My Son - Cham temples

Today we went on a day trip to the Cham temples. This was about an hour from Hoi An and we went as part of a tour. I've been looking forward to this for a long time as I quite like looking around old temples.

My Son - Cham temples

The temples were great! There were a number of different sites which had Cham towers on them. All ranging from about a thousand to several hundred years old. The Cham people used to be a civilisation in the middle of Vietnam that came from Indonesia. There is a big Hindu influence in the carving on the buildings. They were around at the same time as the Khmers in Cambodia. The temples were lost to the jungle before being found by the French in the early 1900s who immediately cut off all the heads on the statues and sent them back to Paris to be put on display at La Louvre museum.

Some of the amazing carvings

The brickwork is pretty cool too. People are still not sure how they made the bricks or how they got them to stick together. (no cement). A lot of them have really stood the test of time and fairing a lot better than some of those that have been restored.

More Cham temples

Sadly, In the war with America the US deliberately bombed a number of these building so some of the biggest (20 meters tall) and oldest (around 1,000 years old) are now piles of rubble. There were also a lot of large bomb craters from the B-52 bombers. The reason they bombed this site was because VC troops were hiding here.