Khuong My Cham Towers

Three towers stand on a low mound of earth, and you can see them from far away.

Not in deep forest, not on a cliff. It is just a low mound in Tam Xuân commune, in the city of Da Nang. National Route 1 runs only about 200 meters to the east. The three red brick towers stand in a straight line from north to south, and all three face east.

The South Tower is the largest. The North Tower is the smallest. The Middle Tower, between them, is of medium size.

A child walks straight to the South Tower. At its foot, carved sandstone slabs run along the wall. Human figures. Animals. Scene after scene, one after another, like the pages of a book.

The child stands and looks, saying nothing. Then the child turns and asks, "What are they doing?"

It is the best question anyone could ask here. The Cham builders raised these towers between the late 9th and the early 10th century. These builders served Champa, an ancient kingdom on the central and southern coast of what is now Vietnam. They were not only building a place of worship. They were building a story.

The reliefs along the base of the South Tower tell scenes from the Ramayana. The Ramayana is an ancient Indian epic, composed in Sanskrit. These scenes are not painted, and not written. They are carved into sandstone, deep and lasting, one scene at a time. Two researchers, Trần Kỳ Phương and Nguyễn Tú Anh, call this style narrative sculpture, sculpture that tells a story.

In other words, each stone slab is a chapter. Each carved scene is a page of the book.

So that viewers would not mix up one scene with the next, the Cham carvers used a sign of their own. Between each pair of scenes runs a band of climbing vines in relief, curling in an even rhythm. It is not extra decoration. It is punctuation, like a period between two sentences, telling the viewer that one scene has ended and a new one begins.

A thousand years before comic books, the Cham were already telling stories that way.

The scenes on those slabs include a golden deer luring Sita, and Sita held captive on the island of Lanka. There is the monkey army of Hanuman, building a stone bridge across the sea. And one scene stands above all the rest. Ravana faces Sita in the Ashoka grove. He is a king with ten heads, standing before a woman who does not bow her head.

According to the researcher Trần Kỳ Phương, this is the only sculpture of this scene in all the visual art of Southeast Asia and South Asia. Here, on the sandstone wall of the South Tower at Khương Mỹ, the Cham carvers chose to carve that very moment.

Then there are the monkeys. Around the foot of the South Tower runs a whole row of sandstone slabs carved with scenes of monkeys, each one full of life. The child stands watching, and laughs. The tower has found its way into schoolbooks too. The writer Lam Linh wrote about Khương Mỹ in a piece included in the Vietnamese sixth-grade literature textbook.

The Cham carvers knew the Ramayana by heart. And they retold that story not in words, but with hammer and chisel, in sandstone.

Khương Mỹ is special in another way too. Most Cham towers were built to worship Shiva, the god of destruction and rebirth. But some researchers believe Khương Mỹ was built for Vishnu, the protector god who keeps the world from falling apart. In the excavations, people found sculpture linked to Vishnu, but no statues of Brahma or Shiva. And Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, is an incarnation of Vishnu, come down to earth in human form. That may be why his story is on the tower walls.

All three towers are in the Khương Mỹ style. It is a style of transition, between the strong Đồng Dương style and the graceful Trà Kiệu style. Not wholly one, not wholly the other.

From 2007 to 2008, archaeologists dug around the towers and uncovered 124 artifacts, among them figures of Naga serpents, monkeys, horses and elephants. Khương Mỹ also left us a statue of Vishnu with four arms. Four arms, reaching four ways, like a god holding the whole sky in his embrace. That statue is now in the History Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Most of the sculptures found at Khương Mỹ in earlier times are now in the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang. Each one is a piece of a Cham story still left unfinished.

In 1989, the state recognized Khương Mỹ as a national monument of architecture and art. It was an official name for something that anyone standing before the stone wall already knows.

Before printed books, before writing was common, there was stone. The Cham carvers invited later generations into their story with hammer and chisel, with every cut pressed deep into the sandstone. A thousand years later, a child stands here and asks, "What are they doing?"

And now there is an answer.