Champa was a collection of independent Cham polities that extended across the coast of what is present-day central and southern Vietnam from approximately 2nd century AD until 1832. According to the earliest historical references found in the ancient sources, the first Cham polities were established around the 2nd to 3rd centuries AD, in the wake of Khu Liên's rebellion against the rule of the Eastern Han dynasty, and lasted until when the final remaining principality of Champa was annexed by emperor Minh Mạng of the Nguyễn dynasty as a part of the expansionist Nam tiến policy.
Early Champa evolved from the seafaring Austronesian Chamic Sa Huỳnh culture off the coast of modern-day Vietnam. It was preceded in the region by a kingdom called Lâm Ấp (Vietnamese), or Linyi (林邑, Middle Chinese (ZS): *liɪm ʔˠiɪp̚), that was in existence since 192 AD; although the historical relationship between Linyi and Champa is not clear. Scholarly consensus has shifted several times as to what degree Champa functioned as a unified polity. Originally being viewed as a unified kingdom throughout most of its history, later authors suggested that Champa was better considered to be a federation of independent states. A number of modern scholars have suggested that Champa did form a unified kingdom in some periods but was disunited in others.
Hinduism, adopted through conflicts and conquest of territory from neighboring Funan in the 4th century AD, shaped the art and culture of the Cham Kingdom for centuries, as exemplified by the many Cham Hindu statues and red brick temples that dotted the landscape in Cham lands. In Champa, historians have also found the Đông Yên Châu inscription, the oldest known native Southeast Asian literature written in a native Southeast Asian language dating to around c. 350 AD, predating first Khmer, Mon, Malay texts by centuries.
Champa reached its apogee in the 9th and 10th centuries CE. The peoples of Champa maintained a system of lucrative trade networks across the region, connecting the Indian Ocean and Eastern Asia, until the 17th century. Thereafter, it began a gradual decline under pressure from Đại Việt, the Vietnamese polity centered in the region of modern Hanoi. In 1832, the Vietnamese emperor Minh Mạng annexed the remaining Cham territories. Mỹ Sơn, a former religious center, and Hội An, one of Champa's main port cities, are now World Heritage Sites.
Although the kingdom had a multi-ethnic population, the majority consisted of Austronesian Chamic-speaking peoples; Chamic languages are a subfamily of Malayo-Polynesian closely related to the Malayic and Bali–Sasak languages that is spoken throughout maritime Southeast Asia. The people who used to inhabit the region are the present-day Chamic-speaking Cham, Rade and Jarai peoples in South and Central Vietnam and Cambodia; the Acehnese from Northern Sumatra, Indonesia, along with elements of Austroasiatic Bahnaric and Katuic-speaking peoples in Central Vietnam.
Today, many Cham people adhere to Islam, a conversion which began in the 10th century, with the ruling dynasty having fully adopted the faith by the 17th century; they are called the Bani (Ni tục, from Arabic: Bani). There are, however, the Bacam (Bacham, Chiêm tục) who still retain and preserve some syncretic Hindu rituals. The Bacam are one of the few surviving non-Indic indigenous Hindu peoples in the world, with a culture dating back thousands of years. The other being the Balinese Hindus and Tengger Hindus in Indonesia.
Champa was a collection of independent Cham polities that extended across the coast of what is present-day central and southern Vietnam from approximately 2nd century AD until 1832. According to the earliest historical references found in the ancient sources, the first Cham polities were established around the 2nd to 3rd centuries AD, in the wake of Khu Liên's rebellion against the rule of the Eastern Han dynasty, and lasted until when the final remaining principality of Champa was annexed by emperor Minh Mạng of the Nguyễn dynasty as a part of the expansionist Nam tiến policy.
