Follow DT 609 road to the west about 4km to reach Ha Nong Trung village, Dien Phuoc commune where we meet Champa ruins. In the middle of Ha Nong Trung field, on a mound of land about 1,500 square meters about 3 meters above the field surface, there is Mieu Ba located at Hong Phuc Pagoda. In the past, while digging in this area, local people found a number of statues made of sandstone and many bricks to build Cham towers. Local people built a temple to worship those statues called Mieu Ba. During the war, Mieu Ba was destroyed. Later Hong Phuc Pagoda was built on the mound of Ha Nong Trung. In the temple grounds, a small timple was built next to the banyan tree to worship the remaining Champa statues. There are also some fragments of sandstone statues and Champa bricks, 4 sculptures in the temple. Among these, there is an intact relief - a very unique sculpture shows the god Siva and his wife, the goddess Parvati, sitting on the back of the bull god Nandin. It is 145cm high, 127cm wide, and 30cm thick. According to Associate Professor, PhD. Ngo Van Doanh, this is a Siva - Gauri relief, a unique theme in Hindu mythology.
The second artifact is the Vishnu-Garuda relief whose top part is broken, the remaining height is 65cm, width 80cm. The remaining part shows the divine bird Garuda spreading its wings. Lord Vishnu has 2 legs and 2 hands on Garuda's shoulders. The Garuda statue is still quite intact. His head is wearing a 2-tiered crown decorated with flower petals like kirita-mukuta style in the Tra Kieu, wearing round earrings, the upper body is bare, the neck is wearing a large necklace, the lower body is wearing a short sampot. Both of these reliefs are carved in raised style, or more precisely, the semi-circular statue form is quite common in Champa sculpture. According to Ngo Van Doanh, these two reliefs belong to the Tra Kieu style, dating from around the X century.
There are also two remaining artifacts. One of them is relief 66cm high, 70cm wide, 17cm thick, showing the elephant in a standing position with trunk curled, big ears, tail hanging off the ground. It is looking similar to the elephant statues at Tra Kieu relic. Other artifact is the relief of the god Skanda standing on the back of a peacock. It is severely damaged. It is 40cm high, 50cm wide, 22cm thick.
There is the Mieu Ba ruins located on a mound of land about 800m2 wide, about 2m high, located in a people's garden in Bich Bac village, Dien Hoa commune. According to the traces left behind, this mound is a Champa ruin that collapsed long ago. On top of the Champa ruins, people in the village built a Ba temple but it also was collapsed during the war. The remaining artifacts are only a few sandstone bars, no sculptures were found, so it is difficult to determine the age of the ruins. About 700m west of Mieu Ba in Bich Bac village, there is also a Mieu Ba in Ha Dong village, Dien Hoa commune. In this ruin, there is a statue, in front of the temple is a broken block of sandstone with size 60cm x 35cm x 6cm; There was also a Yoni - Linga altar measuring 47cm x 27cm and was brought to Dien Ban Museum in 1998. Traces of Champa architecture here are very faint, so it is difficult to determine whether it is Champa ruins or just a place where people brought statues from other places to worship here.
In Inventaire Descriptif des Monuments Cams de l'Annam, H. Parmentier also mentioned Bo Mung ruins (belonging to Thang Bac commune), but he did not identify them a exact location, only shown this location through the stele transported by Mr. C. Paris from Bo Mung to Phong Le, then brought to Da Nang park. According to H. Parmentier, the content of the Bo Mung inscription has engraved the names of Jaya Indravarman King and Jaya Simhavarman King, so the date of this inscription is around 1140.
In Les souvenirs Chams dans te folklore et 1es croyances Annamite du Quang Namby doctor A. Sallet published in the journal BAVH in 1923, he mentioned The linga altar in a pagoda yard in Thanh Quyt along with a number of other Champa vestiges such as "Ong Phat Loi" in Bao An, the shrine of “Thần thạch cảm đương” in Thanh Quyt, Linga altar in Phong Thu...
In 1991, MSc. Nguyen Van Doan (Da Nang University of Pedagogy) and Ho Xuan Tinh (QN-DN Museum) dug 04 exploration holes in the location adjacent to the place where local people had previously discovered buried jars, lined up in rows, with coal ash inside in Xom Duoi (now Thanh Quyt 4 village). The soil layer is located at a depth of 1.2m to 1.4m, the upper layer has 2 cultural layers, the lower layer contains some pottery fragments of Sa Huynh culture; The upper floor has many pieces of porcelain, ancient Champa pottery, pieces of celadon porcelain (Céladon), Chinese white glazed porcelain and some pieces of sandstone grinding tables and pestles. Thus, there are traces of ancient residences belonging to the Sa Huynh culture and the Champa culture continuing in the cultural layer at this location.
Bang An Tower and some ruins in Ha Nong and Lac Thanh villages are located on the same axis stretching from east to west along DT 609 road, on the left bank of Thu Bon river. Particularly, two locations of Mieu Ba in Bich Bac Village and Mieu Ba in Ha Dong Village are located on the DT 605 axis in the North direction. If these points are connected in a straight line, they will create an isosceles triangle with the apex being the Bang An tower. Bang An is intact and has special value in Champa art. With the presence of Bang An tower and many Champa architectural ruins and unique sculptures, as well as some traces of ancient Champa residences still hidden in the underground of Bo Mung, Thanh Quyt, Phong Thu... shows that Dien Ban had an important position in the ancient Amaravati region, where the land has been rich and densely populated from the Champa period to Dai Viet. Perhaps that was why Lord Nguyen Hoang chose this place to build Dinh Tran Quang Nam./.
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