Champa

The oldest, and the least like a kingdom

Drafted from Cowing, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968)formation

Champa is the oldest Indic polity in Southeast Asia and the hardest object in this region to fit into a record.

The Vo Canh inscription, in Sanskrit, from somewhere around the third century, is the earliest Sanskrit inscription found anywhere in the region — earlier than anything at Angkor by three hundred years. The Đông Yên Châu stone, from around the fourth, is the oldest known text in any Austronesian language, which puts it a thousand years ahead of the earliest Malay. Both are Cham.

And Champa was not one kingdom for thirteen centuries. It was a series of principalities at river mouths along six hundred miles of coast — Indrapura, Vijaya, Kauthara, Panduranga and others — each with its own hinterland running back into the mountains, sometimes under a single authority and more often not. Chinese records treat it as a state because Chinese records treat everything as a state. The archaeology and the inscriptions describe something looser and more durable: a set of ports sharing a language, a script, a religion and a coast.

Both conventional dates for Champa are soft in the same way. 192 is the date given for Lin-yi, the polity Chinese sources place here and which later Cham history is continuous with. 1471 is the Vietnamese capture of Vijaya, after which Cham polities survived in the far south for another three and a half centuries without anything the sources treat as a state on the earlier scale.

Neither date describes a single kingdom starting or stopping so much as it marks where the sources change what they can see: a polity Chinese records first noticed in 192, and a coast that stopped mattering to anyone outside it after 1471.

A string of river mouths

Drafted from Cowing, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968)expansion

Champa never became one kingdom and the reason is the coastline. Between the Annamite range and the sea there is no plain — only a series of short river valleys, each opening onto its own bay, separated from the next by spurs of mountain running down to the water.

Each valley is a polity. What the sources call Champa is the set of them, in varying arrangements of alliance and overlordship, for about thirteen hundred years.

The five

The Cham territories are conventionally counted as five, north to south: Indrapura around modern Da Nang, Amaravati, Vijaya inland from Qui Nhon, Kauthara at Nha Trang, and Panduranga in the far south around Phan Rang.

Each has its own dynastic inscriptions, its own temple groups, and its own periods of prominence. The capital moves between them — north to Indrapura in the ninth century, south to Vijaya after the Vietnamese pressure begins, eventually to Panduranga alone.

That mobility is usually read as decline. For most of the period it is simply how the thing worked: whichever valley had the strongest ruler held the primacy, and the others acknowledged it while running their own affairs.

What the expansion was made of

Not territory. There was nowhere to expand to: mountains behind, the Vietnamese in front, the Khmer beyond the range, and the sea.

What the Chams expanded was their share of the traffic. The coast sits directly on the route between the Malacca Strait and Canton, and a ship working north on the summer monsoon has to pass it. The Cham ports supplied water, provisions and shelter, and exported what the mountains behind them produced: eaglewood and calambac — the aromatic resinous heartwood that was the single most valuable forest product in the China trade — along with ivory, rhinoceros horn, beeswax and slaves.

The uplands were the other half of the system. The Cham lowland courts were tied to the highland peoples of the Annamite cordillera by trade and by ritual kinship, and the goods that made the ports rich came down from them. That relationship is invisible in the inscriptions and is the whole economic basis of the state.

Indrapura, and the temples

The ninth and tenth centuries are the high point of building.

Dong Duong, founded in 875, is the great Mahayana Buddhist monastery complex of Champa, and it is unlike anything in the Hindu Khmer or Javanese tradition — its sculpture is heavy, frontal, and immediately recognisable.

My Son, in a valley inland from Da Nang, was the dynastic sanctuary for something over eight hundred years — brick towers built and rebuilt from the fourth century to the thirteenth, with the inscriptions that supply almost all of Cham dynastic history.

And the raiding

The other Cham export was violence, and the Chinese and Vietnamese sources are consistent about it.

Cham fleets raided the Vietnamese coast repeatedly; Cham ships appear in the records of the Gulf of Tonkin as pirates as often as traders. In 1177 a Cham fleet went up the Mekong and sacked Angkor itself.

