Hoi An Heritage Walk Blog

Most people who visit Hoi An are told, somewhere around their second day, that they “should do My Son.” Many do, on a packed morning minibus, walk around some red-brick ruins in thirty-five-degree heat, and come back unsure what they have just seen. That is a shame, because My Son Sanctuary (Mỹ Sơn, pronounced roughly “mee sun”) is one of the most important ancient sites in Southeast Asia — older than Angkor Wat, and the reason there was a port at Hoi An long before anyone called it Faifo.

This guide does two things. First, it explains what My Son was: who built it, why it is where it is, and what happened to it. Second, it covers the practical day trip — how to get there, when to go, and how to combine it with the river and the museums back in town so the whole thing makes sense. My Son sits about 40 kilometres outside our Hoi An walking area, so we treat it as the destination and point you back to the places in town where the same story continues.

Who were the Cham?

Before central Vietnam was Vietnamese, it was Champa: a loose federation of Indianised kingdoms that controlled the coast from roughly the Hai Van Pass down towards today’s Phan Thiet for well over a thousand years, from around the 2nd century AD. The Cham spoke an Austronesian language — related to Malay and the languages of Indonesia, not to Vietnamese or Khmer — wrote in a script derived from southern India, and practised a court religion built mainly around the Hindu god Shiva, with Buddhism at times alongside.

They were, above all, a maritime people. Their wealth came from exactly the trade that later made Hoi An rich: eaglewood (agarwood), cinnamon, ivory and forest products from the mountains, carried down the rivers and exchanged at coastal ports for Chinese ceramics, Indian textiles and Middle Eastern glass. The region around Hoi An — known in Cham sources as Amaravati — was one of Champa’s heartlands. Its political capital, Simhapura, lay at today’s Tra Kieu, a short distance inland. Its religious capital was My Son. And its port was at the mouth of the Thu Bon River, where Hoi An stands now. (Our Thu Bon River article traces that trade route from the Iron Age Sa Huynh people onwards.)

Why a valley in the hills?

My Son is not on a hilltop and not on the coast. It sits in an enclosed valley roughly two kilometres across, ringed by hills and overlooked by a sharp peak that locals call Hon Quap — “Cat’s Tooth Mountain.” That was deliberate. In Hindu cosmology the gods live on a sacred mountain, Mount Meru, and a temple is a model of it. A valley with its own dominant peak and a stream running through it was, to Cham kings, a natural sacred landscape — the mountain as Shiva’s seat, the stream as a holy river. The valley was also defensible and within reach of the capital, but secluded enough to be purely religious. Nobody lived at My Son except priests. It was a place for kings to consecrate their rule and, after death, to be worshipped alongside the god.

The oldest inscription on the site, from the late 4th century, records a king named Bhadravarman founding a wooden temple here to Shiva under the name Bhadreshvara — the god fused with the king who honoured him. That wooden temple burned. In the 7th century King Sambhuvarman rebuilt it in brick, and for the next six hundred years successive Cham rulers kept adding towers. By the 13th century the valley held around seventy structures, making it one of the longest continuously developed religious sites in mainland Southeast Asia.

What you are looking at: the towers

Every main temple follows the same idea. The central tower is a kalan — a square brick sanctuary with a single door, usually facing east towards the sunrise, with a stepped roof rising in tiers to a point. Inside, in the dark, stood a linga on a yoni pedestal: the abstract stone symbol of Shiva set on a basin representing the goddess, with a spout to drain the water and milk poured over it in worship. Around the kalan were smaller buildings: a gate tower, a long hall where offerings were prepared, and a small “fire tower” or treasury. You will see several linga-yoni still in place, and many empty pedestals whose linga have gone.

Look closely at the brickwork, because it is the site’s great puzzle. The Cham laid their bricks so tightly that the joints are almost invisible and there is no obvious mortar. Exactly how they bonded them is still debated. Leading theories involve a plant-based resin or a fine clay slip rubbed between the bricks before firing or setting. Modern restorers have struggled to match it. Where you see rougher, more obviously mortared patches, you are usually looking at 20th-century repairs.

The decoration was carved straight into the fired brick, with sandstone reserved for lintels, pedestals and statues: dancing apsaras, lions, elephants, makara sea monsters, the mythical bird-man Garuda, and floral bands running up the corner pilasters. The best of the sculpture is no longer at My Son. It is in Da Nang, which we come back to below.

The groups, and what survived

When French scholars studied the site in the early 1900s — it had been reported to the colonial authorities in 1898, and the architect-archaeologist Henri Parmentier surveyed it in detail — they divided the temples into groups labelled with letters, A to N. The labels are still used on every sign at the site. The ones you will actually walk through are:

• Groups B, C and D — the heart of the visit, and the best preserved. Group C’s main tower (C1) is the most intact kalan on the site. The two long halls of Group D have been roofed and turned into a small gallery of sculpture and carved stone fragments, and they are a welcome patch of shade.
• Group A — once the grandest part of My Son. Its main tower, A1, was widely considered the masterpiece of Cham architecture. It was destroyed in 1969. What is left is mostly a field of foundations and fallen brick, and it is worth seeing for exactly that reason.
• Groups G, E, F, H and K — smaller clusters, several restored in recent years, with fewer people and a better sense of the jungle closing in.

The war

My Son survived a thousand years of monsoons and the collapse of the kingdom that built it. It did not survive the 20th century intact. During the Vietnam War the valley was used as a base by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, and in 1969 it was heavily bombed by US aircraft. The great tower A1 and a large part of the site were reduced to rubble. Of roughly seventy structures documented by the French, only around twenty survive in anything like recognisable form.

You will see the evidence as you walk: bomb craters, now smooth grassy hollows, sit between the temple groups. Some areas of the surrounding hills were cleared of unexploded ordnance only recently, and signs still ask visitors to stay on the marked paths. Take that literally.

