Po Dam Towers

The road into Tuy Phong runs a long way between dry fields and rocky hills.

The Bình Thuận sun is a hard white, and the wind blows fine sand into the faces of passers-by.

Then the mountain appears, rising sheer behind rows of low trees.

This is Núi Ông Xiêm, which people in the area also call Núi Ka-đak.

It stands 600 meters high, a block of rock with straight cliff walls, and its shadow covers a stretch of flat land below.

And right at its foot, in the cool shade of the cliff, a group of Cham towers comes into view. The Cham are a people of south-central Vietnam whose ancestors lived in the ancient kingdom of Champa.

These are not towers on a hilltop.

The Pô Đam Towers sit low, leaning against the mountain the way a person leans back against a wall.

The tower complex stands in the old Tuy Phong area. Today it belongs to Liên Hương commune, in Lâm Đồng province.

It lies about 110 kilometers northeast of Phan Thiết.

On June 28, 1996, the site was ranked a national historical and cultural monument.

The whole complex has six towers, set in a northern group and a southern group along two parallel lines.

About three towers still stand more or less whole, mostly in the southern group.

The rest are only foundations and broken walls, silent among the weeds and the sunlight.

It is easy to expect a Cham tower to stand tall on high ground, looking down over the whole region.

Here, though, the towers lean on the mountain, low and close, like someone standing right beside you.

The dark red fired brick was laid by an old Cham technique that used no ordinary mortar. It still fits tight after hundreds of years of rain and sun.

Spiral patterns and figures of the sacred creature called the Makara are still sharp on the decorative panels, delicate and solemn.

But one thing stands out at once and sets these towers apart from almost every other Cham tower: the direction of the doors.

They all face south, turned just slightly toward the west.

Most other Cham towers turn their main doors to the east, as old Cham custom asked.

But here in Tuy Phong, the whole complex was designed with doors looking south. They look toward the plain, toward the rice fields and the villages.

No one has yet fully explained why.

Stand in front of a tower for a while, looking at its mossy stone doorway, and a thought comes.

Perhaps the builders wanted the god to look toward the people.

That idea starts to make sense in the story of the king the towers are named after.

King Pô Đam was a Cham king of the 15th century. He was also called Pô Ka-thít.

But he is not remembered for battles or palaces.

Tradition says that after he gave up the throne, he went out among the people. He helped them build irrigation works, raise dams and lead water into their fields.

Folk memory honors him as a god of the fields and of the flowing water.

Tradition holds that the southern group, built in about the 15th century, was raised to worship him.

The northern group had already stood there for hundreds of years. It went back to the time when the Cham raised some of the oldest brick towers still standing on this strip of land.

This is the first layer of time, and the deepest.

The northern group was built from about the late 8th century to the early 9th century, in the Hòa Lai style.

It is one of the earliest styles of Cham tower architecture that still survives today.

Centuries apart, those two layers of time chose the same spot, at the foot of Núi Ông Xiêm.

An archaeological dig from 2013 to 2014 uncovered more of the site. It found an enclosing wall, an ancient path, the base of a gate tower and the base of a mandapa, a long hall for rites.

What can be seen today is only the visible part of a sacred space that was once much larger.

To this day, the local Cham and Raglai communities still hold rites at the towers.

The great festival comes once every three years, in the fourth month of the Cham lunar calendar. It is the time when both communities return here together to remember and to make their offerings.

Nothing here is staged for visitors.

This is a real rite, in which the living return to their memory.

The Pô Đam Towers are a quiet place.

There is no wide stairway and no crowd.

There is only the rock of the mountain behind, the plain in front, and the doors that look south.

Tradition tells of a king who gave up his throne to go and dig canals.

The towers that honor him also turn their doors toward the fields, toward the people he had helped.

Not toward palaces, and not toward battlefields.

Toward the people.

The sunlight slants lower along the mountain.

The shadow of Núi Ông Xiêm stretches long down to the foot of the towers, cool in the middle of a dry afternoon.

The red brick turns darker in the mountain's shade, and the Makara carvings stand out more clearly.

And the stone doorways still open to the south, toward the far-off plain, as if the god inside were still looking out, and looking on.