Early Champa evolved from the seafaring Austronesian Chamic Sa Huỳnh culture off the coast of modern-day Vietnam. It was preceded in the region by a kingdom called Lâm Ấp (Vietnamese), or Linyi (林邑, Middle Chinese (ZS): *liɪm ʔˠiɪp̚), that was in existence since 192 AD; although the historical relationship between Linyi and Champa is not clear. Scholarly consensus has shifted several times as to what degree Champa functioned as a unified polity. Originally being viewed as a unified kingdom throughout most of its history, later authors suggested that Champa was better considered to be a federation of independent states. A number of modern scholars have suggested that Champa did form a unified kingdom in some periods but was disunited in others.
Hinduism, adopted through conflicts and conquest of territory from neighboring Funan in the 4th century AD, shaped the art and culture of the Cham Kingdom for centuries, as exemplified by the many Cham Hindu statues and red brick temples that dotted the landscape in Cham lands. In Champa, historians have also found the Đông Yên Châu inscription, the oldest known native Southeast Asian literature written in a native Southeast Asian language dating to around c. 350 AD, predating first Khmer, Mon, Malay texts by centuries.
Champa reached its apogee in the 9th and 10th centuries CE. The peoples of Champa maintained a system of lucrative trade networks across the region, connecting the Indian Ocean and Eastern Asia, until the 17th century. Thereafter, it began a gradual decline under pressure from Đại Việt, the Vietnamese polity centered in the region of modern Hanoi. In 1832, the Vietnamese emperor Minh Mạng annexed the remaining Cham territories. Mỹ Sơn, a former religious center, and Hội An, one of Champa's main port cities, are now World Heritage Sites.
Although the kingdom had a multi-ethnic population, the majority consisted of Austronesian Chamic-speaking peoples; Chamic languages are a subfamily of Malayo-Polynesian closely related to the Malayic and Bali–Sasak languages that is spoken throughout maritime Southeast Asia. The people who used to inhabit the region are the present-day Chamic-speaking Cham, Rade and Jarai peoples in South and Central Vietnam and Cambodia; the Acehnese from Northern Sumatra, Indonesia, along with elements of Austroasiatic Bahnaric and Katuic-speaking peoples in Central Vietnam.
Today, many Cham people adhere to Islam, a conversion which began in the 10th century, with the ruling dynasty having fully adopted the faith by the 17th century; they are called the Bani (Ni tục, from Arabic: Bani). There are, however, the Bacam (Bacham, Chiêm tục) who still retain and preserve some syncretic Hindu rituals. The Bacam are one of the few surviving non-Indic indigenous Hindu peoples in the world, with a culture dating back thousands of years. The other being the Balinese Hindus and Tengger Hindus in Indonesia.
Etymology
The kingdom was known variously as Nagaracampa, Champa (चम्पा, ꨌꩌꨛꨩ) in Sanskrit as well as in modern Cham, and Châmpa (ចាម្ប៉ា) in the Khmerinscriptions, Chiêm Thành in Vietnamese, Campa in Malay, Zhànchéng (占城) in Chinese records, and aṣ-Ṣanf (صَنْف) in Arabic.
The name Champa derived from the Sanskrit word campaka (चम्पक; pronounced [t͡ɕɐm.pɐ.kɐ]), which refers to Magnolia champaca, a species of flowering tree known for its fragrant flowers. Rolf Stein proposed that Champa might have been inspired when Austronesian sailors originating from Central Vietnam arrived in present-day Eastern India around the area of Champapuri (the capital of the then AngaMahajanapada; presently in Bhagalpurdistrict, Bihar), an ancient sacred city in Buddhism, for trade, then adopted the name for their people back in their homeland. While Louis Finot argued that the name Champa was brought by Indians to Central Vietnam.
