Banh It Tower

Seen from a distance, the brick towers on this hill suggest the shape of a traditional cake from the Bình Định region. That cake is called bánh ít, and it gives the towers their popular name, Tháp Bánh Ít.

In research documents, the official name is the Cham tower complex at Tuy Phước Bắc. The French had a name of their own for it, Tour d'argent, which means Silver Tower.

This is one of the most important groups of Champa towers still standing. Champa was an ancient kingdom on the central and southern coast of what is now Vietnam. The Gia Lai Provincial Museum describes this group as one of the largest left from that kingdom.

Four main structures remain: the Gate Tower, the Stele Tower, the Main Tower and the Fire Tower. The group was ranked a national monument of architecture and art in 1982. According to the museum, it dates from about the late 10th century to the early 12th century.

The towers stand on a hill in Đại Lễ hamlet, in Tuy Phước Bắc commune. The commune is in Gia Lai province. The center of Quy Nhơn lies about 20 kilometers away. Visitors climb the hill by steps before they reach each tower. From the top, the view opens out over Tuy Phước and Quy Nhơn.

The way into the sacred space is the Gate Tower, on the east side. It has two doors that open through each other, on an east to west line that runs straight to the door of the Main Tower at the top of the hill. To pass through it is to enter the ceremonial axis of the whole complex. Tiers of arched doorways rise like spearheads, a feature of the Bình Định style of Champa architecture. They look light, strong and graceful all at once.

The museum says these towers mark the shift from the Mỹ Sơn A1 style to the Bình Định style. In other words, Cham tower art was coming into its maturity. It kept the elegance of the older style and added stronger, more imposing elements.

On the south side of the hill is the Stele Tower. A stele is a stone slab with writing carved on it. All four sides of this tower have doors, which is quite unlike the usual kind of tower. It may have been a building to shelter a stele. It may once have held an inscribed stone recording the deeds of a king or a god. This is only a scholars' hypothesis, not a confirmed fact.

At the center of the whole complex stands the Main Tower. It is built on a square plan, 12 meters on each side. This is where the Cham of old held their rites of offering. The statue of Shiva inside today is a replica made in 2013. The original is kept at the Guimet Museum in Paris.

The last building on the route is the Fire Tower. It is a rectangle, 12 meters long and 5 meters wide, and it rises about 10 meters. According to the museum, this is where offerings were prepared before they were carried into the Main Tower. Its presence shows that a Cham temple complex did not end with a central tower of worship. It also had a set of supporting buildings, each with a clear role in the ritual.

The museum also records that the towers were once included in a list of 1,001 architectural works worth seeing in a lifetime, compiled by a group of British authors.

The towers have stood on this hill for more than a thousand years. They have seen many Champa dynasties, then the time of the Vietnamese, the time of the French, and the modern age. Wind from the Tuy Phước plain still blows up to the hilltop every morning. The old bricks still stand there, silent and firm, as they did on the day the Cham of old laid the last one.