Canh Tien Tower

Tall grass grows knee high here, and the wind rolls through it in waves, bending it flat and letting it rise again. The earth underfoot is red. A few wild fig trees lean at a slant, their roots gripping the rough mounds of soil.

There are no houses and no walls. There is nothing at all, only a wide empty field.

But right in the middle of that emptiness, a tower of red brick rises straight up toward the sky.

This ground was never a meadow. It was once the courtyard of a royal court.

The tower is called Cánh Tiên. It stands in Nhơn Hậu commune, right at the center of what was once Đồ Bàn Citadel. The land lies in the old province of Bình Định, now part of Gia Lai.

And Đồ Bàn was no ordinary citadel. It was a capital, the largest and last great one of a kingdom called Champa. Champa was an ancient kingdom on the central and southern coast of what is now Vietnam. The Sanskrit name of this capital was Vijaya.

Where the grass grows now, there were once palaces and worship halls. There were markets, a public square, and a thick city wall all around. Far off, down the river, lay the port of Thị Nại, where trading ships from many lands tied up and unloaded their goods.

From the 11th century to the 15th, Vijaya was the most important political, economic and cultural center of the Champa kingdom. For several hundred years it was the busiest, liveliest place in the whole country.

Now only grass remains. Grass grows where stone paving once lay. Wild fig trees split the old slabs of the citadel in two. Almost everything that once surrounded this tower, the palaces, the worship halls and the markets, is gone.

Only the tower is still here.

It was built in the 12th century and rises nearly 20 meters. It has four tiers, and each tier is smaller than the one below it. At the four corners of every tier stand four small corner towers, reaching up like slender points. Tier rests on tier, lighter and thinner the higher it goes, as if a pair of wings were lifting the whole tower off the ground. People of old looked at that shape and named it for the wings of a fairy. That is what Cánh Tiên means.

Closer up, something unusual shows. The pillars at the corners of the tower are faced with purple sandstone, carved with fine patterns. It is real stone, not brick. That purple has been here for nearly 900 years. The technique is very rare among Cham towers, and it is found almost nowhere else.

Researchers believe that a tower standing at the very heart of the capital must have held a vital place in the spiritual life of Vijaya. It was the central tower, the tower of an entire royal city.

Then, in 1471, the story of the capital Vijaya turned to a new chapter. Đồ Bàn was no longer a capital. Trading ships no longer tied up at Thị Nại as they once had.

But the tower still stood.

The Cham carried their culture south, to the area of Ninh Thuận and Bình Thuận. That culture was not lost. To this day, in the Katê season in Ninh Thuận, the Cham still remember their ancestors, as they did a thousand years ago. Cham culture is still alive.

Back here, once the capital had turned its page, Đồ Bàn Citadel was left empty. Historical records say that for more than 300 years, only grass and wind remained. Then, in 1776, the Tây Sơn repaired the old citadel. The Tây Sơn were three brothers who led an uprising from 1771 and for a time ruled Vietnam. They made it their headquarters, and it came to be called Hoàng Đế Citadel.

Through all that time, through every change, the tower stood and watched.

It watched the capital at its most prosperous. It watched the day the capital turned its page. It watched three centuries of grass grow, and then the Tây Sơn repairing the walls. In 1982 it was ranked a National Architectural and Artistic Monument, and the whole country has looked after it since.

About 900 years on, the tower still stands alone in the field, the last witness of a royal city that most of the world has forgotten.

The wind moves through the grass, and the shadow of the tower stretches long across it. The tower is still there, lifting its wings toward the sky.