FAITH & LAYOUT
Shiva, the Kalan and My Son's Temple Groups
Shiva, the lingam and the brick kalan: how a Cham temple worked, and how to read My Son's lettered temple groups A to H as you walk the sacred valley.
See My Son options on GetYourGuide ↗A valley dedicated to Shiva
My Son was, above all, a place to worship Shiva. Of the Hindu gods the Cham revered here it was Shiva — destroyer and regenerator, lord of ascetics — who dominated, honoured in the local form of Bhadreshvara. Kings identified their own rule with the god, so building a temple was an act of both devotion and dynastic legitimacy. Vishnu and Brahma appear too, along with figures such as the elephant-headed Ganesha and Nandi, the bull who is Shiva's mount, but the valley's centre of gravity is unmistakably Shaivite. Knowing that reframes the ruins: these were not tombs or palaces but sanctuaries, each built to house a deity and entered by priests and kings, not crowds.
The kalan and how a Cham temple worked
The core Cham structure is the kalan — a tall, square brick sanctuary tower with a single dark inner chamber that held the deity or its symbol. A kalan rarely stood alone. Around it a temple group might include a gopura (gate-tower), a mandapa (a hall where pilgrims prepared), and a distinctive kosagrha or 'fire-house', a building with a boat- or saddle-shaped roof thought to hold the god's treasures and ritual gear. The towers rise in tapering false storeys, each a shrinking echo of the one below, capped by a symbolic peak. Once you can read this vocabulary, the seemingly random ruins resolve into repeated, purposeful arrangements around each sacred tower.
The lettered groups A to H
When French scholars of the École française d'Extrême-Orient surveyed My Son in the early 1900s, they sorted the scattered temples into clusters and labelled them with letters — A and A', then B through H — a system still in use today. The groups broadly reflect building and rebuilding across different centuries, so moving between them is a little like moving through Cham history. Group A once held the site's masterpiece; groups B, C and D form the central ensemble most visitors remember; others, such as E, F, G and H, are more ruined and quietly dispersed through the valley. The lettering is modern and purely practical, but it is the map that guides, guidebooks and on-site signs all use.
Group B–C–D: the surviving heart
If time is short, the linked B, C and D groups at the centre are the ones to linger in — the best-preserved part of My Son and the easiest place to grasp how a Cham complex fitted together. Here a main kalan still stands with its inner sanctuary, flanked by smaller shrines and long halls. The standout is often said to be B5, a kosagrha whose graceful curved 'boat' roof is one of the finest surviving examples of the form, its brickwork richly decorated. Around these buildings, sculpture that once adorned the towers — pedestals, deities, dancers — is displayed where it can be protected. It is compact, walkable, and dense with detail.
The lingam, the yoni and sacred water
At the heart of a Shaivite sanctuary sat not a human-like statue but a lingam — an upright stone symbolising Shiva's generative power — usually set into a yoni base representing the goddess. Priests bathed the lingam, and the water ran out through a spout in the yoni to be gathered as a blessing. Several carved lingam-yoni pedestals remain at My Son, some still in place inside their towers. This abstract focus can surprise visitors expecting temple 'idols', but it is central to how the Cham worshipped Shiva here. The many stone steles once inscribed in Sanskrit and Cham recorded the endowments and prayers that kept these rituals going.
Reading the carvings
What makes My Son's decoration remarkable is that most of it is carved directly into the brick rather than into applied stone. Look closely and you will find bands of floral scrollwork, guardian faces, dancers in the graceful apsara pose, makara sea-creatures and figures of the gods worked into the tower walls and pilasters. Sandstone was reserved for a few key elements — some lintels, pedestals and free-standing sculpture, much of which now sits in museums in Da Nang and on site. Slowing down to read these details is the difference between seeing 'old brick ruins' and seeing the sophisticated religious art of a confident, wealthy kingdom at its height.
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