When preparing to visit Hội An’s Thanh Hà Pottery Museum, I didn’t anticipate an opportunity to reminisce. I hadn’t been to the museum dedicated to the region’s pottery traditions before, so how could it illicit fond memories?

Yet, while making my way through the hot and stuffy museum, passing dated displays accompanied by dry descriptions of pottery techniques and excavation histories, I came to the scale miniatures of Chăm towers. Six of Central Vietnam’s most impressive Chăm complexes — including Mỹ Sơn, Po Nagar, Po Klaung Yăgrai, and Phú Hải — are depicted in tabletop size with information about their construction and significance. 

Of the replicas, the ones collectively referred to as the Bình Định Complex stirred immediate emotion. Had it already been four years since the Saigoneer team took a detour from our scheduled commercial shoot in the area to cruise into the lush rice fields that appear to have been unrolled from a great bolt of green fabric? On that day, gloriously untethered from office obligations or urban clamor, we drove to the top of a mountain to take in Tháp Chăm Bánh Ít, and in doing so, were gifted a new vantage point to gaze upon the impermanence of empire and its centrality in local lives. We continued out to the Dương Long towers, which rose in a state of disrepair. And then we returned to the city’s Hưng Thạnh towers, where we sat sipping soda and snapping digital photos, the crumbling manifestations of antiquity reminding us that all modernity is temporary.  

Chăm Bánh Ít Tower (right) and the Dương Long Towers (left) in 2022.

My appreciation for the monochrome miniatures in the museum and their plain-spoken charm was simpler than the heady ruminations they brought me back to, however. That trip was simply a hell of a lot of fun, and a reminder of how lucky I am to live here. I suppose this is why people buy snowglobes on vacation and collect refrigerator magnets: to be given instant transportation for fond moments. 

Of course, the miniatures still hold great value even if they don’t tug you back into happy memories. They might encourage you to take a trip to any one of them in person, discovering a great variety of experiences and fascinations en route. Or perhaps, their focus on a distant time and group of people that now live on as a minority group in the nation will provide a richer and more nuanced consideration of history, particularly in light of all the recent parades and anniversaries. 

And once you’ve looked at the Chăm miniatures, you can head outside to the clay replicas of global monuments, including China’s Forbidden Palace, London’s Big Ben, Australia’s Opera House, India's Taj Mahal, and others. It’s exciting to consider all the memories that have been conjured in a shabby garden on the outskirts of Hội An.