The site’s recovery owes a great deal to one man. The Polish architect-conservator Kazimierz Kwiatkowski — “Kazik” to the people of Quang Nam — led the Polish–Vietnamese conservation programme at My Son from 1981 until his death in 1997, stabilising towers that were close to collapse. He also worked on the conservation of Hoi An’s Ancient Town, and the town remembers him with a memorial bust in a small garden on Tran Phu Street. Almost nobody stops at it. After My Son, you should. More recently, the Archaeological Survey of India carried out a multi-year restoration of Groups K, H and A, and an Italian team restored Group G in the 2000s.

My Son was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999 — in the same session as Hoi An’s Ancient Town. The two listings belong together: one records the Hindu kingdom that first opened this coast to the Indian Ocean trade, and the other the merchant port that inherited its trade route.

Getting there from Hoi An

My Son is about 40 kilometres west of Hoi An, roughly an hour by road. You have four realistic options:

• Group tour (minibus). The cheapest and most common option. Almost every hotel and travel desk sells one. Most leave around 8:00 and arrive exactly when the heat and the crowds peak. Fine if you just want to have been there. Not ideal if you want to see it properly.
• Sunrise tour. Leaves Hoi An around 5:00 so you are at the gate when it opens (usually around 6:00). This is the single best way to see My Son: mist in the valley, soft light on the brick, and an hour or more before the tour buses arrive. Worth the alarm clock.
• Private car or Grab. Most flexible. Agree a return trip with waiting time. Go at opening or after about 14:30, when the morning groups have left.
• Motorbike. Only if you are genuinely experienced on Vietnamese roads. The route is straightforward, but traffic on the main highway is not.

Many tours offer a boat back down the Thu Bon instead of the minibus. It takes longer, usually with a stop at a woodcarving or boat-building village, and brings you in to the waterfront near the Bach Dang boat pier. We recommend it for a simple reason: it follows the same route the Cham used to move goods between the sacred valley and the sea. You go out through the hills and come back along the ancient trade artery, which ties the whole day together.

At the site

• Tickets: around 150,000 VND for foreign visitors at the time of writing, including the electric shuttle from the ticket gate to the temple area. Prices change, so check at the gate. The Hoi An Ancient Town ticket does not cover My Son.
• Shuttle and walking: the shuttle drops you roughly a kilometre from the main groups. Expect 2–3 km of walking on dirt paths, some uneven, with little shade.
• Museum first: the exhibition hall near the entrance has a good model of the valley as it looked before 1969. Ten minutes there makes the ruins far easier to read.
• Cham dance: short performances of traditional Cham dance and music are staged near the entrance several times a day. They are for tourists, but they are performed by Cham artists and are worth catching if the timing works.
• What to bring: water (more than you think), a hat, sunscreen, insect repellent, and shoes you do not mind getting muddy. In the rainy season (roughly October to December), paths flood and the site sometimes closes. Check the day before.
• Dress: it is no longer an active temple, but covering shoulders and knees is respectful and keeps the sun off.
• Time on site: two to three hours is right for most people.

Where the best of My Son actually is: Da Nang

Here is the thing most day-trippers never learn. Much of the finest sculpture from My Son was taken to the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang, founded by French scholars in 1915 and still the world’s largest collection of Cham art. Its galleries are arranged by site, and the My Son room holds carved altar pedestals, dancers, and deities that simply cannot be seen in the valley. If you are flying in or out of Da Nang, give it an hour. See it after My Son if you can: the empty pedestals in the valley make much more sense once you have seen what stood on them.

The Cham in Hoi An

You do not have to leave town to pick up the thread. The Museum of Sa Huynh Culture covers the Iron Age people who traded at this river mouth before Champa existed. The Museum of History and Culture shows the town’s sequence from the Cham period through Faifo, and the Museum of Trade Ceramics shows the kind of Chinese, Japanese and Middle Eastern ware that passed through this port for over a thousand years. Several of the old square brick wells around the Ancient Town are traditionally attributed to the Cham. Local tradition gives the famous Ba Le well, whose water is said to be essential for authentic cao lau noodles, a Cham origin, although that is hard to prove.

Then walk down to the Thu Bon at Bach Dang Street in the evening. The Japanese Covered Bridge, the Chinese assembly halls and the merchant houses are all the second chapter of a story that started in that valley. The river you are looking at carried Cham eaglewood to the sea eight hundred years before a single lantern was hung over it.

The Cham today

Champa did not simply vanish. Over several centuries the Vietnamese kingdom of Dai Viet expanded south. The Amaravati region around Hoi An passed under Vietnamese control during the 15th century, sealed by the fall of the Cham capital Vijaya in 1471, and the last Cham principality in the far south was absorbed in the 1830s. But the Cham people remain. Today there are roughly 180,000 Cham in Vietnam, concentrated in Ninh Thuan and Binh Thuan on the south-central coast, and in the Mekong Delta and Cambodia. Some are Hindu, known as Balamon, and many are Muslim. In the south, Cham temples such as Po Klong Garai near Phan Rang and Po Nagar in Nha Trang are still places of active worship, and the Kate festival is celebrated there each autumn. My Son is silent, but the culture that built it is not.

A day that makes sense

If you want one plan: take a sunrise tour to My Son and come back by boat down the Thu Bon. Rest through the midday heat. In the late afternoon, visit the Sa Huynh and Trade Ceramics museums, and stop at Kazik’s memorial on Tran Phu. Finish on the waterfront at dusk. That is two thousand years of the same river in one day, in the right order.

For the rest of the town, our self-guided walking tour and top 10 heritage sites cover the Ancient Town, and the Hoi An travel guide covers how long to stay and where My Son fits in a longer trip.