Po Nagar Ganesh Temple, Vietnam.

Address

Po Nagar Ganesh Temple, 61 Hai ThángTư, VĩnhPhước, ThànhphốNhaTrang, KhánhHòa 650000, Vietnam.

Diety

Ganesh Amman: Bhagavati

Introduction

Po Nagar is a Cham temple tower founded sometime before 781 C.E. and located in the medieval principality of Kauthara, near modern NhaTrang in Vietnam. It is dedicated to Yan Po Nagar, the goddess of the country, who came to be identified with the Hindu goddesses Bhagavati and Mahishasuramardini, and who in Vietnamese is called Thiên Y ThánhMẫu

Puranic Significance

Historically, the Chams were an ancient civilization that was very influential in Southeast Asia, especially in the centre of Vietnam where they established their kingdom, the Champa, between the 2nd and 17th centuries. The Champa kingdom was once a state of Hindu and Malayo-Polynesian culture, and their sublime towers in red brick and sandstone found in the central area of Vietnam are the only silent testimony of a civilization that disappeared into the whirlwind of history.Among these fabulous archaeological remains scattered along the central Vietnamese coast are the Po Nagar Cham towers, still in a remarkable state of preservation. The Po Nagar Cham towers were erected on a granite mountain called Cu Lao overlooking the Cai River before 781 in what was then called the KautharaPrincipality. The Po Nagar Cham temple was dedicated to the goddess Yan Po Nagar, legendary founder of the Champa kingdom. Yan Po Nagar was from a peasant family in the mountains of KhanhHoa province where NhaTrang resort town is located. The spirits helped her when she went to China on a drifting piece of sandalwood, where she married a Chinese crown prince, the son of the Chinese emperor, with whom she had two children. When Yan Po Nagar wanted to return to her hometown to visit family, the prince refused to let her go. Disobeying him, she threw a piece of sandalwood into the ocean and disappeared with her children, then reappeared in NhaTrang to see her family again. When the Chinese prince tried to follow her to, she furiously turned him and his fleet into stone. The Viet people, after conquering the Cham Empire, adopted the goddess Yan Po Nagar, calling her Thien Y Thanh Mau. The restoration work on the Po Nagar Temple was carried out early in 1906 by Henri Parmentier, the famous archaeologist-in-chief of the French School of the Far East, who had already begun work at My Son Sanctuary and years later would build the museum of Cham Arts in Danang, which was then called Tourane.

Special Features

The Po Nagar complex is situated on Cù Lao Mountain. It consists of three levels, the highest of which encompasses two rows of towers. The main tower is about 25 m high The temple’s central image is a 1.2m tall stone statue of the goddess Yan Po Nagar sitting cross-legged, dressed only in a skirt, with ten hands holding various symbolic items. According to Vietnamese scholar NgôVǎnDoanh, these attributes show that Yan Po Nagar was identified also with the Hindu goddess Mahishasuramardini or Durga, the slayer of the buffalo-demon. Another sculpture of the goddess Mahishasuramardini may be found in the pediment above the entrance to the temple: it depicts the four-armed goddess holding a hatchet, a lotus and a club, and standing on a buffalo.This sculpture belongs to the TraKieu style of Cham art from the end of the 10th century or the beginning of the 11th century.