnamese life. 

• We'd assumed that elderly parents would have been cared for in a Communist state but far from it: only ex-Government employees have any pension provided so it is customary for elderly Vietnamese to be in effect abandoned by their children and left to fend as best they can.
• In the early 1980s the government had given the land to the peasants but since then, in the absence of primogeniture, the growth in population had resulted in the plots being too small to feed a family, and the resultant exodus of the young to urban areas looking for work.
• Education was universal and free but to get any good job later you had to have money. He never used the words 'bribery' or 'corruption' but they were clearly intended. 
• While there has never been a One Child Policy, as in China, the Government policy favoured families having only 2 children. This was largely ignored in the countryside, but in urban areas parents of larger families, while not 'punished' (our word),  found their lives made difficult.
• And, of course, his references to the War. He told us his family were originally from the Demilitarised Zone around the 17th Parallel, and that they had been forced by the Americans to move south to Da Nang, where they had eventually stayed.  Impossible to know how much of his tone was the result of this and how much the result of his education.