Sa Pa Ancient Rock Field

Cloud shadow slides across a blue-black boulder in the Mường Hoa valley. As it passes, old lines in the stone come and go with the light. A figure stands with its arms spread wide. A few strokes run side by side. A spiral turns like the sun.

This is the Sa Pa Ancient Rock Field.

The Vietnam National Administration of Tourism places the site in the Mường Hoa valley, across the communes of Hầu Thào, Tả Van and Sử Pán. It lies in the Sa Pa area of Lào Cai province, about eight kilometers southeast of the center of Sa Pa. Terraced rice fields climb the valley in tiers. Scattered through them, and along their edges, are the blue-black stones with carvings.

The modern story of the field begins in 1925. According to the National Museum of Vietnamese History, that year a Russian-born French archaeologist named Victor Goloubew surveyed the field and wrote about it. He was the first to do so. He worked for the French School of the Far East, a French institute that studies the classical civilizations of Asia. His report came with rubbings, photographs and drawings of the carvings. Since then, research teams from Vietnam, France, Sweden and Australia have come back many times to redraw, re-rub and analyze the lines.

The field is large. The tourism administration says that almost 200 carved stones have been recorded so far, spread across about eight square kilometers. Newer surveys have found more carved stones in nearby valleys and villages, so the total differs from one source to the next.

The carvings themselves are varied. Both the tourism administration and the museum describe human figures, figures with rays around them, terraced fields, houses on stilts, footpaths, parallel strokes, and spirals like the sun. There are also some signs that many people compare to a map of the Mường Hoa valley. On some stones the patterns are small and dense, and only close up can you make them out. Some stones are so big that a child standing beside one reaches only halfway up.

On the age of the carvings, scientists do not agree. The museum says that decades of research have produced different proposals. One layer of carving may be close to the Đông Sơn culture, from about two to three thousand years ago. The Đông Sơn culture was a Bronze Age culture of northern Vietnam, known for its bronze drums. Another layer is later, and may reach into the centuries after the Common Era began.

The people who live here, mostly Hmong, have a telling of their own. They see the field as a book left behind by their ancestors. That is the community's way of telling it, not an archaeological conclusion.

In October 1994, the Ministry of Culture and Information ranked the field as a national historic site.

But the story is not only about discovery and ranking. The Nhân Dân newspaper reports that many of the old carvings are fading under rain, wind and moss. On some stones, later visitors have cut new pictures and new words over the old lines and damaged the older carving.

The field lies right inside the living space of Hmong, Giáy and Dao villages. Terraced fields are still green around the stones. Kitchen smoke still hangs over the roofs of the stilt houses. And every day, children still run past the carved stones as if past a page of an open book lying under the sky.

Some of what people cut into this stone long ago has gone so far back that no one can read all of it now. But in the Mường Hoa valley, under sun and drifting cloud, an echo can still be heard of the hands that rested on this very stone thousands of years ago.