That is not a contradiction of the trading economy. It is the same economy: a polity that lives on controlling a stretch of sea route will tax the traffic when it can and take it when it cannot, and the distinction between the two was never as sharp as the word "kingdom" makes it sound.

1177

Drafted from Cowing, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968)peak

In 1177 a Cham fleet went up the Mekong, crossed the Tonle Sap, and sacked Angkor.

It is the event that most disturbs the ordinary picture of mainland Southeast Asia, in which the great inland rice kingdoms are the powers and the coast is a margin between them. The largest polity in the region, on an inland plain with a population no other settlement here approached, was taken by a string of ports with a fraction of its resources — by water, from the sea, by a route nobody appears to have thought needed watching.

Angkor's answer is on that record: Jayavarman VII drove them out, took the throne in 1181, campaigned into Cham territory and held parts of it for two decades, and then built the Bayon, whose outer gallery shows the naval battles in detail from the winning side. The most famous reliefs in Cambodia are a record of a war that started with this.

Where the money came from

Champa is the one state in mainland Southeast Asia that did not live on rice. Its neighbours were agrarian: a delta or a floodplain, a taxed peasantry, and a court on top. Champa had no plain to speak of, and lived on tolls and on plunder.

The Cham ports sat on the sea route between the straits and China at the point where ships had to come close inshore, and they supplied it: eaglewood, calambac, sandalwood, ivory and the other aromatics of their own mountains, which were among the most valuable cargoes in the eastern trade. When supplying was not enough they took, and the same fleets and the same crews did both.

Tolls and plunder are one activity seen in two directions, and the same was true across the straits, where Srivijaya and later Melaka had the orang laut — sea peoples who raided for the polity rather than against it — on the payroll.

The difference is that we know who was in the boats for Srivijaya, and for Champa we do not. The Chinese and Vietnamese sources describe Cham fleets and Cham campaigns constantly, and never once say who crewed them.

The long retreat

Drafted from Cowing, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968)contraction

Champa lost to Dai Viet over four hundred years, valley by valley, and the mechanism was demographic before it was military.

What was pushing

The Red River delta is one of the most productive rice landscapes on earth and it is small. A Vietnamese population growing inside it had two directions to go: into the sea, which was already being reclaimed, or south along the coast, into the next river valley.

That process — the nam tien, the march to the south — ran for eight hundred years and it is the central fact of Vietnamese history. It was not a policy announced by a court. It was families moving into the next valley behind soldiers, building dykes, planting rice, and being taxed by a government that then had a reason to defend them.

Champa was in the way of all of it.

The sequence

The dates read like a ratchet, and each one is a defeat that cost provinces permanently.

In 1069 a Ly emperor took the Cham king prisoner and released him in exchange for three northern provinces. In 1306 two more provinces were transferred as a marriage settlement — a Cham king married a Vietnamese princess and paid for her with territory, and the Vietnamese court took the land and then took her back after he died rather than let her be burned on his pyre.

Che Bong Nga in the second half of the fourteenth century reversed all of it for a generation: he sacked Thang Long, the Vietnamese capital, three times between 1371 and 1383, and came close to ending the Tran dynasty. He was killed in 1390 by a cannon shot from a Vietnamese ship, after a defector pointed out which vessel he was on.

That is the last time Champa was the stronger party.

Why the recoveries never held

Because the two states were built for different things.

Dai Viet could raise infantry from a dense taxed peasantry in a single delta, lose an army and raise another. Champa's power was ships, upland trade goods and whichever valley currently held the primacy, and its coalitions had to be reassembled after every reverse.

And the ground itself favoured one side. Every valley the Vietnamese took was settled, diked and put under rice, and became a base for the next one. Every valley Champa retook was a coastline it had to hold against people who now lived on the plain behind it.

The thing that made it worse

The Cham court, from the twelfth century, was fighting the Khmer as well.

