Binh Thanh Tower

One tower in Tây Ninh has stood for more than a thousand years, while the land around it kept changing.

The Bình Thạnh tower is not large by modern standards. It is about 10 meters tall, on a square base about 5 meters on each side. Yet its meaning has little to do with size. It lies in time, and in the people who raised it so long ago.

Many official and press sources tie the tower to the Óc Eo culture and date it to about the 8th to the 9th century. Óc Eo was an ancient culture that once flourished across the delta of southern Vietnam. It was in contact with the traders of India, China and the other early civilizations of Southeast Asia. The Bình Thạnh tower is one of the traces of that culture that remain on Tây Ninh soil.

The provincial list of monuments for Tây Ninh, issued in 2025, ranks the site as a national monument of architecture and art. That ranking rests on Decision 937, signed on July 23, 1993.

It was not always a single tower. The Bình Thạnh complex first had three towers. Today only the main one still stands in fairly good condition. The other two survive only as traces and foundations, sinking quietly into grass and soil, as time takes everything in the end.

The main tower stands in the south of the complex, with its real door facing east. The other three sides have false doors, each with decorative patterns. The main doorway juts out from the body of the tower, and above it sits a stone slab carved with a stylized chrysanthemum. This is a fine point of the builders' art. Even on so small a building, the builders of a thousand years ago took care to decorate all four sides, false doors and real one alike.

Up close, the fired bricks are laid very tightly, and the wall shows almost no visible gaps. Many researchers point to this as a special mark of the Óc Eo towers. It is also a technique that scholars are still arguing over today.

The tower went through a large restoration in the late 1990s. More recently, in 2024, the Tây Ninh culture and tourism office digitized the site in 360 degrees, using augmented and virtual reality. That way, more people can meet the thousand-year-old tower without ever setting foot in the province.

The tower stands in the open fields, with no solid fence around it and no modern roof over it. In the afternoon, the sun falls straight on the dark red brick and throws long shadows across the ground. In that light it looks like something that has watched many centuries go by, and is still here when so much else has vanished.