Efforts to Preserve and Promote My Son World Cultural Heritage

My Son tourism is mainly based on material cultural artefacts like temples and towers. Developing new tourism types in the heritage site is experimental, selective and appropriately incremental. Currently, with new and favorable conditions, tourism in the heritage site is being invested for expansion to serve tourists.

Last year, despite difficulties in promoting values at My Son Cultural Heritage, heritage conservation was successful. Quang Nam province’s policies on international cooperation, with prioritized funding for heritage restoration, created advantages in this work, including the restoration project supported by Indian experts. The project extended the success of previous international projects, proceeded with resultant scientific researches on restoration techniques, the binder from the G Tower Project. The launch of restoration projects for Towers K, H and A, supported by Indian experts, was smooth and produced very positive results. In five years, the project completed restoring K Tower and H Tower. In 2020, the project faced extreme difficulty when the COVID-19 epidemic broke out, the restoration time got extended. The project however still achieved outstanding success, including the discovery of the largest monolithic linga-yoni in Vietnam that diversified the treasure of Champa cultural artifacts and added another national treasure for the heritage site.

The conservation of My Son Heritage Site marks the best international cooperation programs that brought about outstanding successes of preserving Vietnamese monuments for which the India-supported project is an example. International organizations and foreign governments’ interest in choosing My Son for cultural diplomacy and artefact restoration has affirmed the importance of this architectural heritage. At the same time, international projects have helped rescue relics from being further ruined and enter a stable stage. In particular, restoration models have brought success in research and application of scientific, technical and technological progress, and importantly, train the next generations in this work.

In forest protection and heritage landscape preservation, Decision 2223-QD/UBND dated August 13, 2020 of Quang Nam Provincial People’s Committee on the establishment of My Son cultural and historical relic landscape conservation area, resulted from ongoing efforts of generations to preserve this heritage site. The protective natural forest, covering 1,158 ha, has become a landscape forest that contains numerous values of nature, science, and cultural history. In the long term, this is a unique tourism resource beside temples and towers.

With optimistic forecasts, heritage tourism will help create capital and revenue for ongoing infrastructure programs, service products and quality improvement.

In its efforts to help My Son overcome difficulties, in the near future, the My Son Cultural Heritage Management Board will focus on attracting visitors to the heritage site by investing in construction and restoration of existing products like Cham dancing, tramcar transit, interpretation service, developing new products and culture-based leisure products. “Legendary My Son Night” will be launched to serve tourists at night and spread tourism to the surrounding community. For businesses, this is a new unique product that meets heritage discovery needs.

Efforts to preserve and promote the heritage have helped restore the heritage from ruins and revitalize its architecture. My Son has become a destination for international tourists coming to Central Vietnam and gradually an interesting destination for Vietnamese tourists wishing to explore the culture. In general, My Son harmonizes landscape and architecture within a romantic space, a tourist destination that is enough to help visitors experience different types of tourism like visiting monuments, discovering cultural heritage values, natural forests, flora and fauna systems, and landscape restoration results.

Source: Vietnam Business Forum