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My Son

Also known as Mỹ Sơn

My Son is a valley in central Vietnam that was the chief religious sanctuary of the kings of Champa from the late fourth century to the thirteenth, where some seventy brick temples to Shiva were built, many destroyed in the Vietnam War.

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Champa

Champa was a group of kingdoms along the coast of central and southern Vietnam, founded by Austronesian-speaking peoples, whose rulers adopted Sanskrit, Hindu religion and Indian forms of kingship from the early centuries CE. The Chinese knew its northern kingdom as Linyi. The Cham traded across the South China Sea and fought for centuries with the Khmer to the west and the Vietnamese to the north.

The sanctuary

In the late fourth century King Bhadravarman founded a shrine to Shiva in a secluded valley ringed by hills, west of his capital at Simhapura. The god was worshipped as Bhadreshvara, a name joining the king's to Shiva's, an early example of the Southeast Asian practice of identifying the king with the god. The first shrine, of wood, burned, and in the seventh century King Shambhuvarman rebuilt it in brick. For the next six hundred years Cham kings added temples, inscriptions and endowments, and My Son became the dynasty's religious centre and burial place.

Building ceased in the thirteenth century as Cham power shifted south. In 1471 the Vietnamese king Le Thanh Tong took the northern Cham capital, Vijaya, and the region of My Son passed under Vietnamese rule. A Cham principality survived in the far south, at Panduranga, until it was annexed by the Nguyen emperor Minh Mang in 1832, and the sanctuary was forgotten by all but local villagers until the French survey.

The temples

The temples are built of fired brick, fitted so closely that the method of bonding is still debated; a vegetable resin may have been used. Each main shrine, the kalan, is a square tower with a stepped roof, accompanied by a gate tower, a hall and a repository for offerings. The walls carry carved brick decoration and sandstone sculptures of deities, dancers and guardians. French archaeologists, led by Henri Parmentier in 1903–04, classified the about seventy structures into groups designated by letters, and the styles of My Son became the basis for the chronology of Cham art.

War and conservation

During the Vietnam War the valley was a base for Viet Cong forces, and in 1969 American bombing destroyed or damaged many of the temples, including tower A1, considered the finest of them. Unexploded ordnance remained for decades. From the 1980s Polish, Italian, Indian and Vietnamese teams have worked to stabilise and restore what remains, and the site was inscribed by UNESCO in 1999. Sculptures from My Son are displayed in the museum of Cham sculpture at Da Nang. The Cham people, who live mainly in southern Vietnam and Cambodia, are today largely Muslim, though a Hindu Cham community survives.

Further reading

  • Coedes, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. University of Hawaii Press, 1968
  • Higham, Charles. The Civilization of Angkor. University of California Press, 2001
  • Michell, George. The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to Its Meaning and Forms. University of Chicago Press, 1988

See also

  • Khmer Empire — The Khmer Empire was a Southeast Asian state centered on Angkor in present-day Cambodia that flourished from 802 to 1431 CE, building its political and religious order on Indian Hindu and, later, Buddhist models.
  • Dai Viet — Dai Viet, "Great Viet", was the name of the Vietnamese state from the eleventh century until the early nineteenth, used under the Ly, Tran and Le dynasties, which expanded south at the expense of Champa and the Khmer.

This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.