The 1177 sack of Angkor brought a Khmer reprisal that put Champa under direct Angkorian occupation for about twenty years from 1203 — a Cham prince ruling as a Khmer appointee, on the Khmer side of a war Champa had started.

A polity on a two-hundred-mile coastal strip that manages to be at war with the two largest states in mainland Southeast Asia simultaneously is not going to finish the century in the same shape.

By the middle of the fifteenth century what was left was Vijaya and the two southern valleys. In 1471 a Vietnamese army of, by the chronicle's account, two hundred thousand men took Vijaya, and the northern Cham lands were annexed outright.

1471

Drafted from Cowing, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968)end

Le Thanh Tong took Vijaya in 1471. The Cham territory north of Cape Varella became Vietnamese, and what remained of Champa was a small polity in the far south that lasted, in diminishing form, until 1832.

Vietnamese historiography calls the long process this belongs to the Nam tiến, the march to the south: five centuries in which the Red River delta's state expanded down a narrow coast, absorbing Cham principalities one at a time and eventually reaching the Mekong. 1471 is its decisive act.

Who did it

The Le dynasty, and the king was Le Thanh Tong.

He is the most consequential Vietnamese ruler between the Mongol wars and the nineteenth century, and 1471 is only part of what he did. He rebuilt the administration on a Ming model with six ministries and a censorate, promulgated a law code that stayed in force for three hundred years and is unusually protective of women's property rights for its period, ordered the compilation of the standard dynastic history, and commissioned a cadastral survey of the whole country.

The Cham campaign belongs to that programme rather than standing apart from it. A state that has just given itself a working land register and a functioning army goes looking for land to put in the register.

He annexed the northern Cham territories outright, organised them as Vietnamese provinces, and settled soldiers and their families on them. That is the mechanism the whole march south ran on, applied at the largest scale it ever reached.

Po Sot's gamble

Drafted from Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (2013)afterlife

Vijaya fell in 1471, but a Cham court went on ruling the dry country around Phan Rang and Phan Ri for another two centuries, shrinking with every generation and surviving on the same terms that had governed weaker states on this coast for a thousand years: acknowledge whichever power controlled the Vietnamese court, pay what was demanded, and be left alone.

A death in Hue, and a gamble that failed

Po Sot had governed the remaining Cham lands from Phan Ri since 1659, careful enough in his dealings with the Nguyen lords at Phu Xuan to keep what independence he had. In 1691 the Nguyen lord Nguyen Phuc Tran died with the Mekong frontier in disarray and his own commanders discredited, and his successor Nguyen Phuc Chu came to power at only sixteen. Po Sot read the transition as an opening and seized the Phan Rang region outright, defying Phu Xuan's authority for the first time in a generation.

It was the wrong moment to test an untested ruler. Nguyen Phuc Chu sent Nguyen Huu Canh south, and in 1693 Po Sot was captured. What remained of the Cham kingdom was reorganised as a Vietnamese province, with Vietnamese officials placed at Phan Rang, Phan Ri and Phan Thiet; several thousand Cham Muslims left for Cambodia rather than live under the new administration, and many of those who stayed moved into the uplands among the Churu, Ede and Jarai. Po Sot himself died in captivity soon afterward.

A king kept on, in diminished form

Vietnamese rule did not extend to abolishing Cham kingship outright — not yet. Po Sot's younger brother, Po Saktiray Depatih, was installed as an "aboriginal king" answerable to Phu Xuan, ruling what remained of the Cham population under Vietnamese oversight. An uprising in the winter of 1693-94, led by a Cham noble and a Chinese adventurer who claimed magical powers, besieged Phan Rang twice before being driven off into Cambodia — the last armed attempt to reverse 1693 rather than live with it.

Po Saktiray Depatih chose the other course. For more than three decades, until his death in 1727, he kept the peace, sent the tribute Phu Xuan demanded — elephants, cattle, tusks, rhinoceros horn, cloth, honey, dried fish, salt and timber, itemised down to the bamboo mat — and used what standing he still had to shield ordinary Chams from Vietnamese administrators reaching further into their affairs than the arrangement allowed.

