Postcard from Vietnam 3

My Son A1 tower

the A1 tower in 1895

When you visit the Cham ruins at My Son, you can almost feel history replaying itself like some ghostly video.  Up here in the mountains in the overcast misty silence you can hear echoes of the American planes and the relentless bombs as they thunder into the soft earth. 


This drawing of the A1 tower was created as a record of the ruins in the 1890s by Parmentier and his team. You can see the scale of the building by the little figure in the bottom right hand corner. Apparently this was not the tallest temple by far.

You can sense the despair of the freedom fighters watching from their encampments up on the 'Ho Chi Minh Trail' in the mountains behind. 

This trail was a series of ancient trade routes used by the Vietnamese from the north to infiltrate and free the southern provinces.

Up here amongst the forests where beautiful little flowers can be spotted in the undergrowth and the Lotus grows wild in the streams, you get a real sense of the beauty of this exotic country and a flavour of the history that underpins its emergence as a modern nation.

A12 and A13 towers in 1890s

A 12 and A13 today