Bang An Cham Tower

A child walks around the foot of the tower, one hand on brick that is warm from the sun, counting out loud. One, two, three, four. Then the child does not stop. Five, six, seven, eight.

The child stands still and asks, "Eight? Why does it have eight sides?"

It is the very question this tower has been waiting more than a thousand years to hear.

This is Bằng An Tower, in Điện An, in the old Điện Bàn area. The area was part of Quảng Nam province, which is now part of the city of Da Nang. The tower stands about 14 kilometers north of Hoi An. A tower of dark red brick rises about 21.5 meters into a wide sky.

But the height is not what keeps the child counting. It is the base underfoot.

Cham towers are built on a square plan. They come from Champa, an ancient kingdom on the central and southern coast of what is now Vietnam. Four sides, four corners. Mỹ Sơn is square. Khương Mỹ is square. Hòa Lai is square. Almost all the other Cham towers have four sides.

Except this one.

Bằng An Tower has eight sides. Each side is exactly four meters long, perfectly even. According to the Nhân Dân newspaper and VietnamNet, it is the only octagonal Cham tower still standing in the whole of Vietnam. To stand here is to stand before something that is not repeated anywhere else.

So the child's question is far from naive. Why eight?

The Cham builders raised this tower around the 10th to 11th century. They knew how to build a square tower. Their forefathers had built square towers for hundreds of years. Square was familiar, safe and easy. Yet here they chose to make it hard for themselves.

They cut four extra corners. Each side had to meet the next, and each brick had to lean at exactly the right angle, so that eight faces closed into one unbroken body. One wrong angle, and the whole tower would tilt. Each inside angle of the eight faces had to measure exactly 135 degrees. Off by a quarter of a degree, and the faces would not close against each other. The builders had to get that number right by eye, by hand and by experience, with no protractor and no table of figures.

Stranger still, they raised the whole tower from dark red fired brick, made from earth of this very region. There is no line of mortar to be seen anywhere in the wall. The bricks seem to cling to one another, so tight that nearly a thousand years of wind and rain have not pulled them apart.

According to some researchers of Hindu cosmology and Cham culture, shape is a kind of language. The square is earth: fixed, steady, with four clear directions. The circle is heaven: boundless, with no beginning and no end. The octagon, with its eight sides, stands exactly in between. It is a bridge, a passage between earth and heaven, between the finite and the infinite.

Eight sides are not there to look pretty. Eight sides are a statement. The builder was using form to say what words cannot fully say.

The main door faces east, toward the sun that rises each morning. On either side of the door stand two sandstone Gajasimha statues, each with an elephant's body and a lion's head. They have stood quietly through many seasons of rain and sun. Inside, the god Shiva is worshiped through the symbol of the Linga. The tower has two parts, a front hall and a shrine behind it.

And here is one more way of reading the tower. Some researchers say that, seen from outside, the whole tower rises like a giant Linga, while the eight-sided base below suggests a Yoni. Many scholars believe the builder wrapped a belief in the flourishing of life into the form of the tower. This is one way of understanding it, an interpretation, not something confirmed.

But however it is understood, one thing cannot be denied. The eight sides are deliberate.

In 1989, the tower was recognized as a national historic and cultural site. It was an official name for what anyone standing here can feel for themselves: this place is unusual.

It is still a sacred place for the Cham, kept through the centuries.

The child is still walking around, counting once more to be sure. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. The Cham builder did not carve eight sides instead of four by accident. Every corner was a choice.