My Son - Champa Ruins

Our last full day in Hoi An, we drove an hour outside of town to explore My Son Sanctuary, a UNESCO World Heritage site. These Champa ruins hold immense historical and cultural significance, offering a glimpse into the ancient Champa Kingdom that thrived from the 4th to the 13th centuries. The main building material was sandstone, so it's pretty incredible that some of these buildings were built back in the 4th century! This is a complex of monuments for worshiping the god King Shiva, located under Cat's Tooth mountain, or what the locals call Sacred Bird mountain, which is the god of peace and wealth. The structures are built from sandstone, so many are badly deteriorated but lots of work is in progress to preserve them. Many, many heads are missing from the temples and statues, as back in the day, and probably today still, they are worth a lot of money on the black market. Some in the group said they have seen some of these heads in museums around the world, so the artifacts are finding their way out of private collections and into public museums so we can all learn more about this history. One of the interesting animal sculptures is the Vietnamese dragon, with its jaw opened wide, with a long, thin tongue. These dragons always keep a châu (gem/jewel) in their mouths, which is a symbol of humanity, nobility and knowledge. Stark reminders of more recent history are abundant, with giant divots in the ground, where Americans dropped thousand pound bombs during the Vietnam war. We saw a series in a line, representing an example of a carpet bombing campaign. On a lighter note, there were several cluster fig trees on the banks of the river, which I believe we ate at the nunnery at our vegan lunch. At the time none of us at the table could believe we were eating figs because we were thinking of the figs back home.Read more