My Khanh Cham Tower

It was the morning of April 18, 2001. Workers from the Phú Diên workshop of the Thừa Thiên Hue Minerals Company were digging a pit to mine titanium. They were working in the coastal sand dunes of Mỹ Khánh village.

A shovel blade struck brick.

The worker stopped. He dug a little more. More brick. Then more again. Then a stretch of wall appeared, nearly a meter thick, built of dark red fired brick with no mortar. The men dug wider. Slowly the shape of a Cham tower came into view, still fairly intact. It had lain still in this spot for no one knew how many centuries. It was a tower of Champa, an ancient kingdom on the central and southern coast of what is now Vietnam.

That was how the Mỹ Khánh tower was found.

The place was Mỹ Khánh village, now part of Phú Vinh commune in the city of Hue. It lies in the coastal dunes near the Tam Giang lagoon. That is about 30 kilometers from Hue by road. Under that sand, a tower had rested 5 to 7 meters down, and no one knew it was there.

The Thừa Thiên Hue Provincial Museum and the Institute of Archaeology took up the work that same year, 2001. They peeled the sand away layer by layer, carefully and slowly. It was like opening a letter that had lain in the ground since long before any map of this land was drawn.

Little by little, the tower came into the open.

It is rectangular. Its base is more than 8 meters long and more than 7 meters wide. The walls are from 90 centimeters to 1 meter thick. The fired Cham bricks fit tightly together, laid by a rubbing technique. Each brick was ground against the next, then bonded with tree resin, with no mortar at all. Builders today still look at this work with surprise: bricks with no mortar have held together this firmly, and stood for more than 12 centuries, long stretches of them under the sand.

The main door faces east, toward the rising sun. The other three sides have false doors, finely carved but never meant to open. Researchers call this a low tower, with tiers that narrow as they rise. It is a form from the oldest group of Cham architecture.

Inside, archaeologists found a sandstone yoni, a sacred symbol in the worship of the god Shiva. With it lay pieces of gold leaf and pottery. The tower had kept these things for many centuries, undisturbed.

What astonished the scientists most was the age of the tower.

Radiocarbon analysis confirmed that it was built early in the 8th century. It is one of the oldest Cham towers still standing in central Vietnam.

In the 8th century, the great Cham towers that later generations would know had not yet been built. The Mỹ Khánh tower was one of the first lessons the Cham learned in speaking to their gods through fired brick.

Then the sand buried it. The wind pushed sand in from the sea, a thin layer each season, each year, each century. The tower vanished completely. People walking past never knew. No map marked it. Time went on.

Until the morning of April 18, 2001.

On December 28, 2001, the Ministry of Culture and Information ranked the tower a national relic of architecture and art. A few years later, the restoration was finished, on a budget of nearly 4 billion dong. The tower is now protected inside a glass house. Rain, sun and wind-blown sand can no longer wear it away.

In 2022, the world took note of the story. The WorldKings organization announced a world record. By that record, it is the first ancient Cham brick tower sunk deep under a coastal sand dune to be excavated and preserved anywhere in the world. Before Mỹ Khánh, no ancient brick tower buried that deep in a coastal dune had ever been dug out and preserved.

The very sand that buried the tower is what protected it. No rain, no sun. No human hands. No war and no storm could reach it. People often think of a coastal dune as nothing but an obstacle. Here it became the finest armor nature could give a brick building from the 8th century.

Today the Mỹ Khánh tower stands inside its glass house in Phú Vinh commune. The thousand-year-old Cham bricks are still dark red in the light that filters through the glass. The stone yoni still lies exactly where the Cham builders set it, more than 12 centuries ago.

Visitors leave the grounds of the glass house, but that April morning in 2001 stays in the mind.

For many centuries, the dunes hid the tower. Then the shovel of a titanium worker touched what the sea sand had quietly kept safe for so long.