a cham, thap mam style, grey stone architectural fragment

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THE DR. MORICE COLLECTION Dr. Claude Albert Morice (1845-1877), who studied medecine in Lyons, begun his colonial career in 1872 - 1874 by a first assignment in present Vietnam. He was an enthusiastic 'scientist' in the protean sense of the word, as used in the nineteenth century. He devoted all his free time to the full enjoyment of his passion for natural history. He gathered and sent to the Museum of Natural History of Lyons, his hometown, a very important collection of zoological and botanical samples and specimens. At the same time he began studying the language, the history and religion of the country. In 1876, during his second stay, he was appointed residing M.D. to the new consulate of Thi Nai, in the Bay of Qui-Nhon, on the coast of what was then still the empire of Annam. There, as a new passion overtook him, he switched to local archaeology and to history of the arts. It is then that he discovers the traces of a people and a culture which have disappeared three centuries earlier and which are still unkown in Europe. The area covered by the present day Bin Dinh province indeed was, until 1471, the kingdom of Vijayah, the last great independant kingdom of Champa. It was erased from the map by the armies of the Vietnamese king Le Thanh Tong. Dr. Morice gathered in the Bin Dinh area thirty-one statues, high-reliefs, friezes and other architectural ornaments and fragments which he had packed and sent first to Saigon with the help of the French navy and then to France. A first consignment of ten boxes arrived safely in Lyons in early 1877. Eight of the statues are now in the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle of Lyons and two are lost or at an unknown location. A second shipment however, consisting of twenty-two boxes and containing probably twenty-one statues and some samples of dye-wood, perished when the steamer Mei-Kong of the Messageries Maritimes was lost by shipwreck on the coast of Somalia, a couple of miles south of Cape Guardafui, in June 1877. The cargo of the ship was entirely pillaged by the Somalis with one exception: the Cham stone statues. In 1995, the Belgian marine archaeologist dr. Robert Stenuit recovered the statues of this second shipment after months of search and recovery work off the coast of Somalia, generously financed by the Internatonal Marine Salvage Ltd., USA, under the zealous guiding of it's president, Mr. Ted Edwards Jr. and with the help of the local authorities. Before the definite recovery, dr. Stenuit reconstituted the whole story through his research in the navy archives, the colonial archives, the archives of the city of Lyons, the archives of a number of museums, the archives of the Morice family and all the nineteenth century publications extant. The recovered statues and fragments are all made of grey sandstone, a very though material. None of them has suffered of their sojourn of almost 120 years in the marine environment. All carved stones have now been preserved in a leading British conservation laboratory where they were slowly and carefully cleaned from the calcereous accretions and superficial stains. The process was long and painstaking, in particular when existant pigments had to be preserved. The sculptures have all been found by dr. Morice in the immediate vicinity of Thi Nai, in the Bin Dinh area. They are at the same time typical of the style of the area and original inasmuch as their exact parallel is often unknown in western private and public collections, as well as in the Vietnam museums. Most of the sculptures from the dr. Morice collection are stylistically related to carved corniches and tympans of the sanctuary Thap Mam, discovered by the French archeologist Jean-Yves Claeys in 1927-1928. The specific style has been named after this temple. Several of the sculptures, collected by dr. Morice, are probably taken from some ruined temples in the Bin Dinh region, namely the Thap Doy towers at Hung Tan (12th century) and the so-called Ivory Towers of Duong Long (circa 13th century). However some other pieces can not be related to any religious structure still known today in the area. Therefore we may presume that these originate from now completely lost temples. Nevertheless all sculptures have been catalogued here as in the style of Thap Mam of this Bin Dinh province and are dated to circa the twelfth century. Future research has to shed more light on the various sub-styles of this general known Thap Mam or Bin Dinh style.

a cham, thap mam style, grey stone architectural fragment

CIRCA 12TH CENTURY

Details

a cham, thap mam style, grey stone architectural fragment
circa 12th century
Carved in relief as an aquatic monster, perhaps a makara, with bulging eyes set in leaf-shaped eyebrows, upturned beak showing teeth and fangs, tear-drop shaped hairdo
48 cm high

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