Where We Take People

The Quang Trung Museum stands at Kien My in Tay Son district, about 45 km inland from Quy Nhon, on the ground where the three Tay Son brothers were born. Built between 1977 and 1979, it holds the weapons, documents and relics of the peasant uprising that ended with Nguyen Hue crowned as Emperor Quang Trung — and, in the hall beside it, the martial arts and battle drums that came out of the same villages.

Binh Dinh holds the densest surviving group of Cham brick towers in Vietnam, left from the five centuries when Vijaya was the capital of Champa. They run from the Twin Towers, which now stand in a residential street in Quy Nhon, to Duong Long out among the sugarcane in Tay Son, whose central tower is the tallest brick tower in South-East Asia at close to 40 metres.

An Nhon lies about 20 km north-west of Quy Nhon on the old inland road, on ground that has been a capital twice over. Vijaya — Do Ban to the Vietnamese — was the seat of Champa from 999 until 1471, and the Tay Son brothers later raised their Hoang De citadel inside the same walls. What is left above ground is fragmentary: gateways, stone elephants and lions, a moat line running under the rice, and the Canh Tien tower alone on its mound.

Thi Nai is the largest lagoon in central Vietnam — roughly 5,000 hectares of brackish water held between Quy Nhon and the Phuong Mai peninsula, fed by the Kon and Ha Thanh rivers. Champa used it as the port of Vijaya and it has been fought over ever since; today it is fish pens, cast-net fishermen working from flat boats, and the mangrove islet of Con Chim in the middle.

Lang Song — the Lang Song minor seminary — sits in a walled compound out in the rice fields of Tuy Phuoc, about 20 km from Quy Nhon. A seminary has stood on the site since the 1840s; the Gothic church and the two-storey colonnaded wings that enclose its courtyard are the early twentieth-century rebuild, ringed by old sao trees planted along the walls.

Eo Gio is a wind gap on the Phuong Mai peninsula at Nhon Ly, about 20 km north-east of Quy Nhon, where two arms of rock curve around a cove of clear water. A stepped walkway with white railings runs along the cliff at mid-height above the sea, and the wind that gives the place its name — the wind strait — comes through the gap most of the year.