The treaty that outlasted everyone who signed it

In 1712 he secured a five-point agreement with the Vietnamese court that, at least on paper, remained the legal basis of Cham self-government for the next hundred and twenty years: Cham officials retained sole jurisdiction over disputes between Chams, disputes between Chams and Vietnamese were to be judged jointly, and Vietnamese authorities were barred from oppressing the people the treaty covered. It was not independence. It was a kingdom reduced to a jurisdiction, kept alive on paper for longer than most kingdoms of any kind last outright — until Minh Mang cancelled the whole arrangement in 1832 and there was no aboriginal kingship left to defend it.

Panduranga

Drafted from Cowing, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968)afterlife

The date given for the end of Champa is 1471, and a Cham polity went on existing for another three hundred and sixty-one years.

What survived the fall, and what finally ended it

The Vietnamese annexed the north after Vijaya fell and left the far south alone. Panduranga continued as a Cham principality for another two hundred and twenty-two years, until 1693 reduced its own kingship to a Vietnamese province and, after that, to a treaty-bound jurisdiction under an "aboriginal king" answerable to Phu Xuan. Even that arrangement outlasted every ruler who signed it: not until 1832 did the Nguyen emperor Minh Mang abolish the last Cham kingship outright, absorb the territory fully, and suppress the rising that followed — seventeen years after the Napoleonic wars ended, and eleven hundred kilometres of coast from where the whole business began.

The reason the ending is dated to 1471 rather than 1832 is that after Vijaya there was no Cham state that anybody outside the region had to take account of. The distinction is real. It is also, from Panduranga's side, the difference between a country and a footnote.

What happened to the people

They are still there, which is the part most accounts of the "vanished kingdom of Champa" leave out.

Something over a hundred and fifty thousand Cham live in Vietnam and perhaps twice that in Cambodia, with communities in Thailand, Malaysia and — since the 1970s — the United States and France.

They split religiously in a way that has no parallel anywhere. The Cham of Cambodia and much of southern Vietnam are Sunni Muslim, converted through the maritime trade from the fifteenth century onward. The Cham Bani of Ninh Thuan and Binh Thuan practise a form of Islam that developed in isolation for centuries — a lunar calendar, three daily prayers, a Ramadan observed on behalf of the community by the priesthood, and a body of ritual that orthodox Muslims elsewhere do not recognise. And the Cham Balamon are Hindu, still — the only indigenous Hindu community in Southeast Asia outside Bali, still worshipping at Cham towers built a thousand years ago.

Po Nagar at Nha Trang, the great shrine of the Cham mother goddess, is now a Vietnamese Buddhist temple and a Cham pilgrimage site simultaneously, and both communities use it.

The language, and the script

Cham is an Austronesian language — the same family as Malay, Javanese and Tagalog, and one of the very few Austronesian languages spoken on the Asian mainland.

That is the deep fact about Champa and it explains a great deal. Its people came by sea, they were part of the island world rather than the mainland one, and their ports faced outward while their Vietnamese and Khmer neighbours faced their own river plains.

The Cham script, derived from a south Indian original, is still used for religious texts by the Balamon and Bani communities. The earliest inscription in it — the Dong Yen Chau stone, from about the fourth century — is the oldest surviving text in any Austronesian language anywhere, which means the first written Austronesian words come from the mainland rather than from the islands where almost all the speakers live.

The towers

Between Da Nang and Phan Rang there are something like twenty surviving groups of Cham brick towers, standing on hills above the coastal plain.

They were built without mortar, of bricks fired and then rubbed together and bonded with a vegetable resin, in a technique that has not been reproduced. They have survived monsoons, the sixteenth-century wars, the French period and the American bombing of the 1960s and 1970s, which flattened My Son — the dynastic sanctuary of eight hundred years — in a week in 1969.

What is left of the largest tower group in Southeast Asia after Angkor is therefore a set of foundations, a pile of numbered bricks, and the photographs and drawings the French made before the war.