Da Nang Story · July 2026
The Statue Who Got Her Hands Back
For forty five years, the most important bronze statue in Da Nang stood with two broken hands, and the pieces she was missing were sitting in a farming village.
In a small museum near the Han River, in a room named after a village called Dong Duong, stands a bronze woman a little under 1.15 metres tall. She holds both hands out in front of her, palms up, as if she is about to give you something. Look at the palms and you see the breaks. Something used to sit in each hand.
Her name is Tara, or Laksmindra Lokesvara. She was cast in the 9th century, so she is about 1,200 years old, and she is the largest bronze work in all of Cham art. She was made for the Buddhist monastery at Dong Duong, a place whose stone inscription carries the year 875 and the name of a Cham king, Indravarman II. In October 2012 the government named her a national treasure, one of the first thirty in the whole country.
In 1978, people in Dong Duong village in Thang Binh found her buried in the ground. During the digging, two pieces broke off her hands. A lotus flower from the right hand. A conch shell from the left. The statue went to the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang that same year. The lotus and the conch stayed in the village. Families there kept them and passed them on for forty five years.
Then in November 2018 the President of India, Ram Nath Kovind, came to the museum. He stood in front of her for a long time, noticed the marks on her hands, and asked the guide what was missing. She told him: a conch and a lotus. Da Nang's chairman, standing right there, asked the next question. Does anyone know where they are? The guide did know. They were still in the village.
The villagers agreed to give them back. On December 9, 2023, at a ceremony in the Quang Nam Museum, the two pieces were handed over to the Cham Museum. On November 19, 2025, the museum put her on show whole, lotus and conch back in her hands, and the public saw the complete statue for the first time.
Here is the odd part. The Tara you meet in the Dong Duong room is a copy. The museum keeps the real one in a special store room and opens it only for researchers and big occasions. So go to the museum, which opened in 1919 and holds the largest collection of Cham sculpture in the world, and find her. Look at those two open hands. Then remember that a few metres away the real ones are full again, because a village kept two small pieces safe for forty five years, and a visitor asked one good question.
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