Po Klong Garai Tower

At the foot of Trầu Hill stands one of the best preserved Cham temple complexes in Vietnam. This is Po Klong Garai Tower. The hill lies in the old Phan Rang and Tháp Chàm area. Today that is Đô Vinh ward, in Khánh Hòa province.

The Prime Minister ranked the site a Special National Monument in a decision dated December 22, 2016.

But before the architecture, there is a story.

In the memory of the Cham people, there was a king named Po Klong Garai. He is remembered for digging canals and building dams, which turned the fields green in a dry land. People were so grateful to him that after he died, they worshipped him as a god. This tower was built to worship him.

This is the cultural and religious memory of the Cham community. It is not a chronicle with firm dates. Even so, it says something true about the Cham. They did not worship only abstract gods. They also worshipped a leader who had done good for his people.

As for the architecture, the Department of Cultural Heritage provisionally dates the present towers to the late 13th or early 14th century. The complex has three structures.

First comes the gate tower, which the Cham call Gopura. It has two doors, one facing east and one facing west, in a straight line leading to the main tower of worship. In Cham architecture, a gate tower is more than an entrance. It is a sacred threshold, the boundary between everyday space and the space of worship.

The central tower, called KaLan, is the main tower of worship. It is more than 20 meters tall, on a square base 10.5 meters on each side. Its main door opens to the east, the direction of the rising sun and a sacred direction in Cham belief. Above the doorway is a relief of the god Shiva. Two stone pillars at the entrance are carved with old Cham script. These are lines that people of that time cut into stone to leave behind for later generations.

Inside the main tower are the symbols of the Linga and the Yoni, joined with the statue of King Po Klong Garai in the belief of the Cham Bàlamôn. Bàlamôn is a Cham Hindu tradition. In 2024, the Prime Minister recognized this statue as a National Treasure. It is a sacred object of the Cham community, not an ordinary museum piece.

On the left as you step through the door, a stone statue of the bull Nandin stands with its head turned toward the inside of the tower. In Bàlamôn belief, Nandin is the animal that Shiva rides. His presence shows that this tower does not worship only a king of history. It also belongs to the world of the Bàlamôn gods.

The third structure is the house tower, usually called the fire tower. It is rectangular, 8 meters long, 4 meters wide and almost 10 meters tall. According to the Department of Cultural Heritage, it may have been used to hold ritual objects for ceremonies, or it may be linked with the fire god. Its roof has a distinctive curve, very different from the soaring shape of the main tower. When the Cham built, they cared about more than height. They cared about function, and each function has its own form.

Po Klong Garai is not a ruin. It is a place of worship that is still alive. Every year the Cham Bàlamôn hold the Katê festival, an important occasion of their cultural and religious life. It usually falls in September, October or November of the solar calendar, depending on the Cham calendar. The community holds its rites right here at the temple tower. They come not to look around, but to practice their faith. For them, the tower is the sacred space of a living community.

Anyone might wonder how these brick towers have stood for hundreds of years without cement mortar. To this day, science has no agreed answer. All that is known is that the Cham way of building towers was special, and most of its secret has been lost. What remains is all the more precious for it.