Oc Eo Archaeological Site

In a glass case at the Óc Eo site lies a single gold coin. It is small and round, and thin as a dry leaf. On its face is the side profile of a stranger with a high nose and curly hair, ringed by letters I have never seen. My grandfather bends down beside me and points at the glass. I look for a long time, then ask quietly, "Grandfather, how long has this coin been here?"

He smiles. To answer, he says, the two of us must go back a very long way, two thousand years. The Mekong Delta was not then the quiet rice country we see today. The ancient coastline lay much closer than it does now. Right here, on mounds of earth rising from flooded ground, stood a busy port city called Óc Eo. People had dug long canals to join it to the sea, so that boats could come and go. A whole city, just beneath our feet.

On those canals, boat followed boat. Merchants from India brought fine gold jewelry. Sailors from China carried jars of glazed pottery. Strangest of all, some people carried gold coins struck on the shores of the Mediterranean, in a far-off empire called Rome. The voices of many lands mingled at the water's edge, under the golden sun of the delta.

The city belonged to a kingdom called Phù Nam. In English that is Funan. It was an early kingdom of Southeast Asia, strongly influenced by Indian culture. My grandfather says it was the first Hindu kingdom on Vietnamese land. Its kings bore Sanskrit names, taken from the old script of India, and they worshipped the gods of that land. Under the mud of our home soil, people have even dug up a stone statue of the god Vishnu. Gods from far-off India once reigned here too. A rich and refined civilization lived on this very land, two thousand years ago.

Then he turns back to the coin. Remember two names, he tells me. The man on this coin is Antoninus Pius, and other coins carry the face of Marcus Aurelius. Both were real emperors of the Roman Empire, and both lived in the 2nd century of the common era. This small coin made a journey too long to imagine. It crossed the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and came to rest at last in the heart of the Mekong Delta.

"Who found it, Grandfather?" I ask. He tells me about a French archaeologist named Louis Malleret. From 1941 to 1944, Malleret carefully dug the mounds at Thoại Sơn. Beneath the mud of the centuries, a whole old world came into view. There were gold coins, fine jewelry, Sanskrit lines carved in stone and Chinese pottery. The world at that time was astonished. This gentle delta had once been a link in a trade route joining Rome, India and China.

But no city lives forever. By the 7th century, the kingdom of Phù Nam was slowly growing weak. The canals saw no more boats. The voices of the merchants thinned, then fell silent. Óc Eo was abandoned, and each year the floodwaters laid down another layer of silt, until the whole city sank deep into the earth. People sowed rice on top of it, and for more than a thousand years no one remembered that beneath their feet lay a harbor for the whole world. Today Vietnam has nominated Óc Eo and Phù Nam for the UNESCO World Heritage list, so that this story can be kept by the whole world together.

My grandfather and I look once more at the little gold coin in its glass case. The face of the long-ago man still shines quietly under the lamp. Outside, the rice fields stretch out where coins from as far as Rome once found their way.