Yang Prong

The only Cham tower in Vietnam's Central Highlands, built at the end of the 13th century by King Jaya Simhavarman III for the worship of Shiva. It stands apart from all the other monuments of Champa — in the forest on the bank of the Ea H'leo River, in Ea Sup District of Dak Lak Province, more than a hundred kilometres from Buon Ma Thuot. The building is small, some nine metres high: a square base on a slab of blue stone, a body of red fired brick that tapers towards the top and is laid without mortar, and a single entrance on the eastern side. Inside, Shiva was venerated in the form of a mukhalinga — a linga with a face carved on it. Europeans learned of the tower only at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the French scholar Henri Maitre described it. It is the first and still the only architectural monument of the Tay Nguyen (Central Highlands) on the national list; in recent years the tower has been restored and a road has been brought up to it. The tower stands in the forest on a riverbank in a remote corner of Dak Lak Province, more than a hundred kilometres from Buon Ma Thuot, so almost nobody travels here specially — it is a destination for those who are collecting every Cham monument. In recent years a road has been laid to the tower and it has been restored.

On the map