Other academics however dispute the Indic origin explanation, which was conceived by Louis Finot, a colonial-era board director of the École française d'Extrême-Orient. In his 2005 Champa revised,Michael Vickery challenges Finot's idea. He argues that the Cham people always refer themselves as Čaṃ rather than Champa (-pa–abbreviation of -pēśvara, though see ईश्वरĪśvara for more; though Champa was also known as Campādēśa and Campānagara as well, though do also see the wikilinked suffixes). Most indigenous Austronesian ethnic groups in Central Vietnam such as the Rade, Jarai, Churu, Raglai peoples call the Cham by similar lexemes which likely derived from Čaṃ. Vietnamese historical accounts also have the Cham named as Chiêm. Most importantly, the official designation of Champa in Chinese historical texts was Zhànchéng – meaning "the city of the Cham," "why not city of the Champa?," Vickery doubts.
Historiography
Sources
The historiography of Champa relies upon four types of sources:
Physical remains, including ruins as well as stone sculptures;
Approximately four hundred Champa inscriptions have been found. Around 250 of them were deciphered and studied throughout the last century. Many Cham inscriptions were destroyed by American bombing during the Vietnam War. Currently, the Project Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campā launched by French School of Asian Studies (EFEO) partnering with the Institute for Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) of New York University is tasked for cataloging, sustaining and preserving ancient Cham inscriptions into an online index library and publications of scholarship's epigraphical studies into English, French, and Vietnamese.
The Cham have their written records in form of paper book, known as the Sakkarai dak rai patao, was a 5227-pages collection of Cham veritable records, documenting a history range from early legendary kings of 11th–13th centuries to the deposition of Po Thak The, the last king of Panduranga in 1832, reckoning in total 39 rulers of Panduranga, the tales of spread of Islam to Champa in 1000, to Po Thak The. The annals were written in Akhar Thrah (traditional) Cham script with collection of Cham and Vietnamese seals imprinted by Vietnamese rulers. However, it had been dismissed for a long time by scholars until Po Dharma. Cham literature also have been greatly preserved in approximately more than 3,000 Cham manuscripts and printed books dating from the 16th to 20th centuries. The Southeast Asia Digital Library (SEADL) at Northern Illinois University currently contains an extensive collection of 977 digitized Cham manuscripts, totaling more than 57,800 pages of multigenre content.
Overarching theories
Modern scholarship has been guided by two competing theories in the historiography of Champa. Scholars agree that historically Champa was divided into several regions or principalities spread out from south to north along the coast of modern Vietnam and united by a common language, culture, and heritage. It is acknowledged that the historical record is not equally rich for each of the regions in every historical period. For example, in the 10th century AD, the record is richest for Indrapura; in the 12th century, it is richest for Vijaya; following the 15th century, it is richest for Panduranga. Some scholars have taken these shifts in the historical record to reflect the movement of the Cham capital from one location to another. According to such scholars, if the 10th-century record is richest for Indrapura, it is so because at that time Indrapura was the capital of Champa. Other scholars have disputed this contention, holding that Champa was never a united country, and arguing that the presence of a particularly rich historical record for a given region in a given period is no basis for claiming that the region functioned as the capital of a united Champa during that period.
History
Sources of foreign cultural influence
Through the centuries, Cham culture and society were influenced by forces emanating from Cambodia, China, Java, and India amongst others. An official successfully revolted against Chinese rule in modern central Vietnam, and Lâm Ấp, a predecessor state in the region, began its existence in 192 CE. In the 4th century CE, wars with the neighbouring Kingdom of Funan in Cambodia and the acquisition of Funanese territory led to the infusion of Indian culture into Cham society. Sanskrit was adopted as a scholarly language, and Hinduism, especially Shaivism, became the state religion. Starting from the 10th century CE, the Arab maritime trade introduces Islamic cultural and religious influences to the region. Although Hinduism was the predominant religion among the Cham people until the 16th century, Islam began to attract large numbers of Chams, when some members of the Cham royalty converted to Islam in the 17th century. Champa came to serve as an important link in the spice trade, which stretched from the Persian Gulf to South China, and later in the Arab maritime routes in Mainland Southeast Asia as a supplier of aloe.
Despite the frequent wars between the Cham and the Khmer, the two nations also traded and their cultural influences moved in the same directions. Since royal families of the two countries intermarried frequently. Champa also had close trade and cultural relations with the powerful maritime empire of Srivijaya and later with the Majapahit of the Malay Archipelago, its easternmost trade relations being with the kingdoms of Ma-i, Butuan, and Sulu in the modern Philippines.
Evidence gathered from linguistic studies around Aceh confirms that a very strong Chamic cultural influence existed in Indonesia; this is indicated by the use of the Chamic language Acehnese as the main language in the coastal regions of Aceh. Linguists believe the Acehnese language, a descendant of the Proto-Chamic language, separated from the Chamic tongue sometime in the 1st millennium AD. However, scholarly views on the precise nature of Aceh-Chamic relations vary. Tsat, a northern Chamic language spoken by the Utsul on the Hainan Island, is speculated to be separated from Cham at the time when contact between Champa and Islam had grown considerably, but precise details remain inadequate. Under Chinese language influence over Hainan, Tsat has become fully monosyllabic, while some certain shifts to monosyllabicity can be observed in Eastern Cham (in contact with Vietnamese). Eastern Cham has developed a quasi-registral, incipiently tonal system. After the fall of Vijaya Champa in 1471, another group of Cham and Chamic might have moved west, forming Haroi, which has reversal Bahnaric linguistic influences.
Founding legend
According to Cham folk legends, Champa was founded by Lady Po Nagar–the divine mother goddess of the kingdom. She came from the Moon, arrived in modern Central Vietnam and founded the kingdom, but a typhoon drifted her away and left her stranded on the coast of China, where she married a Chinese prince, and returned to Champa. The Po Nagar temple built in Nha Trang during the 8th century, and rebuilt in the 11th century was dedicated to her. Her portrayal image in the temple is said to date from 965, it is of a commanding personage seated cross-legged upon a throne. She is also worshiped by the Vietnamese, a tradition that dates back to the 11th century during the Ly dynasty period.
Formation and growth
The Chams descended from seafaring settlers who reached the Southeast Asian mainland from Borneo about the time of the Sa Huỳnh culture between 1000 BC and AD 200, the predecessor of the Cham kingdom. The Cham language is part of the Austronesian family. According to one study, Cham is related most closely to modern Acehnese in northern Sumatra.
The Sa Huỳnh culture was an Austronesian seafaring culture that centred around present-day Central Vietnam coastal region. During its heyday, the culture distributed across the Central Vietnam coast and had commercial links across the South China Sea with the Philippine archipelago and even with Taiwan, which now most archaeologists and scholars have consentient determined and are no longer hesitant in linking with the ancestors of the Austronesian Cham and Chamic-speaking peoples.
While Northern VietnamKinh people assimilated Han Chinese immigrants into their population, have a sinicized culture, Cham people carry the patrilineal R-M17 haplogroup of South Asian Indian origin from South Asian merchants spreading Hinduism to Champa and marrying Cham females since Chams have no matrilineal South Asian mtDNA, and this fits with the matrilocal structure of Cham families. And compared to other Vietnamese ethnic groups, the Cham do not share ancestry with southern Han Chinese, along with Austronesian-speaking Mang.
Champa was known to the Chinese as 林邑 Linyi in Mandarin, Lam Yap in Cantonese and to the Vietnamese, Lâm Ấp (which is the Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation of 林邑). The state of Champa was founded in AD 192 by Khu Liên (Ou Lian), an official of the Eastern Han dynasty of China in Xianglin who rebelled against Chinese rule in 192.
Around the 4th century AD, Cham polities began to absorb much of Indic influences, probably through its neighbour, Funan. Hinduism was established as Champa began to create Sanskrit stone inscriptions and erect red brick Hindu temples. The first king acknowledged in the inscriptions is Bhadravarman, who reigned from AD 380 to 413. At Mỹ Sơn, King Bhadravarman established a linga called Bhadresvara, whose name was a combination of the king's own name and that of the Hindu god of gods Shiva. The worship of the original god-king under the name Bhadresvara and other names continued through the centuries that followed.